Carmel Buckley

“Mark Harris & Carmel Buckley,” The Economist Building, London, England, 1999

Two-person show

I was invited to exhibit collaborative work made with my husband Mark Harris along with an outdoor public work that engaged the architecture of the site in relation to the surrounding buildings. In this piece I was concerned with imagined structures developed from everyday found objects. Three metal vents on an adjacent building were my starting point. I took measurements and made replicas in wood. Using the lost wax process, I cast the replicas of the vents in aluminum. I then connected the vents with long stretches of aluminum wire. These sculptures used wire to suggest both volume and form while simultaneously existing as a line in space. They could be read as darning or stitching the building, or as a depiction of an imaginary expulsion of air or gas from the building. The wire forms captured and delineated a space that extended from the found element and could be thought of as drawings in space, as this space or air within the work was an important part of the piece.

Among our collaborative works, Mark Harris and I included Colonial Stock Book, which juxtaposed actual West Indian stamps from around the time of the Second World War with facsimile enlargements of details from those same originals. These enlargements showed details of scenes of island labor, predominantly rural, normally barely discernable in the background of the originals. The details also removed the monarch’s head from each stamp. Their captions were enlarged to be more easily legible since they tended to designate a pastoral and picturesque aspect to what in reality was strenuous agricultural labor endured under poor working conditions.

The book containing the stamps held a CD player and speakers. The viewer could listen to 1930s’ Trinidadian calypsos whose lyrics narrated in detail the effects of unemployment and the labor unrest resulting from the low pay and appalling conditions of agricultural work.

Both the stamps and calypsos followed similar trade routes out of the West Indian islands to the communities of islanders who had emigrated to North America and Britain. The two cultural commodities presented contradictory images of life on the islands, yet taken together they provide a compelling summary of colonial indifference fuelling a humorous and insightful local commentary, which at times was censored in the interests of preserving this appearance of stability and contentment.

We also showed “Splash,” a piece that came about when I was invited to participate in the Joint Technologies Application Programme in England to make a series of rapid prototypes. I wanted to capture a moment of action (as in the photograph of milk by Harold Edgerton), in this case, the action of making a drawing, or painting and so shifting from something 2-dimensional to 3-dimensional. I asked Mark Harris for a drawing; at the time he was making drawings of splashes, which I then interpreted using a 3-D computer modeling program. Once the piece was made, we decided that it would be appropriate to somehow suspend the form in space. To do this we made a plexiglass box where the piece is housed in suspension.

The exhibition was reviewed by Maria Walsh in Art Monthly, “Mark Harris/Carmel Buckley,” and by Jonathan Jones in the Thursday Guide, The Guardian.