The Cabinet of Dr Caligary
Leant against walls
assemblages
free standing painted boards,
rusted iron panels, disks, grids and mesh
skylines, roofscapes and abutting architectures
dead objects
having lost their life use
brought to work art
empty
(of use meaning)
full
(of exchange value),
available for redistribution
greyhounds
chasing hares,
a Lawrencian boy
loading a sporting rifle
beside a blood hound
an incomplete grid of 11 x 9 x 1” circles
cut from a sheet of oxidised,
weather etched and stained steel
panels
(parallelograms, triangles, rectangles, circles, asymmetric pentagons, polygons)
fretwork arches
primitive traceries of painted dots
the remains of a blitz
shards, jagged broken edges
an elemental iconoclasm
the elements themselves:
a kind of corrosion or neglect.
Other images may be etchings of sculptural figures:
bound and perhaps blinded
with a bird on its shoulder
birdlike stone dwarf.
Conflict of flight and restraint, bondage and freedom.
The process of coming into being is fore-grounded,
rust stands as its marker.
Configurations are mutable
as are surfaces:
these panels take any order and any image.
The loss of surface is the appearance of surface.
Joins and surfaces are weakened.
Production, the play between deterioration and formation.
From a review of Mary Martin. Various works. June 2010. For Circa Magazine online.
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