FOUR WALLS & FRAMES - an ode to art

tate modern, london.

museum voorlinden, netherlands.

The quiet hum and dainty footsteps that echo in the rooms of galleries and exhibits provide a unique sense of comfort for those who frequent these places often. The sense of complete tranquillity as your mind and body prepares itself for a journey of looping around vast never ending rooms, takes over. It is finding yourself completely immersed in the mosaic nature, of the floor-plan that becomes an exhibit itself, forcing one to become separated from the chaos of the outside. The four walls of each room house you for some time and ask you to fully embrace what the bareness of the white provides amongst the intricacy of what is within the coveted and protected frames. By entering the gallery and observing the exhibits you step into one of these frames, it is all encompassing as you tread carefully admiring it all.

Whilst on this lulled journey of escapism, the visual arts simultaneously play an important role in addressing society directly, using art as a medium to reflect, attack and critique. The art forms laying on a canvas, spread out, act as a distinctive tableau to disillusion you and dismantle popular discourse, whether it concerns topics such race, feminism or even the rise of the digital age. The four walls serve as a conductor for thought and as you step in, the multitudes of artistic voices amplify and layer onto each other, each exhibition calling for attention and it is overwhelmingly beautiful. The voices reflect off of the frames and glass and leap through, bounding across the hollow space searching to be understood.  

british museum, london.

british museum, london.

However, it is just as significant that exhibitions and the visual arts do not exist purely to be intellectually understood or interacted with. Sometimes the beauty of these spaces is to walk through mindlessly appreciating it for the colours or the unique way the textures form together on the canvas, or how light is projected reflecting onto your fingers and filling the space like a kaleidoscope. The assault on the senses can be enough to find pleasure in the visual arts, to freely enjoy the visual aspect without wanting to know about its place in art history is just as good enough.  

ワンダフルライフ - short story

The long corridor is flooded with fluorescent lights and the faint beeping of electrical machines is heard faintly like the ticking of a clock, continuous and sinister. It is empty and everything feels distant and hollow. The corridor seems endless, the white walls are infinite, and a sudden desire to investigate this strange passage overwhelms you. You walk a step before being interrupted by the cold floor, and glancing down you can feel the coldness seep into the naked soles of your feet. You adjust to the smooth white before walking along this tunnel, the faint beeping rings in your ears as if it is following you closely behind. You look behind as you walk and it is all the same but it is what is ahead of you that pulls you. Your hands instinctively graze along the white walls and you notice a white tag wrapped around your wrist. It feels alien and strange that it is there but also familiar. This confusion hangs over you like a haze and you can do nothing but to walk forward. The beeping still follows you except it is comforting now. The regular monotonous beeping gives each step meaning, it is valid and part of the rhythm of your strides.

Before long you reach a window on the right side of the passage, and it is dark inside. There is no door, just glass looking into black. You peer through the glass and notice your reflection, it doesn’t feel real and yet the continuous beeping forces you to accept a type of reality. You notice that there is dried blood around your nose and you seem tired. It only now dawns on you how tired you are, that there is a deep ache inside you. You exhale and simultaneously feel warmth radiating through the deep blackness. It is hot behind the glass. You tentatively press your hand against the glass and the heat makes you pull away, you step back. The black behind the glass seems to be pulsating as if it cannot be contained. The lights transform into red, and angry and overpowering red flooding the space. The beeping has intensified too and it is loud, you’re sure it is right next to you. But it isn’t and instead the beeping propels you into moving away from the burning black. Your running however, feels innately slow and unsteady as much as you try to run, your limbs betray you. You’re sure the heat will soon engulf you, except your feet find the coldness of the floor and it is bright again.

