No Escape

Invited by Victor Costa, Director of the Centro de Arte de S. Joao da Maderia, which includes contemporary British art in its programme, each of the selected artists had a discrete space in which to make an individual exhibition.

Christine Hatt records, codes and abbreviates the minutiae of the evidence of her everyday existence: from phone numbers, names, times, addresses and dates. The resulting data is then edited and re-notated to form a wall-text. Within and between texts, sub-categories are created within an invented taxonomy. Each set of text-works is an excerpt from a single category within the artist's database, and consequently functions as a microcosm of the entire taxonomic system and database she holds.

Hatt developed the wall-texts in a linear configuration, which permitted sequencing and groupings of texts, and readings and interrelationships previously unexplored. The sequence of texts invited, and frustrated, narrative readings e.g. the left to right of written English, the possibility of a story, diary or journal, or an endless cycle, as the viewer rotated within the single, enclosed space.