Fibre optics
Featured Artists
Abi Palmer; Rowan Riley; Natalee Decker; Funmi Lijadu
Unable to use studio space or their usual materials, many artists have found their practices shifting in recent months. Whether it’s to translate a physical practice to digital space, collaborate remotely with other creatives, or simply take the opportunity to experiment, this year has seen considerable ingenuity and adaptation. In this room, you will find some examples of the ways artists have tweaked or innovated to express themselves and reach others in a rapidly changing cultural landscape.
BSL room description video
Room Audio Introduction
- All the worlds you'll never see—Abi Palmer, 2021All The Worlds You’ll Never See is a short sensory film designed for virtual spaces. “I wanted to explore the potential of an online gallery, by floating multiple films as if hanging in infinite space, but was surprised by how much my brain wanted me to organise the films as if on one wall of a white cube. This is a boundary I would love to keep pushing – what can the virtual world do for the way that we experience art that is different and transformative?”The film explores Abi’s relationship with her housebound cats. She lives on the third floor of an “accessible” building but that doesn’t make it easy to access the outside. By default, Abi’s kittens are indoor cats, but she started to understand their own desire for an outside which they cannot reach. It is very similar to her own, which is why she brought them into my home to begin with. “I, too, hunger for the outside world. I, too, am craving wildness.”Abi has been exploring ways of reproducing the outside world for them in miniature: foraging for found objects such as feathers, plants, and fallen twigs and leaves, and build small forests for the cats to explore. She wanted to invite the experience of becoming lost in nature, to experience reverie, which feels like such a crucial part of being alive on this planet. The process of sharing her findings has become a regular aspect of our play and bonding. It’s been bittersweet: in recreating and discovering aspects of the natural world Abi loves, is grieving for, and can’t access; and being aware that she has passed this experience on to them.A note on poisonIn the film, Abi wanted her cats to experience the magic of finding life growing in the strangest of places. Near her home, a fantastic meadow of wildflowers grows by a large and polluted roundabout. Abi picked some of the flowers and brought them home.However, when she researched the plants, she learned that many of these flowers are toxic to cats and potentially very harmful.“The conflict here is painful. I tried to create an accessible version of the outdoors for my cats but I was clearly projecting what I felt they should know rather than being led by their needs. It’s also true that the moment I picked the flowers, they lost what I attempted to convey.This very often happens in access. I am left reflecting on what it means to translate an experience in ways that are both powerful and safe for the bodies who will be taking part. How do you distil and translate the essence of a poppy without using a poppy? It always comes back to centring the user.”Animal welfare statement: throughout this process, the cats were closely supervised. No animals were harmed in the making of this film.
Abi Palmer
Abi Palmer is an artist and writer exploring the relationship between linguistic and physical communication.
Her artworks include Crip Casino – an interactive gambling arcade parodying the wellness industry and institutionalised spaces – exhibited at Tate Modern (part of Shape Arts’ Flux/us takeover at Tate Exhange), Somerset House, and Wellcome Collection. Her debut book Sanatorium (Penned in the Margins, 2020) is a fragmented memoir, jumping between luxury thermal pool and blue inflatable bathtub. It was shortlisted for the Barbellion Prize.
Her short sensory films experiment with ways to share fleeting immersive exchanges with her audience, while exploring themes of the natural world, queerness and disability. These include WHAT NOW? (Wysing Broadcasts), FLESH (Artangel), and Sanatorium: a Shared Mystical Experience over Zoom.
In 2020 she was awarded an Artangel ‘Thinking Time’ Grant to address the pandemic.
A Pocketful of Posies—
Rowan Riley, 2021
A Pocketful of Posies
Rowan Riley, 2021
About the work
This work is interactive! Download the Polaroid Originals app and scan Rowan’s images to experience her work in augmented reality.
A Pocketful of Posies is Rowan’s first work specifically for the digital environment. It’s always been imperative to be able to touch and feel the materials Rowan works with, and the tangible tactile nature of the resulting object is what they find most accessible about art making.
By considering a digital screen as the frame for this work – and the webpage it is housed on another frame – the viewer is further removed from experiencing it as one would in a physical space.
This limitation had Rowan considering how distance can be exploited to change or enhance perception- and how seeing things from new perspectives results in interrogation without normal frames of reference.
Rowan started with a small field of tiny overlapping hand-embroidered French knots, bullion stitches, and seed stitch. Through a microscope these were transformed into a strange, alien, fluffy, seaweed-ish noise, and unpicking the stitches revealed more of the criss-cross weave of the fabric. The series shows what could be seen under the scope of the remaining thread fibres while unpicked to the naked eye. Also revealed in the last two images is the damage to the underlying fabric caused by the process of stitching and un-stitching.
