Contested Spaces: an interdisciplinary collaboration

ABSTRACT

The world in 2020 presented Australia with a world on fire, in lock down, and in environmental ruin, with potentially unprecedented social dislocation, homelessness, unemployment and mental health issues. Four artists reaction was to collaborate in an attempt to make sense of the complex COVID-19 context that was unfolding in front of them. Their interdisciplinary collaboration resulted in the multimedia artwork: Contested Spaces. Two iterations of the artwork (2020 and 2021) were exhibited as the artists navigated the unfolding spaces inhabited as they learnt to live and cope under the strictures of COVID-19. The 2021 iteration, was part of a national arts and mental health focus consisting of exhibitions, talks and workshops at the National Art School in Sydney and ECU Galleries in Perth. Through Contested Spaces the artists explored the complexity of unique circumstances brought about by the pandemic. Working collaboratively across disciplinary boundaries, created a space in which alternate understandings manifested as a consequence of the situation. This paper argues that the ongoing narrative of COVID-19 needs to be examined and scrutinized, in reconsidering our constant perpetual present, one that contests ideas and art making processes, proffering interdisciplinarity methods as a productive means for critiquing everyday pandemic complexity.

KEYWORDS:

• Interdisciplinarity collaboration
• contemporary art
• multimedia
• public pedagogy
• palimpsest
• COVID-19

Introduction

Contested Spaces (2020–2021) is a multimedia artwork by artists, Nicola Kaye & Stephen Terry, Lyndall Adams and Marcella Polain consisting of a filmic projection over 19 small canvases embroidered with obscenities (Figures 1 and 2). The projection is a layered composition of typed text with handwritten corrections spliced together with film of alleyways and weedy forgotten patches of public space. The making of this artwork became a site for interdisciplinarity in which the artists experimented with their collective experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic. The first iteration of the work was made and exhibited at ECU Galleries, Edith Cowan University (ECU) Western Australia (WA) in 2020. This was an ECU visual arts staff exhibition devised to cover 3 cancelled exhibitions slots in the gallery program due to COVID-19. At a time when galleries in WA and nationally were forced to close their doors it seemed essential to contribute as soon as possible (ArtsHub 2020). A subsequent iteration was made and exhibited in 2021 as the artists learnt to live and cope under the strictures of COVID-19.

Figure 1. Nicola Kaye & Stephen Terry, Lyndall Adams, and Marcella Polain, contested spaces (still), 2020, multimedia, dimensions variable.

Figure 2. Contested spaces (still), 2020, multimedia, dimensions variable.

Like many artists (Douglas, Geczy, and Lowry 2022), their aim for the artwork was to navigate the complexity of the times in which they lived. Through interdisciplinary collaboration the artists responded to the transient, brutal and ephemeral spaces inhabited, revealing and collectively imagining the possibilities for creating order where there was none. The artwork argues for the significance of making visible, peripheral sites that are deemed undesirable – spaces, however, that make up collective narratives. Separately the artists had witnessed so much as individuals. Coming together in-real-life, they talked about zoom funerals, children out of reach, long, long hours online with students and colleagues, the fear, the worry, the anxiety, the uncertainty, the locked-in-locked-up-ness and the feelings of isolation. They had watched their surroundings change. It was quiet and still even in the middle of the city of Perth, Australia, the homeless who wanted to, were moved to hotels. Those that did not banded together in the shopfronts of the empty streets. The air was cleaner and the birds more abundant. COVID-19 highlighted to the artists ‘the unevenness of city geography … but also shows how we can reimagine play when pushed to the extreme and can (re)connect in hopeful ways’ (Hjorth and Lammes 2021, 15).

Within the complexity of such emotional and unique circumstances, this paper articulates the interdisciplinary methodology used to approach, make and exhibit Contested Spaces (Kaye et al. 2020–2021). First, the interdisciplinary nature of the work is discussed followed by its theoretical aspects: text, stitch and filmic projection, untimely matter, and palimpsest. The outreach of the artwork is then outlined – a survival kit for feminist academics in Melbourne, and the work becoming part of a national arts focus of exhibitions, talks and workshops at the National Art School in Sydney, ECU Galleries and There is Gallery in Perth dealing with mental health navigated through the lens of the COVID-19 landscape. This paper argues the importance of artists examining the ongoing narrative of COVID-19, and how employing interdisciplinarity can be a dynamic and significant interrogative approach to contesting ideas and processes and critiquing everyday pandemic complexity.

