The Armchair traveller – Deb Mansfield
Rennex, B 2013, The
Armchair Traveller: Littoral zones and the domestic environment
Wow I found this was one of the most
helpful readings in terms of thinking about my own practice and life and being
in the in between zone. Rennex states that our culture summarizes experiences
in terms of binary opposites such as being at home or away yet that artists,
philosophers and theorists endeavor to find a place beyond the confines of
these to describe experiences. Rennex then quotes the theories of Elizabeth
Grosz who states that the ‘in between space’ is a space to contest the ‘many
binaries and dualisms that dominate Western knowledge’. This article shows how in
The Armchair Traveller project which took Deb Mansfield on artist
residencies to Tasmania and Newfoundland, Canada she explored this notion of
the in between space. She photographed and investigated the idea of the
littoral zone –a physical space where the tide flows; an in between zone that
is ‘neither fully sea nor fully land’ which Mansfield likened to the
psychological space of the armchair traveller – ‘imagining the unknown while
situated in the known’. Us who inhabit domestic spaces within the metropolis
yet who dream of adventure, exotic places and travel yet is it the fear of the
unknown or the fear of risk and transformation that keeps us in our armchairs?
Mansfield disrupts typical binary dichotomies in this exhibition by using these
very binaries and inviting us ‘into this in-between… where two sets of binaries
converge’. Rennex explains how in this exhibit work we literally experience
this convergence as we the audience sit on the The Armchair Traveller (two seater) 2013, a French European high
culture designed chaise yet upholstered with fabric printed with a forest, and
thus are taken on a journey in the artists and our own imagination. Rennex
explores how through ‘enticingly disrupted spaces’ such as A chaise on the brink 2013 where a de-robed and upturned chaise is
wedged in a window ‘on the brink of being inside and outside’, Mansfield
highlights and yet subverts these dichotomies as the chaise is on the brink of
‘being something else’ beyond just a chaise. Rennex also shows how this work
explores the ‘ongoing negotiation between domesticity and adventure and we
juggle the need for both’ which for me is powerfully shown in the work The migration of an ocean (tapestry) into
the space between the house and fence 2013 where ‘an infinite ocean is made
finite and a tiny backyard is made huge enough to hold an ocean’. Part of the
magic of this exhibition was Mansfield’s amazing ability to keep us in this in between
place and as Rennex states to ‘offer us
a way of recognizing the abundance of potentials in the everyday’.
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