Unsure of what this place is and what to do, you keep walking. Hands clenched and a sweaty dampness on the nape of your neck, the hazy confusion is mixed with adrenaline and fear. The beeping is still there distant and your only companion in this boundless place. The florescent lights make your head hurt and eyes heavy, the tiredness has only gotten worse and your knees are heavy. You lean onto the wall your hands sticky with sweat and sliding down you fall in a heap onto the floor. You rest for a while, your head against the fall and knees close to your chest wanting the exhaustion and ache to disappear. You close your eyes, seeing flitting colours on your eyelids before you are hit with a strong wave of drowsiness…

You’re sitting on a cold chair in a room with similar walls to that off the corridor. “This must be a dream” you think to yourself although the corridor felt like a dream too. Ignoring the persistent confusion, you lean back into the chair and assess where you are. The room is eerily silent, even your breathing seemed to interrupt the stillness. Then you realise the faint beeping of the corridor had disappeared. “This is a dream” you say aloud with certainty.

The room was small with only two chairs and a small old TV, with a VHS tape laying on top, furnishing the space. These items lay in the centre of the room and with a chair opposite holding the dusty TV and tape. Without finding any reason to you take the tape and insert into the TV and press play. The title “ワンダフルライフ” appears in white lettering before turning black and the tape ejecting. You put the tape back into assuming the old TV was broken yet the foreign letters appear again, “ワンダフルライフ” before turning to black and ejecting. Frustrated and stuck, you stare into the screen of the TV, wondering what this was, what it meant. Willing and wanting to make the tape work you place your hand on the black screen of the TV, not expecting anything. Except the glass screen it is hot, sweltering. You flinch, taking your hand away and a familiar fear takes hold of you. You get up as the heat from the small black box rises, pulsating you can feel its strength. In an effort to flee you put the chair in front of you, wanting to create space between the blackness and you turn, before you realise there is no door…

You wake with a jolt, still leaning against the wall, hoping it was over. But the glaring red lights told you it was not, that the blackness was coming. You get up stumbling, still feeling the residual heat from the TV. The faint beeping was back and urging you to hurry, to run. You try to, pleading with your limbs to hurry and save you. The corridor flooded with red lights mocks you, taunting your fear. Finally, you are at the end and a door appears, you open it just as the black scorching heat is behind you and you close it with force.

“Hello, we’ve been waiting for you”.

You turn around and see a woman dressed in all white, holding a clipboard, with a seemingly pleasant smile. You felt yourself shake as you try to respond, to open your mouth and let words come out, but they don’t. She takes you, ignoring your shaken and nervous state and turns your wrist. She observes the numbers that you had never seen before and proceeds to write it down.

 “We’ve been looking for you for a while, but don’t be afraid. Everything will be just right”.

She caringly touches your wrist before guiding you to a door. Her hand placed on your back you feel safe, finally. The fear calms down slightly and your breathing is less sporadic. She opens the door and it is black. You step back and noticing your anxiousness, turns your head affectionately and says again

“Everything will be just right”.

You step in, trusting her, too tired to fight and question anything. The room is black except for a window showing white walls and fluorescent lights on the other side. You walk up to it and understand the woman in white has gone. You look for your reflection in the glass and you watch as you put your hand to the glass but you haven’t. Your hands are by your side and you are not observing your reflection. You are watching her. You. The heat of the black swallows you as you try to scream from the realisation and fear and nothing is audible in this void.

THE END

WHITE - a memory

She woke one morning, scrunching her toes in the cold sheets to feel some warmth and wriggled around. She spread her arms across the huge and never ending bed, nuzzling into the soft sheets and opened her eyes. The air was still and cool, the light through the windows was bright but almost grey and had steamed up behind the netted curtains. It was another day but today felt different. From a distance, she could hear her mother humming as breakfast was cooking. Her mother’s low melodic humming was a reminder that it was the weekend for she was at home and not away working, which immediately excited her for the day. She slowly swung her small, soft feet out of the bed and with a hop bounced down and made her way to the kitchen. The smell of coffee and some sort of fried food welcomed her as she nestled in between her mother’s legs. Her mother, with loving anticipation, greeted her with a smile, which was probably the most beautiful and kind one she would ever encounter. However, as her mother attempted to coax her out of her sleepy hibernation, she was distracted, hardly hearing what her mother was saying.  