The Australian context

2020 Australia proffered a country on fire, a world in environmental ruin, and in lockdown, with potentially unprecedented social dislocation, homelessness, unemployment and mental health issues. The bombardment by mediated images and stories from across the world became unwillingly and unwittingly part of everyone’s lifeworld:

Bit by bit, the thin layer, the slight screen, that is between here and there, home and away began to liquefy, allowing the shards of horror to fly through the screen. Realizing the thinness of the curtain separating the horror at play and the audience, some countries started to fly their national citizens to their home countries.

(El Maarouf, Belghazi, and El Maarouf 2021)

As the artists watched the unfurling nightmare from one of the most isolated capital cities on the planet, Perth, the Western Australian Premier, Mark McGowan’s response from the outset in April 2020 was to shut the state's border, stating: ‘In effect, we will be turning Western Australia into an island within an island. Our own country’ (as cited in Poloni 2020, 8). McGowan and the State Labor Government continued to act with much the same stance, and with little tolerance until March 2022 when the border fully re-opened. Such strict rules, divisive actions and WA’s isolation resulted in the majority being able to conduct their lives with relative normality, compared with the rest of the world. This does not however undermine or minimize the considerable adverse impact on WA residents’ emotional and mental health. They watched from afar those that became ill through this time. Many lost friends and relatives worldwide.

Galleries internationally and across Australia closed their doors (ArtsHub 2020; Burke, Jørgensen, and Jørgensen Finn 2020; Eltham 2020; Eltham and Verhoeven 2020; Flore, Ann Hendry, and Gaylor 2021; Gibson 2020; Greenberger 2020; King et al. 2021; Noehrer et al. 2021; Pennington and Eltham 2021). Many of the world’s most celebrated art events, such as the Venice Biennale and Documenta were postponed. Rather than postpone exhibitions, many galleries opted for remote, virtual or online access including: Musée d’Orsay, the Louvre, the Musei Vaticani, the Van Gogh Museum, and the Stavanger Art Museum (Burke, Jørgensen, and Jørgensen Finn 2020) amongst many others. Australia’s largest art event, the Sydney Biennale was forced to close (2020a) along with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, The Art Gallery of South Australia and the National Gallery of Victoria which closed for over 6 months in 2020 reopened to 500,000 visitors through their triennial exhibition despite restricted capacity (Pickup 2021). As early as May 2020 it was predicted that as much as ‘26% of Australian workers could be out of work as a direct result of the coronavirus shutdown’ including many in the arts (Coates et al. 2020, para. 1). WA had much the same story for 2020 followed by an increasing sliding scale of how many could gather and at what distance. It is from this inward-looking outward lens the artwork was made and that inform the nature of this article.

The university sector was also under considerable financial strain. Adams, Kaye and Polain are artist/academics and like elsewhere, their teaching was moved online, with major restrictions placed on face-to-face class sizes resulting in an increase in online teaching continuing into 2021 and 2022. International students, unable to enter Australia were forced to conduct their studies online and often asynchronously. Many university staff in Australia and internationally lost their jobs or faced increased pressures in light of new teaching conditions – all of which contributed to a sector in trouble (Akella, Rolla, and Sharma 2021; Karataş and Karataş 2021; Millner and Moore 2022; Yucelen 2021).

Interdisciplinary methodology

Adams, Kaye and Stephen Terry are contemporary visual artists working across two-and three-dimensional forms and Polain is a poet and fiction writer. Their usual modus operandi is a practice-led research approach. The interdisciplinary nature of this kind of artistic research supports a range of research strategies which are multi-method in approach, rigorous, open, transparent and accessible (Gray and Malins 2004; Gray and Pirie 1995; Nelson 2022). Engagement across disciplines remains key to any interdisciplinary research in that connections need not be harmonious and blending – they do however need to engage in dialogue and interaction (Bal 2012). Dialogue (Bakhtin 1982) facilitates cooperation between the disciplines without the need for resolution whereas discussion is dialectic (Hegel 1977) and intrinsically a process of compromise.

