extractors

Blockage in extractors, The Extractor Space, London, 2015.

extractors was a group show, curated by the artist Wayne Lucas, which brought together ten artists who had previously held, over the course of a year, residencies and solo shows in The Extractor Space. Utilising in turn the nostalgic flickering sensitivity of the filmic, the seduction of gaudy lighting, the obsessively precise, the disturbingly lurid, or the repetition of performative action, all created installations in response to the dereliction and sensibility of this old Victorian school kitchen. Whether reinventing its role, ruminating on its ruination, or allowing the unsaid to seep from its walls, the works responded to its nooks and crannies and the spectacle of the everyday.

For this show, each artist has been asked to ‘draw’, (in the widest sense of the word), generating new works by revisiting and reflecting on their own installations, tracing their experience of being in-residence. Rather than relying on a direct and immediate interaction with the site, the works will be made at a distance: to consider what could have been, what remains, what could become again, and then placed into the environment they most belong to, returning to their source.

I had completed my residency in June 2014, where I made The pleasure of small partings. For extractors I decided to bring the hair back to perform alone, encasing it in ice at both ends of the drain. Slowly throughout the show the two ice blocks would melt, finally leaving their watery remains in the gutter and revealing the hair in its naked glory.

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