Text has been a constituent feature of almost all of Rowan’s works, but for this, words were the way into understanding what to explore and provided answers to some of the decisions that needed to be made.
Names given to shades of emulsion paint were chosen for their connotations with Rowan’s experience of the last eighteen months, and their corresponding colours determined the colours of thread used for the stitches. By exploring the words of the names first, Rowan was conscious of the ideas the name of the colours had engendered while stitching, and as a result sewing (and then removing, mostly) with the threads of their experience of the pandemic. ‘A Pocketful of Posies’ is a blush red colour, and a reference to the apocryphal association with the Black Death and its transmission.
The microscopic images were printed onto Polaroid emulsion film and video is embedded into the prints accessible with the free Polaroid Originals app. The augmented reality viewer feature recognises the information stored in the prints and the embedded content will play after a few seconds.
When using the Polaroid Originals app…
Open the app and scroll sideways on the bottom menu to “AR Viewer.” Tap on the icon and hold your phone over the photo so that it fits in the frame marked on the screen. The app will say it is scanning and then loading the AR media when it recognises the photo.
If you find that it isn’t recognising the image, make sure there aren’t any reflections on the screen you’re scanning, try moving your phone nearer or further away from the screen or making the image larger.
Image Description
In a white polaroid print frame, is an image of highly magnified textile fibres. Four loops of bright orange thread fibre are close to the camera. Surrounding these fibres are hints of pink and purple fibres with dark shadows. A small barcode sits in the bottom right corner.
In a white polaroid print frame, is an image of highly magnified textile fibres. White fibres cover the bottom of the image and top left corner. In the top right corner dark green and blue fibres blend into the background. A cluster of red fibres peek through to the left. A small barcode sits in the bottom right corner.
In a white polaroid print frame, is an image of highly magnified textile fibres. White, pink and yellow fibres fill the frame with no distinct thread. Green fibres slightly peek through from behind. A small barcode sits in the bottom right corner.
In a white polaroid print frame, is an image of highly magnified textile fibres. A small black hole sits at the centre of the image. It's surrounded by a swirl of white, yellow and orange fibres that expand out of the frame. Green fibres slightly peek through from behind. A small barcode sits in the bottom right corner.
In a white polaroid print frame, is an image of highly magnified textile fibres. Diagonally across the image is a wide stretch of white fibres, surrounded by dark green, pink and orange fibres that seep through from behind. A small barcode sits in the bottom right corner.
In a white polaroid print frame, is an image of highly magnified textile fibres. Across the image is a woven fabric in a white fibre. Shadows seep through holes across the image, showing the black below. In the corner, orange and pink fibres have mixed with the white. A small barcode sits in the bottom right corner.
In a white polaroid print frame, is an image of highly magnified textile fibres. Lilac fibres fill the image, with a tight weave near the top of the frame. Along the right hand side, deep blue and black fibres mix with the lilac weave. A small barcode sits in the bottom right corner.
In a white polaroid print frame, is an image of highly magnified textile fibres. A loose open weave of lilac fibres are filling the frame. Black fibres mix with these lilac fibres in the bottom right corner, where a small barcode also sits.
Audio Description
Rowan Riley
Rowan Riley is an artist and embroiderer based in southwest London. Rowan graduated with distinction from the MA Fine Art at Central Saint Martins in 2020, and their final work Legs was shown at the Saatchi Gallery and shortlisted for the Innovative Use of Materials Cass Art Prize.
Rowan’s roots are in contemporary dance and began developing an art practice in the final year of training at Trinity Laban exploring the role of skin as a surface of expression.
Rowan’s sewn work explores bodies, illness, and how the experience of living in one’s own body is simultaneously universal and deeply personal. Their practice investigates how interior bodily experience can be communicated via exterior presentation, with skin masking internal truth, inner workings and failings while providing its encapsulating protective function. Rowan is especially interested in how bodies seem to have a language not easily accessed or understood- particularly evident when health fails, or functioning is limited by illness or injury.
It is important to Rowan for the viewer to consider their work carefully. Details are often not immediately visible, obscured on a far side or between a fold requiring time to be spent with the work. Use of symbols, ambiguous text, and pattern prompt questioning, and artwork is intended to be more universally applicable than that which spells out its theme. Text is a constituent feature of Rowan’s work, and stitched sayings, phrases, swearing and wordplay are provided as food for thought, sometimes in a provocative manner in contrast with the medium. Words also provide the way into making a work, often from an arbitrary source, even the names given to shades of B&Q emulsion.
Rowan’s work is a mixture of precise stitching and a low-fi analogue, unpolished finish. It is key for Rowan to ‘show the working’ -and even the interior of a structure- than for the work to be neatly concluded. Rowan employs textural technical stitches which sit proud of the surface inviting – but not allowing – a tactile interaction. The stitches are manipulated in a way that they are classically “wrong” but form more interesting, alien shapes.