According to cultural theorist and curator, Mieke Bal’s (1991) interdisciplinary methods, the context of artworks become a:

text that can be ‘read’ using a semiotic methodology that treats medium-bound terms such as spectatorship, storytelling, rhetoric, reading, discursivity, and visuality as aspects rather than essences opening up larger questions of representation and interpretation that facilitate systematic interrogation of the ways arts emerge, circulate, and are intertwined within a culture.

(as cited in Klein and Parncutt 2010, 140)

Contested Spaces can be read precisely as this type of interdisciplinary engagement, designed to interrogate the contemporary moment and through creative actions open-up dialogue. This approach navigates and articulates that, ‘interdisciplinarity is not the promise of ultimate unity, but of innovation and surprise by way of recombining parts of knowledge, no matter which’ (Weingart 2000, 41). The confluence of creative disciplines transgresses the particularity and history of certain processes and media, and instead makes work that denies framing within specialist knowledge and concurs with Bal’s explication that:

with the advent of artifacts that can no longer be confined to categories such as ‘painting,’ ‘sculpture,’ or ‘film,’ the awareness has grown that not only now but always, many artworks fit uneasily in the disciplinary categories designed for their study … the fact that these objects are made by people for people gives them a historical position as well as a social function.

(Bal 2012, 91)

Bal (2012) critically analyses Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s moving image installation Where Is Where? (Ahtila 2008) identifying at least 7 different disciplines (history, politics, cinema, theatre, language, literacy and philosophy) integrated in the artwork with the aim of arguing humanities contribution to interdisciplinary research. Bal argues:

Like scientists, who often encounter complex situations that require interdisciplinary analysis, humanists also confront situations of great complexity. Frequently, even their very objects are, by definition, already complex in this sense. With the involvement of so many disciplines comes a need, for the analyst, for limitation. But these cannot be the limitations of disciplinary method, as in ‘normal science.’

(Bal 2012, 93–94)

Contested Spaces as an interdisciplinary work requires this kind of interdisciplinary analysis – not only the different disciplines (visual art, creative writing, fine art, art history, literary and contemporary theory, history and philosophy) inherent to the artwork but the artists’ practices engaging with one another using methods familiar to them as artists. In this way they engage with the ‘constant feedback between the analysis the scholar is performing and the work itself’ (Bal 2012, 94). The artists however, also understand that collaborating with other disciplines involves: ‘a deliberately chosen alteration of artistic identity from individual to composite subjectivity’ (Green 2001, x). This paper consider the composite subjectivity (Green 2001) of the scholar artists performing collectively to make the artwork, Contested Spaces (Kaye et al. 2020–2021) and in the process make sense of the evolving COVID-19 situation. Through making the artwork beyond the machinations of individual practices and personal subjectivities but ‘between disciplinary experts – rather than interdisciplinary generalists … [their] collective subject-specific knowledge could be made greater than the sum of its parts’ (Taylor 2013, 8).

Creating a collective creative space, usurped any boundaries, concomitantly and reflexively straddling discipline specificity. Collaborative definitions attributed what Contested Spaces meant to each of them personally and then became their collective response to how they managed the pandemic. In this way the artwork formed a palimpsest through interdisciplinary collaboration between four senior arts practitioners with their own research agendas and particularities. By using Bal’s (2012) interdisciplinary methodology to analyse aspects (text, stitch and filmic projection) of the artwork they were able to see more clearly the complexity before them. Text, filmic projection, stitch, untimely matter and palimpsest are used to guide the artists’ approach and analysis. These categories are simply a device to manage complexity, in reality no such simplistic reading is possible.

