Untitled (Hinge)

“Untitled (Hinge)” is a site-specific wall drawing produced as part of the exhibition Plurale 1, British School at Rome, 2004. The work was a culmination of a three-month research period at the British School at Rome as part of the Abbey Fellowship Award, an annual competition open to British and American artists.

My research during that period focused on the work of the Baroque architect, Francesco Borromini, in particular, the logic behind his deployment of linearity – simultaneously used to articulate space, to disturb architectural mass and as a means of maintaining a reference back to bodily gesture. Developing from this research, “Untitled (Hinge)” focused on drawing as act and intervention. Architectural elements within the existing space are accentuated and transformed into sweeping linear elements that both reconfigure unstable gravitational centers within that space and maintain a sustained gestural reference.

A range of recent architectural practices (Libeskind, Eisenman, Serra, Matta-Clark) engage with a Baroque conception of space as a ‘multiplicity’ resisting synthesis. “Untitled (Hinge)” brings to this field the question of the primacy of gesture in spatial determination (Lefebvre). As such, the work brings the complexities of Baroque space into collision and dialogue with the concerns with phenomenological experience that characterize the Minimalist project - the subject as embodied and mobile.

A related site-specific work was subsequently produced for the exhibition Ex Roma at APT Gallery, London in 2005 selected by the Abbey Awards committee.

• http://www.chelsea.arts.ac.uk/17219.htm