The Fabricator's Tale

Collected short stories with an overarching narrative, featuring the character, Reality Flickers. Here Reality Flickers is employed allegorically to represent a critical understanding of sculpture: without a delimiting medium and often with only a description or context to distinguish it from non-art, the subject of sculpture flickers, or becomes indeterminate. Dramatized through storytelling, this fluctuation between absence and presence as artwork becomes a question of life or death for the characters.

The research, in the form of the stories specific to this publication, is additionally disseminated through a series of live readings and public exhibitions in which physical environments and audio recordings are elaborated from its narratives. Related live readings and exhibitions drawn from these stories:

Reality Flickers: found objects and audio installation in group exhibition Mirrorcity Hayward Gallery, London 2014
Dr Sinclair’s Drawer and The Fabricator’s Tale: found objects and audio installation in group exhibition Dr Sinclair’s Drawer Flat Time House, London 2014
Reality Flickers: found objects and audio installation in solo show Katrina Palmer: Reality Flickers MOT International, London 2013.
Ex: audio walk in group show Orpheus Twice, David Roberts Art Foundation, London 2013
The Pretender: live reading at 21st Century Chisenhale Gallery, London 2013
A Remote Object of Thought: live reading during UR Feeling Camden Arts Centre, London, 2012
‘Geraldine Goat: The Hard Way to Enlightenment’, in Mute Magazine, vol 3 Summer 2012
‘Relief (A Remote Object Of Thought)’, in Penelope Curtis and Keith Wilson eds., Modern British Sculpture, Royal Academy of Art London 2011, p. 277 ISBN: 9781905711727

Reality Flickers is now in the collection of Arts Council England

Research towards this project was conducted during a residency: July 2013 – September 2013 Flat Time House, London.

Reviews:
‘Katrina Palmer’ review of Reality Flickers by Stephanie Bailey, Art Forum, March 2014
‘Katrina Palmer: Reality Flickers’ review by Martin Herbert, Art Review, March 2014

Palmer proposes extended forms of writing as sculpture. By highlighting the role of words, in place of objects, the works typically refer to absence, often employing visceral descriptive language to construct physicality. The artist-protagonist teases out the material significance of objects, negotiating social spaces and power dynamics. The activity of sculpture (e.g. arranging objects, a theoretical, sensual and experiential enquiry into objecthood) is formulated in words. The devices of literature and fiction, such as plot, voice, narrative, character and rhetoric, are exploited as sculptural media.

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