Text

Not unusual per se is the use of text in contemporary art, nor by artists in general. The text in Contested Spaces (Kaye et al. 2020–2021) – written text, erased text and stitched text – is doubly articulated: one set rolling/scrolling on a repeated loop (Figures 3 and 4) while overwriting the stationary wall mounted canvases in what Roland Barthes (1977) called a graphic stereographic plurality, a ‘weave of signifiers (etymologically, the text is a tissue, a woven fabric)’ (159). Contested Spaces is ‘woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages (what language is not?), antecedent or contemporary, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony’ (Barthes 1977, 159). The futile search for any origin in the artwork’s intertextual weaving belongs in the spaces between the texts – stereophonic dialogues woven over time through both specific and shared disciplinary knowledge.

Figure 3. Contested Spaces, (still), 2020, multimedia, dimensions variable.

Figure 4. Contested Spaces, 2020. Embroidery cotton on linen and canvas. Dimensions variable.

The anonymous, untraceable (Barthes 1977), quotations cited in this artwork came together as the artists’ reaction to unstable times. The space in which they found themselves evaded language altogether: sign, symbol, icon, or image. Articulation required manoeuvring the gap between signs (Mitchell 1986). W.J.T. Mitchell posits that:

versions of this gap reappear in the distinctions we apply to each type of sign in its own turn. There is the natural, mimetic image, which looks like or ‘captures’ what it represents, and its pictorial rival, the artificial, expressive image which cannot ‘look like’ what it represents because that thing can only be conveyed in words.

(Mitchell 1986, 43–44)

What does a pandemic look like? How can a pandemic be conveyed in words? ‘The image is the sign that pretends not to be a sign, masquerading as natural immediacy and presence. The word is its “other”, the artificial, arbitrary production of human will’ (Mitchell 1986, 43–44). This blend of masquerading sign and its other came close to what the artists attempted in the artwork.

The words stitched into Contested Spaces (Figures 3 and 5) – the f word (Phillips 2014) (feminism and fuck), shit, bastard, pussy, maggot and the c word (Williams 2020) etc. – evade mimetic representation. Conveyed as image they express the nuance of the spoken word more closely. Adams stitched this work over approximately 20 years. It began as a project in response to common Australian colloquialisms used in the 1990s school yard. Exploring the slippage of language ‘since language is a nonrepresentational system of differences’ (Ebert 1991, 893), seemed a way to subvert the quotidian that remains a part of the racist, homophobic, misogynistic Australian idiom amplified through the pandemic. They became utterances, Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1982) extension of what structural linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (2011) called the parole aspects of language (the speech act/utterance), but where utterance is made specifically social, historical, concrete and dialogized. This ‘mode of textuality marked by the gaps, slippages, absences and undecidabilities generated by difference [emphasis in the original]’ (Ebert 1991, 893) provided a space for protest. What was collectively attempted in this work was ‘both an escape from the world’s madness and a means of grappling with it … to embrace and express paradox, to break up the trajectory of sense-making by focusing on the absurdity’ (Campbell 1993, 15).

Figure 5. Contested Spaces, 2020. Embroidery cotton on linen and canvas – pre stretching.

As an extension of the project, the artists were invited to contribute to a #FEAS (Feminist Educators Against Sexism) survival kit (Figure 6) for academics in Melbourne’s 2020 lockdown reminiscent of Subversive Cross Stitch founder Julie Jackson who began by selling a cross stitch kit that spelled out ‘Fuck Cancer’ graduating through the peak of COVID-19 to other delights such as ‘wash your fucking hands’ (Chansky 2010; Jackson 2015, 2021). This project embeds such utterances, using hand stitched expletives to directly confront and make centre socio-political issues of COVID-19 through a tactical approach that aligns with ‘what characterises current feminist work in the visual arts is how theoretical and ethical issues are aired’ (Millner and Catriona 2018, 1). Notably, another activist work is also pertinent in this context; the AIDS Quilt, ‘an undeniable visual force that orders us to reflect on the horrors of our modern epidemic’ (Elaine Showalter as cited in Chansky 2010, 683). Needle, thread and a bad words template were sent, ready to while away the time in lockdown stitching a profanity. One recipient posted ‘The unexpected highlight of receiving my survival kit was explaining the term “VJJ” to Mr FEAS’ (as cited in ‘Feminist Educators Against Sexism’ 2020b).