This work is interactive! Download the Polaroid Originals app and scan Rowan’s images to experience her work in augmented reality.
Bubble—
Natalee Decker, 2021
Bubble
Natalee Decker, 2021
About the work
“A feeling has been bubbling up inside me – that the social isolation I’ve experienced throughout the pandemic will not end when the world opens back up. I’ll stay in my little bubble due to some combination of architectural inaccessibility, health concerns, or the ableist social organisation.
The bubbles in the “o” of FOMO (fear of missing out) returned abruptly. I’m watching hot girl summer through a soapy phone screen on my mom’s couch. The celebratory shots to shots of packed clubs are a reminder of how difficult it is for me to access these spaces. And access desire. I, too, want queer joy.”
Whether looking in or looking out, the bubble can create certain optical amplifications and distortions. It can cause a flattening of the exterior, a contraction of worlds, membranes of separation, voyeuristic snow globe fish tanks, safety within a shared ecosystem of values, feedback loops of the same breath exhaled and inhaled and exhaled and inhaled.
“My own personal bubble can make me feel so unseen in the dark and yet so magnified when I venture out drenched in the gaze.
Things are always bubbling up.
Some days my only liquid is bubble water and champagne,
but unfortunately I’ll never have a bubble butt.
Bubbles are what form between my hands as I vigorously lather with soap until they pop on the raw dry skin cracked from repetitious cleaning.
Or what I imagine a child blowing in the sunny park I imagine myself sitting in when I imagine getting out more.
Or the ones that dance over the purple LED glow of the electric tea kettle.
Or academia.
Or the musical ones that form in my body.
Or algorithmically engineered echo-chambers.
Or the ones that are feelings that rise in my chest.
Or the ones that are suspended inside my bottle of hand sanitiser.
Or “bubble mate” love in the time of bubbles.
Or lips blowing bubble kisses.”
Anti-bubbles are formed when a droplet of liquid becomes totally surrounded by a thin membrane of gas within a body of fluid. Natalee watched a video of a Youtube scientist create anti-bubbles in beakers of soapy water. They added food colouring, so that when the anti-bubble popped, a smooth explosion of colour swirled to dissolution.
“I want to pop swirl turn this isolation, and every feeling I have, inside out to crisp in the sun.”
Audio Description
Natalee Decker
Natalee Decker is a Chicago-born, Los Angeles-based artist currently pursuing an undergraduate degree at University of California, Los Angeles in Design, Media Arts, and Disability Studies. Her work engages the intersections of disability, technology, crip fantasy, and scarred memories. Natalee is queer, disabled, and white.
- Lost/In Transit—Funmi Lijadu, 2020Lost/In TransitFunmi Lijadu, 2020
About the work
This image was made using a stitching technique, layering strips of paper for an interesting effect. The imagery of a blue sky and deck chairs captures the energy of being on holiday and content with lack of schedule. During quarantine, Funmi pondered on whether the notion of “getting away” had shifted, since we were all forced to slow down.
Image Description
A mosaic-like collage of two images woven together in large squares. One image is a blue and white blur of wings or propellers turning in a blue sky and the other shows disrupted sections of a holiday photo of a man in swim shorts by sun loungers in a warm tropical setting.
Audio Description
Funmi Lijadu
Funmi Lijadu is a writer and collage artist highlighting stories that are less heard. She is invested in humanity, the histories that led to our present, and imagining better futures. A lot of her work is influenced by the experimental energy of surrealism. She currently attends The University of Edinburgh studying English Literature, in her final year. Funmi is also a digital journalist fascinated by culture, relationships, and social media trends.
- Tough Times—Funmi Lijadu, 2020Tough TimesFunmi Lijadu, 2020
About the work
This image is a combination of two separate images and could be read as a take on emotional repression displaying itself on the human body. The image of a clenched fist is embedded in pop culture memory, as evident in the viral reaction image meme of Arthur’s fist. “Beyond this, the idea of endurance, unpredictability and unresolvable pain seemed super profound to me at the time.”
Image Description
A photo collage of the lower half of a man on decking or a boardwalk, disrupted so that the legs are separate, wearing a different colour of jeans to the other, and rips seeming to appear across the rest of his body and clothing.
Audio Description
Funmi Lijadu
Funmi Lijadu is a writer and collage artist highlighting stories that are less heard. She is invested in humanity, the histories that led to our present, and imagining better futures. A lot of her work is influenced by the experimental energy of surrealism. She currently attends The University of Edinburgh studying English Literature, in her final year. Funmi is also a digital journalist fascinated by culture, relationships, and social media trends.