The opportunity to construct a specific room of lights and shadows arose out of Geraldine Barlow's enthusiasm when she invited me to participate in a show she was curating. The gallery had both smaller spaces and the massive main space. With her encouragement and support we decided it would be an exciting opportunity to think about not just making artworks but also being able to create the space for them. It was an interesting project and process - and whilst I'm still not sure how successful I was – I really did learn a lot from it: working with different people, other artists, builders and designers, as well as within the gallery, learning about public access and health and safety issues were all new and highly informative experiences. The shadow component within my work is fundamental in motivating a re-reading and re-viewing of the gestures within the paper art piece, and the opportunity to construct greater control of this would hopefully provide a larger forum to facilitate these shifts. Furthermore by extending the repertoire for displaying the artwork - normally executed on a smaller scale and where the relationship between audience and shadows are more specific and intimate - at a larger scale the intensity of shadows and lighting would be emphasised, and the audience hopefully more physically affected.
Untitled Spider no. 11 2004
From all of this the resulting installation ‘…and she spins and weaves with them still, and continues to hang’, emerged. And in part drew upon the following excerpt from Junchiro Tanizaki's exquisite slim volume In Praise of Shadows:
The darkness wrapped around her tenfold, twentyfold, it filled the collar, the sleeves of her kimono, the folds of her skirt, wherever a hollow invited. Further yet: might it not have been the reverse, might not the darkness have emerged from her mouth and those black teeth, from the black of her hair, like the thread from the great earth spider.
This Tsuchigumo (earth spider) to which Tanizaki refers is a terrifying spirit of Japanese myth and folklore which dwells deep beneath the earth sucking the vital essences from of its victims. It has been interpreted that this subterranean lore explains the resistance of the aboriginal inhabitants of Japan to outside forces, and or rebellion of the lower classes to sovereign authority. Considering the origins of this myth Tanizaki's poetic comparison evokes an ambivalence between the frightening female shrouded in darkness: black hair, black teeth – vagina dentata, and one of strength: resistance, rebellion. Perhaps in part where from the fear of the female derives – her control as life-giver carries within, its opposite, thus creation and destruction. These tropes of woman-hood luring men in with their shadowy sex abound in our cultural narratives.
Installation view 3 photography John Brash But it also hooks in on another particular theme, that of the spider-woman (mostly trapped or ensnared weaving away in isolation) which by her nimble skill and artistry the intelligent female is evoked an alternative figure of threat. As the most well known of these forewarns: Arachne the beautiful and accomplished weaver, who precociously dares Athena her patron goddess to a match of skill. Having lost her wager she is metamorphosed - as many a plucky mortal – into a many eyed eight-legged creature. And even today we may witness her overarching intelligence still trapped in her body of arms as she spins and weaves with them still, and continues to hang.
But there are also many other women who in their domesticated cells weave their webs of delicate gossamer thread, of lace and lightness and artistry: Penelope’s loom grants her reprieve from the suitors during Odysseus long absence. Philomela’s tapestry is a map for her escape, whilst Klytemnestra’s captures Agamemnon. And Tennyson’s Lady of Shallot – that unknown woman – caught in her turret weaves her tales of Camelot, from the reflections (shadows) cast upon a mirror in her room. All these women give way to the myriad interpretations which contemporary feminist, cultural and semiotic theories have explored. 'It is Woman', writes Roland Barthes, 'who gives shape to absence, elaborates its fiction, for she has time to do so; she weaves and she sings; the Spinning songs express both immobility (by the hum of the Wheel) and absence (far away, rhythms of travel, sea surges, cavalcades). …1
1 Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse, Fragments. Trans. Richard Howard. London: Vintage, 2002, p 13.
1 Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse, Fragments. Trans. Richard Howard. London: Vintage, 2002, p 13.
Installation view 4 photography John Brash Both the Greek, metis, and the Latin, texere, equate the process of sewing and weaving simultaneously to the act of speech and the working of fabric, and thus, as the Barthesian context demonstrates, is the inherent relationship between text/ile. And so one sews together a sting of sentences to weave a tale. Spin a yarn. Or is caught in a web of deceit. Such consideration of the signification between text and textile develops and portrays the relationship of women within the worlds that surround them, and the worlds they give voice to. And as Kathryn S. Kruger points out the many stories of female weavers “reflect their relationship toward the patriarchal culture that either sustains or silences them.” 1 It is for these layers of meaning that this project emerged exploring the relationship between voice and voicelessness that is the activity and protest of women who are compelled or spellbound to weave.
1 Kruger , Kathryn Sullivan. Weaving the Word: the metaphorics of weaving and textual production. Sellinsgrove: Susquehana University Press, 2001, p. 15
Installation view 2004 photography John Brash The four-sided cut-out depicts on one panel a female figure, her hair falls round her and mixes into the yarn on her spindle. These tresses and threads flow out from her across the remaining three panels, and in their travels becomes surging seas, the roots of trees, wandering paths. Her knowledge and her narratives are in there somewhere - between the lines - just as she too is discerned between darkness and light, caught by this knowledge. To further encompass this sedentary, trapped woman, she is placed in her turret, her pavilion, her temple. Hidden dwelling elsewhere from the main space of action, of the gallery. And from within this space of shadow and light her song is spread. It falls onto the viewer that enters her space, onto the walls that enclose her, and out through the opening onto those other surfaces of the gallery. They work back and forth these shadows, inviting us in, and holding us within her web – like the darkness that enwraps her so to, it emerges from her. Outside, along the white walls of the pavilion, that echo the white walls of the main gallery space hang paper spiders. They are barely visible – white on white – but emerge from the surface via the shadows they cast as they scurry towards the entrance, attracting / inviting the viewer towards the interior. As a practical device this helps to bring the audience (a)round and into the work as a whole. As a conceptual device they prompt the references within the work. And lastly perhaps, as contemporary signifiers – alike Arachne – they caution intelligent girls!
Barthes writes: (Myth and utopia: the origins have belonged, the future will belong to the subjects in whom there is something feminine.)
detail view spiders 2004 photography Rochelle 
detail 2. 2004 photography John Brash After Geraldine's show, consequent reworkings of this project saw the four-sided cut-out installed by itself. This led to new results and opportunities, and which I think also lent a greater autonomy to the piece. In these situations as the cut-out was installed directly within the space it was the gallery environments themselves that became the tableau for the work with gallery walls providing the surfaces onto which the shadows were cast. Yet, pending the position and the number of walls, of the location of the work in the space, these shadows would vary greatly in strength, distortion, length etc, and /or in some cases simply not be cast. This fluctuation between the shadows that were cast, and simultaneously the relationship that emerges between these and the possible shadows to be cast - absence and presence – helped to better explicate the themes within the work and I feel established a greater sense of ambivalence and hidden narratives.
Another time the work was installed in the front window space a gallery and this naturally led to alternating functions and theatricality. Whereby the window provided another surface on which to simultaneously cast shadows, and/or reflect the light source, depending on the time of day/night. Whilst during the night, the cut- suspended and lit from within the gallery, was able to cast both light and shadows out of the gallery space, and interact immediately with the external and public space. These changes in presentation, the ambiguity that the work could encompass on its own without the pavilion and spiders also led me to reconsider the title for the work as it was in all these contexts. And so the tale twists and becomes known as I'm half sick of shadows ; the sigh that passes the faery's lips before she slips from loom to window to watery grave.
Untitled Spider no 16 2004 