Figure 6. Contents of #FEAS 2020 survival kit, 8 September 2020, Facebook post #FEAS— feminist educators against sexism survival kit for Victorian academics in lockdown, Melbourne Australia. Printed with permission, feminist educators against sexism.

As Professor of Literature Ricia Chansky (2010, 682) states:

The needle is an appropriate material representation of women who are balancing both their anger over oppression and pride in their gender. The needle stabs as it creates, forcing thread or yarn into the act of creation … . Women are channeling [sic] their rage, frustration, guilt, and other difficult emotions into a powerfully productive activity.

One of the strengths of needled imagery is its ability to take viewers’ completely off guard. Needlework often carries associations of the home, older generations of female relatives, and the security of items made for comfort. Works such as these discussing heady socio-political issues delivered in this forum welcome viewers into communicating with the ideas presented, instead of automatically turning away from them out of discomfort (Chansky 2010). The contradiction of terms, comfort and discomfort, coexisting in the work are placed under scrutiny, reproposing that ‘women used embroidery as a weapon to negotiate the limitations of femininity, including its use by socially disadvantaged and marginalised women’ (Rozsika Parker as cited in Millner and Moore 2022, 6). Stitch in this artwork is posited as a political tool, historically and contemporaneously.

Filmic projection

The weeds, public toilets and alleyways that constitute the filmic projection aspects of the work challenge pre-existing power structures embedded within dominant paradigms, cultural institutions and historical narratives that equally permeate and inscribe us. Like many artists the degrading political climate and ‘the precarity and unsustainability of the contemporary artworld … laid bare … the effects of a global pandemic, a sense of climate emergency, and a series of backlashes and reckonings centred on race, gender, and power’ (Lowry and Geczy 2022, 4–5) the artists of this work sought to contest the spaces in which they were forced to inhabit. The film is purposefully rendered in a manner that is obfuscated and can be aligned with cultural geographer, Andrew Gorman-Murray’s thoughts on the degraded image. Gorman-Murray notes, that by ‘deliberately de-focusing or altering the image quality [the artist] takes the image out of fetishistic regimes and asks viewers to look to different forms of value in the image’ (2019, 217). In this way, the sites of alleyways, detritus, weeds and plant matter, only fleetingly revealed and articulated, but enough to question: why such degradation?

The use of weeds in Contested Spaces references anthropologist, Anna Tsing who states, ‘we live in a world of weeds – a world of human ecological disturbance’ (2017, 5). Kaye and Terry have used weeds in previous works as a critical commentary of hierarchical spaces embodying dominant hegemonic power, and in this work, weeds also refer to unstable times, where the future is uncertain in so many ways. Interdisciplinary artist, Ellie Irons (2018) problematizes the definition of a weed advanced by Harlan and de Wet (1965, 16) noting how imperative it is to rewrite, and to reinscribe their oft quoted definition: ‘a herbaceous plant not valued for use or beauty, growing wild and rank, and regarded as cumbering the ground or hindering the growth of superior vegetation’. Weeds challenge such hierarchical pontifications, and demand attention, positing their significance despite being oft misunderstood and by their very raison d’être fit within a post-humanist philosophy which ‘interrogates the effect of other-than-human agency in worlds ostensibly constructed by humans – worlds that, in reality, are co-created’ (Gorman-Murray 2019, 214). The veiling and enveloping of weeds – with their tenuous positionality creates a liminality, a contested space from which the political and social world can be questioned. Liminal spaces such as these need to be understood, and reinscribed, even if only marginally, because as Gorman-Murray states when he summarizes one of his urban artwork sites:

post-human environments: where natural elements take back the city, where the material trace of human activity also reveals the limits of human agency in the landscape. In human terms, this is urban decay; in post-human terms, this is the vitality of matter and nature.

