Beyond Skin 2016
The place where we encounter the Stranger is a threshold.
Metaphorically, we can see “thresholds” defining the the edges of human being in many ways: () at the limits of my physical body, a threshold of pain, of pleasure, a threshold at the limits of one culture and another, one political group and another.
At such thresholds of experience, we stand in an event: an opening onto hospitality. But doors can be opened or shut. Or stand ajar. It may be unclear who or what moves first.[1]
A shelter, an extension of the space of the body made from membranous, skin-like materials.
Awkward angles describe a lived space within, hybrid wooden structures that could be stage flats, sections of stud wall or lean-to roofing anchor dynamic swathes of soft jersey dancer’s fabric.
At once warm and welcoming, this architecture of non-place forces a negotiation of barriers or thresholds, we are unsure whether to enter or keep out.
We find ourselves in the position of the stranger or the foreigner, between Hostility and Hospitality.
Artist Helen Angell-Preece has created this installation in response to the idea of Being in Place, from the position of her own creative practice exploring the sense of being ‘not in place’, not belonging, or in locating and identifying oneself in multiple places at once.
The artist believes this threshold position to be one of value, a place with multiple viewpoints is a position of power. The ability to recognise we are all Strangers, we are all somehow Foreigners, may perhaps lead us to a Place where,
each would take the risk of other, of difference, without feeling threatened by the existence of an otherness, rather, delighting to increase through the unknown that is there to discover, to respect, to favor, to cherish.[2]
[1] Kearney, Richard., and Semonovitch, Kascha. 2011. Phenomenologies of the Stranger New York: Fordham University Press P4.
[2] Cixous, Helene. 1972. ‘Sorties’, The Newly Born Woman London: I. B. Tauris P78.
Jersey Lycra Fabric, CLS timber, packing string, acrylic paint. 2016