Something was falling in the sky. It was barely noticeable but it was definitely there. Delicate, wispy flakes of ice were drifting through the sky landing upon the thick layer of what appeared to be frosting, covering the motionless world. The flakes of this strange white fell elegantly, carried by the wind as if they were dancing, happy to fall from such a height, perhaps even flying. It was strange watching the silence of the outside, as if you could finally witness quietness mold itself around the world. It was so still and as she watched the hushed white envelop the outside, she suddenly felt a shift in her understanding of herself. She was so small. Not compared to the kitchen counter or the table top where her mother was placing something steaming on. But in fact, small compared to how vast and immense out there was. It gripped her and as her feet felt the cold of the tiled floor, she felt utterly taken over by this sentiment. She could not yet fully understand it or even formulate the thought out loud. But she felt it completely, and paralysed by this realisation she stayed mesmerised by the strange weightless bits of white, they were infinite.

 Soon she was being ushered out of this motionless hypnosis, towards the front door of the flat, a small one-bedroom space for two, barely three. The snow was cascading down and as the door opened wide, she felt the bitter air hit her, and involuntarily let out a breath to reveal a mist leaving her mouth. She stayed fixated upon the sky, never moving her head, looking up with astonishment.  Her mother quickly bundled her up in her winter coat and boots whispering “look its snow”, whilst holding her shoulders. The word took her out of her awe and she repeated the word back “snow?”. Her mouth getting used to the word, it came out slowly forming the word “s-no”.

LIMINAL SPACES & ALTERED REALITY – a study

The concept of liminal spaces has always been fascinating to me. I stumbled across the idea one day and its very notion struck a chord with me. So, I have created a written study of what I have come to understand it to be. Liminality is that our own world, thing and places we know to be familiar and almost mundane, can also have an adverse darker undertone to it. Leaving a nauseating and displaced feeling.

Liminal spaces, are places or states of space whereby reality feels altered and strange. Places where we associate motion and transition come to a standstill at one point or another, providing a haunting and empty phase. It is perhaps because human nature relies upon context, whether it is in our learning processes as an infant or the need for rationality in the everyday. Therefore, when tangible solid aspects of our lives become slightly altered, it is jarring for the brain to process, creating a fleeting limbo-like state. I suppose these places are recognisable subconsciously and because of that, we have grown accustomed to not taking much notice of it.

For example; empty train stations during late nights, supermarkets in the early mornings or vacant corner shops filled with the dull hum of music. The inside of a car whilst it’s raining, snowfall during night time and empty buses. As well as take away shops with only a few customers, flooded with neon fluorescent lighting. Frost covered grass in the park on winter mornings, and bare cinema theatres whilst the endless trailers play, or galleries and museums with no observers. It is also reminiscent in films, especially from the dystopian genre. Films such as Blade Runner 2049 (2017), have taken places typically associated with occupation and hollowed it out. Here, in figure 1, occurs a more extreme and cinematic example of liminal space. It depicts a dead and hopeless reality with the yellow lighting and grand yet dusted, aged décor portraying a nostalgic calling for a civilisation that once existed.

Figure 1: Blade Runner 2049 (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment)

There are many more examples, but what I have noticed is that these spaces are dependent upon two things: the time of day either early morning or late night and winter. I think the coldness of winter lends to these stark differences in daytime and night-time. Both leave different but lasting impressions upon reality. The crisp and bitterness of early mornings paired with a dull and almost white daylight, to the stretched-out darkness of night that seems to last forever. This seasonal change allows for liminal spaces to exist in a much more evocative manner, creating a melancholic and sinister tone to common places of existence. Perhaps this is why summer time is much more romanticised in popular culture, as its natural warmth gives in to our familiarity with life. It invites us to enjoy these spaces with more wonder and joy, as sunlight fills the emptiness with golden tones of reassurance and familiar wistfulness. Rather than the numb, damp and coldness the outside that winter provides.