(Gorman-Murray 2019, 221)

The weeds, plant matter and the alleyways (Figure 7), refer to the post-human environments Gorman-Murray postulates and which the artists witnessed as weeds grew through cracks in the roads and pavements of the empty streets through the pandemic. Such framing of post-humanism is most apt to the work, which affirms the significance of the ‘role of materials, elements and plants and their capacity to rework urban spaces and structures’ (Gorman-Murray 2019, 214). The world that continues in its cyclic fashion, despite the pandemic – a world that we are all a part of, not in control of, also draws parallels to: ‘feminist and ecofeminist theory by the likes of Val Plumwood, Carolyn Merchant, Donna Haraway and countless others, who laid the groundwork for dismantling predominantly Western systems of thought that put humans outside of and above the rest of nature’ (Irons 2018, 9). The disregarded and discarded quality of certain plants, and the ways that weeds are quite deliberately removed parallels the injustices Contested Spaces sets out to navigate in this new and quickly altering paradigm. This metaphorical palimpsest positions us all as weed – as itinerant, as endemic, as inter-species, and interloper – as interdisciplinary.

Figure 7. Contested spaces (still of plant matter and alleyways), 2021, multimedia, dimensions variable.

By their very nature, the filmic references, shares kin with the stitched expletives. The repetitious, cyclic nature of the film links with the careful articulation of bad words, which in turn links with the scrolling, punctuated text in a contested manner that is discomforting, yet appears seamless. The undesirable, problematic sites in the film – public toilets, laneways, and parks at night – interlope with the hand-stitched expletives and typed and hand edited text.

The scrolling text originates from poetry written on a computer, printed and then hand edited, (and convolutedly digitized for this project) in a lyrical, seemingly innocuous manner that appears to offer a reprieve from the everyday commotion brought about by the conditions of living with, in and through a pandemic into an accusatory, and contested space. Polains’s visible erasure offers a stillness and as such reveals an insistence on revealing the invisible labour of artmaking. This text is from an emerging poetry manuscript (written by Polain) (Figures 8 and 9) and becomes testament to the quotidian, and the artists’ actions within it.

Figure 8. [fat full breaks] crabbing? (poem draft).

Figure 9. White thing jeezus face (or, driving through the national park at night) road as grit, throat, melody, want (poem draft).

The scrolling poetic text, acts as trickster, meant to lull the viewer into apathy, yet becomes jarring by its incessant creeping invasion, like opportunistic weeds, and akin to the virus. Contested Spaces by its mixture of forms, processes and meanings, mitigates against any simplistic reading, and instead deliberates on the complexity of the different, ever-changing world we inhabit in an ongoing response to COVID-19.

Untimely matter

Contested Spaces inhabits different spaces simultaneously while eliding the ability to see those spaces as separate entities. ‘Framing, here, replaces integration. The difference between framing and integration is that in framing, the difference between frames remains visible and pertinent, whereas integration would offer a synthesis that makes the different frames invisible’ (Bal 2012, 9). The work resists integration in this context while questioning its situatedness in space and in time, and in something between literal and extended senses. A situatedness that is problematized by the world we now know and engage with. Such a space defies logic and literalness. Such a context speaks to the frames here that locate the work, not in an integrated whole but as an intertext constantly referencing each other space/field, creating a polytemporal field in which ‘every cohort of elements may bring together elements from all times’ (Bruno Latour as cited in Harris 2010, 3).

Contested Spaces is untimely matter, ‘polychronic, multitemporal, and reveals a time that is gathered together, and with multiple pleats’ (Michel Serres as cited in Harris 2010, 3) – the pandemic which began in 2019 and which, is likely to be a dominating force for some time. Moments of individual temporal experience are collected in this work as an assemblage with many different understandings of time across those pleats evoking the multitemporal ‘relations between now and then, old and new, before and after’ (Harris 2010, 4) – if after ever occurs. By resisting assimilation into a homogeneous present, the untimely ‘brings with it the difference that produces the possibility of a new future even as it evokes the past’ (Harris 2010, 11). Jonathan Gil Harris relates this to how Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari posit the untimely – ‘a temporal becoming-other that subverts the twin reifications of time as epoch and chronological sequence’ (2010, 11). COVID-19 presented the artists with a sense of being out of time, forcing a reworking of not only their conception of temporality but of how they might rework temporality through interdisciplinarity. Latour according to Harris (2010) argues that the active constituents in quasi objects demand to be seen as an actor network of many non-singular entities, noting that Deleuze and Guattari use the term rhizome to explore the phenomenon. The ‘rhizome is a suggestive metaphor for any symbiotic system comprising supposedly disparate elements that act in concert. In their discussion, a wasp and an orchid constitute a rhizome, as do a human and her viruses’ (Harris 2010, 144). The rhizomic couplings of Contested Spaces sees supposedly disparate elements collide in response to such a system – weeds like a virus grow.

