Immersion

These works are sourced in everyday domestic tasks and functions that are performed to maintain our existence. For example, sleeping or washing our bodies. Though these tasks can be perceived as mundane, banal or commonplace, never the less they are constants in our lives that ground us through their physical routine.

An awareness of these tasks were heightened for me when I was living and making my work in a semi-rural household in South Karori. I became immersed in an environment where there were strong physical, rural-based routines - cooking, gardening, washing, feeding the chooks, setting mouse traps, stock piling and recycling waste and objects. These brought with them strong sensory reactions: the smell of chicken shit, the buzz of flies, the impressions made by stains. I became very sensitive to the way these things invaded my relatively urban, 'clean', way of living.

My work began to incorporate the domestic routines and objects of my everyday. Trained as a painter, my starting point was to sketch these routines. It became increasing clear, however, that it was unnecessary to reference actions in terms of a drawn human figure. I experimented with pouring liquid into containers, staining and imprinting fabric, hanging and ordering objects that were sourced from the house. The use of found objects and what I actually did with them spoke more directly about everyday rituals.

To highlight their function, I avoided tampering with the outcome of the processes employed, for example by including the residue from the process. This served to root the work in something everyday, and therefore to demystify it on one level. That is a doily. This is a chair. Liquid has been poured on cloth.

However for the most part these workings in themselves were not enough to sustain my interest; they had to transcend their roots. Some aesthetic or intellectual framework could be used to organise them into groups with 'meaning'. Instead their arrangement was overtaken by a more ritualistic and intuitive process, to arrive at a point where the final grouping awakened or resonated a particular moment or symbolic reference to my being. This state is not quantifiable - it is existential and liberating. The work became an object of memory and reflection to be inhibited by imagination rather than to function merely as individual pieces or experiments.

The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard articulates this condition: "Knowing must ... be accompanied by an equal capacity to forget knowing. Non-knowing is not a form of ignorance but a difficult transcendence of knowledge. This is the price that must be paid for an oeuvre to be, at all times, a sort of pure beginning, which makes its creation an exercise in freedom"1

Victor Berezovsky, 8 August 2000

1 Smith, Jason (1995) 'Existence and Desperation: the art of Louise Bourgeois' :11, in Deidre Missingham (ed), 1995, Louise Bourgeois