Imogen Stidworthy

I first became interested in Imogen Stidworthy’s work in 2003 and immediately commissioned a review for the Static Pamphlet of ‘The Whisper Heard’ exhibition, Matts Gallery, London1. Since then I have enjoyed being engaged in a critical dialogue with Imogen about her practice.

For me, one key element of Stidworthy’s work, is that it questions the notion of translation – to move a thing from one space to another space without changing it – not necessarily in the process of the production of art, but rather by concentrating on the breakdowns and inevitable slippages in this utopian ideal, mainly through an ongoing investigation into the vagaries of language itself. Therefore, Stidworthy’s work – primarily installation, text, video and film – examines the different dimensions of language: its communicative potential, its paths through the body, its acoustic, gesticulatory, spatial and mental characteristics.

Stidworthy’s work also continues to interrogate the subject of architecture, through both subject matter and physical installation, in particular her multi-part installation for Documenta 12, Kasel, which like many other works, has a reference to Dennis Hollier’s Against Architecture: The writings of Goerges Bataille’s.

Holliers’s theoretical take on Hegel’s aesthetics – in particular the power of architecture in Hegelarian philosophy – and Batailles spatial analysis of the Pyramid and the Labyrinth, or the object and space inside and around the object, is echoed in Stidworthy’s use of object – sound wall, screen, plinth, platform – and the subsequent labyrinth spaces created by the physical objects, that compel the visitor to see and hear the film, video and sound elements of the installation in a particular way. For Hollier, the “labyrinth was the elusive, almost invisible model of spatiality through which Bataille induced the undoing of structures linguistic as well as architectural”2. I would also suggest that Stidworthy’s work is also undoing or un-packaging her own reading of equivalent linguistic and architectural structures by firstly recording the testimonies of her subjects language or glitch/learn language through sound, film and video, then post-editing the original material, a translation in itself, and lastly colliding it into what Sarat Maharaj has described as an “oral-aural-acoustic contraption”3.

Not to be misled by the word contraption, which may invoke a slight Victoriana, Stidworthy’s installations are of well cut technological cloth, tailor made for a contemporary audience attuned to the protocols or shear seductiveness of the modern HD spectacle. In this sense, I would conclude by saying that if we could assess Stidworthy’s work on the possibility of translation, it is fair to say that to move a set of complex ideas from a conceptual state of thinking to a series of precisely synched large scale physical, installations and emotionally charged visual and acoustic architectural spaces is an amazing achievement.

Notes:
1. Matts Gallery: www.mattsgallery.org
2. Introduction, Against Architecture: The writings of Goerges Bataille’s by Dennis Hollier, ISBN-10: 0-262-08186-5.
3. Sarat Maharaj in reference to The Whisper Heard. Publication: Migrating Images, pg 161 ISBN 3-9808851-8-6.

Imogen Stidworthy was born in 1963. She gained a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from West Surry College of Art and Design and went on to postgraduate studies in fine art at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastrick (1992-94). Selected solo exhibitions include ‘Die Lucky Bush’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (2008); ‘Get Here’ at Galerie Hohenhole, Vienna (2005) and ‘The Whisper Heard’ at Matt’s Gallery, London (2003). Group exhibitions include Documenta 12, Kassel (2007); Visual Soundings’ at the Netherlands Institute for Media Art, Amsterdam (2007); ‘Re [Video Positive]’ at FACT, Liverpool (2007). Stidworthy is based in Liverpool.