Jacques Derrida styles the untimely as a ‘specter that haunts the present and renders the time “out of joint”’ (Harris 2010, 11). Harris (2010) contends that the untimely is not just a descriptive theory of the past-in-the-present, it is also a practical theory of how to rework temporality, of how we might use the past to imagine alternatives to the present and to chronology itself. Untimely matter likewise suggests the simultaneous agency of past matter and present subject in reworking conceptions of temporality.

Palimpsest

A palimpsest is ‘a writing surface upon which multiple signs and narratives are inscribed and erased’ (Harris 2010, 179). The work is inspired by Adams and Polain’s research on the Archimedes palimpsest – a manuscript written on goatskin, much of which consists of medieval Greek Orthodox liturgical materials written in 1229. Underneath the liturgical script, and written at right angles to it, are the faint traces of other handwriting, also in Greek, dating back to the late fifth century. The manuscript is further added to with twentieth century forged faux-Byzantine images painted over the manuscript. Harris (2010) argues that this palimpsest is both polychronic and multitemporal – it can be made to articulate several different organizations of time. Harris’s (2010) articulation of time is manifest in both iterations of Contested Spaces – time from the first incarnation, to the time taken to stitch the work, to the over-writing of the text on continuous loop. Harris argues for temporality of conjunction stating that conjunction distinguishes itself in its ‘distribution of agency within the palimpsested object’ (2010, 143), recognizing the ‘combined activity of all its polychronic components’ (2010, 143). It is such a process that was used in both iterations of Contested Spaces.

Contested Spaces (Figures 10 and 11) uses disruption as a transformative process, both through the act of collaboration and the disrupting of knowledges that enable a different form of understanding, through the layers of sustained arts practices and in this context, of overwriting a pre-COVID world. This is much like the late fifth century undertext’s, faint presence, ‘thus even as it is temporally distanced from and by the liturgy written over it, it retains a power to speak, and hence to disrupt and transform its over-text’ (Harris 2010, 15).

Figure 10. Contested spaces (still), 2021, multimedia, dimensions variable.

Figure 11. Contested spaces (still), 2021, multimedia, dimensions variable.

Harris remarks that the undertext of the Archimedes palimpsest ‘buoyantly rises through and above the … over-text beneath which it has supposedly been submerged’ (2010, 15), a subversive act of ‘untimely irruption’ (2010, 15), one that he calls the ‘the temporality of explosion’ (2010, 15). Similarly, Contested Spaces defies a singular reading, instead revealing such temporality through its palimpsest of text, stitch and filmic weeds.

The dark side exhibition

The second iteration of the work in 2021, a more embedded response to living and negotiating COVID-19, was a part of the exhibition Dark Side (Snell 2021a) a satellite of the overarching project, Frame of Mind: Mental Health and the Arts (NAS 2021) between the National Art School in Sydney, New South Wales and ECU Galleries in Perth, WA. The project encompassed exhibitions in both locations as well as online, with talks, workshops and a Symposium titled, Making Sense of the World Through Art held at ECU to ‘explore the mental health challenges faced by artists, and how artists engage with mental health themes within their work’ (Snell 2021a, 34 1). The curator, Ted Snell (2021b, 34–35) stated, ‘the artists in the Dark Side exhibition have found ways of making sense of their world … Their creative practice is a mechanism that allows internal narratives to unfold in the controlled environment of the studio’. Professor Ian Hickie, Co-Director, Health and Policy for the Brain and Mind Centre at the University of Sydney in his catalogue essay for the exhibition posited the value creative arts has in providing a ‘unique contribution to our national “wealth”’ (Hickie 2021, 8).

