School of Art, Media and Design, UWE Bristol:
Lost Properties
Alice Maude-Roxby
4th May – 6th June 2004
excerpt from Lost Properties:
Yoga Break-in
It is amazing how neatly twelve women can leave their shoes and coats in a lobby which measures only one square metre. It is a careful act of balance to spread the weight of twelve coats so that they hang carousel-like from a flimsy hat stand. The yoga room has been rented from the nursery. It is filled with children’s drawings. The nursery has rented the room from the Methodist church and high up hang prints of Victorian Bible scenes. The smell of joss-sticks blends with the smells of play-dough and incense
Within the class we are working on visualisation techniques for meditation. As we sit cross-legged on the floor our teacher tells us to visualise a curtain and pull it across in front of us to separate ourselves from the everyday world. With the out breath we are breathing away the clouds which fill a blue sky, we’re aiming just for blue. We are picturing our breath moving through a glass tube which runs from the base of our spine up and through our mouths. Suddenly there is a huge crash. The rhythm of feet pelting up the stairway. We don’t stop, we pull the curtain across more firmly and keep going.
An hour and three quarters later, Jean is the first to leave the yoga room, everybody else is packing up. As she opens the door it looks as if the entire contents of the lobby have been shaken up and then smashed down onto the floor. Piles of coats and shoes are strewn with what remains of the contents of our pockets: old bus tickets, handkerchieves and keys. Those of us who had arrived with new trainers have to walk home barefoot. Those who find their car keys missing crane their necks out of the small window to the empty parking lot below.
In the late 1980s whilst on a travelling bursary to Norway I began to make one off bookworks combining images and text. Wishing to make works in different locations the format of the book enabled me to make temporary three dimensional objects on site which could be collapsed again, allowing the books to close; a good way to make objects which could be transported in the back of a rucksack. “Lost Properties”, the book which will be exhibited at UWE Bristol, is in many ways a return to this form although it is a publication printed in an edition of 1000. Each page is conceived as a temporary three dimensional model, simple cuts into the pages allow for sections to be raised up into three dimensional space. Collectively the pages of “Lost Properties” make up an entire miniature exhibition which has toured from London to Sheffield and Bristol.
The book includes two sets of photographic images, both of which are printed in vibrant red. Photographs taken at a spiritual convention are combined with those taken at a breakfast table. The images are accompanied by short stories, texts which describe the collision of spiritual experience with everyday incidents. The photographs have been aligned on either side of the page so that the cut element, often one figure, is seen on both sides of the page but within different photographs. In this way the process of moving the figure, pushing it through from one side of the page to another acts as an editing device: as in film the same individual is seamlessly transported from context to context.
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