evocative objects (ongoing)
If the plates, thimbles, scissors, keys and saltshakers that Pablo Neruda addresses in his Odes to Common Things speak of moments of sensory and affective caress, such objects also extend an invitation beyond that of perception and sensuality: an invitation to narrative. We use our evocative objects to keep re-engaging with the construction of our own stories. […] For a long time, I have been interested in such autobiographically charged objects: not so much heirlooms as things skimmed off the surface of everyday life. Things that furnish our day-to-day existence and that, in their acquaintance with the humdrum, act beneath the visible as spurs to memory, cues to thought. We may regard these as trophies or tokens: always, they are private memorials. Yet objects – like facts – can intrude into the fluid, ambiguous space of remembering. They might remind us of our old selves or of other people, but that very association may fossilise the living, changeable beings we once were, and those others whom we miss (from Second Chance: My Life in Things, published by Open Book, Cambridge, 2022).
Two short texts out of which two fuller essay chapters were subsequently constructed, were published as “Surviving Objects,” Life Writing Projects, University of Sussex, 2019.
In 2011, I asked about twenty friends and acquaintances to bring me an object that was meaningful and evocative to them. I photographed these items without being quite sure what to do with those images. What interested me, perhaps more than the images, was the ceremony of bringing forth that all these people performed in laying out their objects before me. That was something I did not capture; and it is perhaps for that reason that I felt the need to write about evocative objects, rather than letting them exist only within the domain of the image. I have, however, remained persistently interested in the use of evocative objects by other artists and writers (watch this space). Nevertheless, it is the braiding together of words and images, their interdependence rather than the opposition they might establish, that remains central to my work in all mediums.
A severed ponytail, a family album, a book, another book, a cigarette lighter, a hairbrush, a napkin in its ring, an old audio cassette, a chewed dog’s toy, a clumsy drawing, soiled pyjamas, an accordion-folded Kama Sutra, a photograph album, a pair of sunglasses, a pile of letters, a pair of shoes: these evocative objects are things that enable me to experience my self as I inhabit my particular world. Each object is a survivor, testifying to a period or a sequence of events in my past, and thus to my own survival as a narrator. They speak about the way I rub along, living in things, as Virginia Woolf succinctly puts it. […] Nevertheless, objects – even ones that are not charged with the burden of carrying our personal histories – have contours that are more porous than we might imagine. Their quiddity is not that assured. The self finds and defines, and then re-finds and re-defines itself in the process of assigning shifting mental and emotional places to and for things. Loved, unloved, loved again perhaps. We attach ourselves to objects because of their perceived stability: this ponytail, this handkerchief, this sled with the word Rosebud inscribed upon it. The very thingness of our evocative objects, their staunch assertion of presence, confers the fantasy of stability on the subject, on me (From Second Chance: My Life in Things, work in progress).