erasure by ill illumination
2024
'erasure by ill illumination'
Repurposed UCL library books, second hand books, plywood
‘untitled (erasure)’
desk lamp, wood, steel, beeswax, butter
‘Worthing beach 27/12/23’
Field recording on brown wax cylinder reproduced digitally, speaker, plywood, steel
00:02:24
‘palm like paper as to bone’
projector, plywood, bronze arrowhead, stick, feather, string
00:03:00
Installed at The Slade School of Fine Art.
Dust can never settle on an uninterrupted surface, e.g. the M1.
Eventually, the sun will melt away all that is recorded and from the residue, grow another method of recording. To preserve for a while, willing the ever prevailing character of written erasure.
Like skimming your knee on concrete, or skimming one palm sized flat stone on a length of water.
Fresh warmth will open up the joints of incision, uncreasing, unfolding to a flat plane in which there is no beginning or end.
(I fear the act of forgetting deeply.)
Hide these rifts, lines of information where dust cannot gather, where sun cannot pour, neither ash nor snow to obscure the surface. Bury, exile all warmth, wrap dry and swaddle by cold stone.
With any luck this will remain, and must, at least in delicacy.
The written unit, signs, grave markers and the left behind object
2023/2024
Reclaimed Luton red bricks, Yellow London stock bricks, soil, paper, cloth.
Installed at The Slade School of Fine Art.
'The written unit, signs, gravemarkers and the left behind object' is a colour inkjet printed hardback book comprising of poetry and photography designed, bound and written by Lily Petch.
'To pay close attention to the way in which we treat writing as a tool to preserve presence beyond the boundaries of the body.'
Image references in this book include Akkadian lamentation tablets and pictographic trade records, fragments of Linear B, Medieval monumental brasses and personal, family oriented artefacts from the artist.
Any secondary sourced photographs, scanned linguistic/archaeological texts or artefacts documented are listed in a short bibliography at the end of the book.