In the context of the pandemic one of the ‘central losses was the community’s direct connection and experiences with the creative arts’ (Hickie 2021, 6). The twenty artists who featured in the Frame of Mind (NAS 2021) project including the authors of this paper held this statement close to their hearts. For example, Hiromi Tango’s artwork, Amygdala in which she ‘ignites the protective and healing aspects of social connectivity’ (Tango 2021, 10), Stevie Fieldsend’s Descent in which she explored ‘the way in which emotions and past trauma can be processed and integrated through the making of art’ (Fieldsend 2021, 13) or Giselle Stanborough’s intermedia works that ‘examine the interpolation of the self, and the relationship between connectivity and isolation’ (2021, 14).

Contested Spaces for this iteration had a similar agenda to the first, but was clearly positioned as part of a broader national focus and due to the different timeframe the work was made, confronted COVID-19 with a greater understanding of its impact on seemingly every aspect of one’s lifeworld and the hunger of audiences for face-to-face arts engagement (Figures 7, 10 and 11). The artists’ reflexive engagement with making the second iteration, directly altered the work. The decision was made for this next iteration to be filmic and projected, with the small canvases only present within the film. This iteration as well as being more ephemeral, revealed the processes of the making, the touch and the materials – the needle, the cotton, the act of stitching, the hand, the fingers holding the needle and the fabric:

the sense of touch makes nonsense out of any dualistic understanding of agency and passivity; to touch is always already to reach out, to fondle, to heft, to tap, or to enfold, and always also to understand other people or natural forces as having effectually done so before oneself, if only in the making of the textured object.

(Sedgwick 2003, 14)

This contested sensitivity coupled with the expletives again reiterated the interstitial spaces the artists inhabited through the making of the work framed within and by COVID-19. This next iteration included different plants, introduced species to add to the weeds, metaphorically one could argue, emphasizing the increasing normativity of COVID-19 within their lifeworld’s.

Harris (2010) cites the work of gender studies scholar, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003) as she builds upon Renu Bora’s discussion of texture, underscoring the effect of touch on the object, ‘as networks of dialogic tactility, networks that allow their various inscriptions to engage in touching intercourse’ (2010, 151). It is through such a process that the artists engage. As Sedgwick articulates, ‘to perceive texture is always, immediately, and de facto to be immersed in a field of active narrative hypothesizing, testing, and re-understanding of how physical properties act and are acted upon over time’ (2003, 13). The artists took the opportunity to rewrite, to reimagine and to rethink the work and moreover its materiality and meaning(s).

Conclusion

The unfolding narrative of COVID-19 and how it continues to mark us requires examination, scrutiny and reconsideration. Rather than a constant revising, a constant perpetual present is required – a palimpsest of untimely matter sutured by the politics and culture of the present (Flisfeder 2018; Jameson 1991). By contesting ideas and processes, by repositioning and rethinking, interdisciplinarity and palimpsest creates a space in which meaning could be made manifest despite and through complex and mitigating circumstances, such as those brought about by the pandemic. Interdisciplinarity proved a dynamic and significant interrogative approach to contesting ideas and processes in developing the artworks.

Both iterations of Contested Spaces encapsulates a specific time, unprecedented in the artists’ lives, a time full of unimagined and unnavigable complexity through revealing and re-revealing, through imagining and re-imagining, the individual practices and processes of the artists collectively contested the lifeworld spaces created by the pandemic. Interdisciplinarity is an interrogative process, and therefore by its very nature, contested, and one could argue incommensurate, in-between and unresolved, providing a gap that enables an opening up of new dialogues, representations, interpretations and meanings. COVID-19 has unequivocally contaminated, barricaded and eroded our social world – the artists collaborative attempt at making sense of the situation was a form of resistance in which slippage could occur through the interstitial, irreverent spaces of their collective palimpsest. It is through the intertextual weaving of these artists disciplinary speciality that the warp and the weft come together to define a specific time and place albeit through an inward-looking lens – under any other circumstances this artwork would not exist. As they wrote in their artists’ statement ‘This interplay between words and weeds is our reaction to unstable times’ (Kaye et al. 2020–2021).

Geographical information

Perth, Western Australia, Australia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).