Isolated ramblings: On Objects and Dragons
By Caitlin Dawkes
Image by Caitlin Dawkes
This text explores ideas surrounding our everyday art experiences in isolation.
Whether we collect everyday objects for our stash of materials, to decorate our homes, find inspiration within, or use them as art objects themselves; the mundanity of everyday objects is something that we have all come to recognise as significant anchors in our lives.
Scavenging, scouring, foraging, and hoarding interesting, colourful, and miscellaneous objects like a corvid or bowerbird. Gleaning materials to build the nest that is my sculptural art practice. Raiding rubbish bins like a feral pest, to secure 10cm of colourful wire lingering upon domestic waste. That is the innate nature of my inner art kid - a dormant dragon that rests upon a hoard of bits and pieces, trinkets and treasures, glittery ribbon, and scrap fabrics. Snoozing until I can slip materials from under its nose to fabricate a new piece of work.
The inner art kid manifested when we had an electrician come to our house to fit new lighting and sort out electrical mishaps. When they finished, the electrician tossed wire offcuts into a bag of rubbish, like any person would. Sensing a material nearby, the dragon awoke from its blissful slumber. Whiffs of copper wire in a rubbery plastic coating of blue, brown, black, red, green, and yellow filled their nostrils. Sensing the discarded object’s material potential to become a collection of unique art objects, akin to the large-scale sculptures by Franz West. Without a moment’s notice, the inner art kid scooped up these fascinating materials that the electrician did not think twice about and dragged its treasures back to its lair. The scraps of wire were merely rubbish in the electrician’s eyes, but in the eyes of the art kid, they were sparkly gems of inspiration.
It is no surprise that the dragon has this reaction to the copper wire, when their very first exposure to artmaking was through using everyday discarded materials and objects, making fridge-worthy pieces using sponges, potatoes, and hands as painting tools. The use of everyday objects within art, allows for heightened accessibility. To the artist, the work is more affordable to make, and the familiarity of the object creates a sense of comfort to some audiences.
Objects are unique to everyone, even if they seem generic, each collection entirely unique to the ones next door, perhaps with a different narrative attached also. From this period of isolation and dormancy of physical art spaces and events, the objects that live in our homes become our closest thing to an art experience in isolation. Our living spaces and the collections of miscellaneous objects that reside within them have become an archive of ourselves; our own personal curated exhibition that documents the places we have been, the people we have met, the gifts we have been given and the little trinkets that we have collected from our time here on earth.
The past year has led me to question what this means for our relationship to contemporary art objects and how we experience them. Before the sudden dip into isolation, I was exploring the concept of object sentience in relation to sculptural art objects and their maker’s connection. This interest in the human/object relationship has only grown stronger over bouts of isolation as we connect our objects to safety and security. We have developed a sense of restraint towards objects that are not our own to the point where our own objects feel safer to touch and interact with than those of a stranger.
Will this “touch anxiety” affect how we interact and connect with art objects in the future?