Johanna Bolton
I work with sculpture, photography, installation and performance. I was once told I have a ‘talent for chaos’. It is a nice backhanded compliment, and probably true. I do find complexity very interesting, and a lot of my art practice seems to be about ways to deal with complexity and attempts to impose order.
I sometimes use processes borrowed from science to isolate cause and visualise the effect of changing one thing at a time. It leads to a serial process, archives, dealing with multitudes: separating, sieving, stacking, storing.
I have made studies of elastic bands, scrunched up patterns, folds in worn clothes. Why persist in looking at such small everyday things? Is it a kind of feminist scientist movement? Or just a way to say - look, we cannot even fully understand the simplest, most common matter around. As soon as we start really looking at something it expands and reveals itself as unknowable. I was once asked what I found so interesting about elastic band knots, and my answer is that it is because the possible shape variations of this simple loop are practically endless.
At its core it is probably an attempt to experience something as old-fashioned as the sublime. My awe in front of the complexity and chaos of the everyday is enough, I do not need to seek out high cliffs and waterfalls.
In this reflection of the high in the low, from the ridiculous to the sublime, in the unending bathos of everyday life, lies also a knife-edge balancing act between the deadly serious and the seriously funny. The artist, deep in thought, slips on a carelessly discarded metaphor and falls on her arse. It is interesting to note that Derrida (yes, sorry, but bear with me…) speaks of the moment of moving from play to earnestness as the moment of experiencing the sublime. Which also happens to be the balancing act I am attempting in the studio every day. So, yes, I think chasing the sublime, or at least surprise is a really important element of my practice.
There are many other edges I like to explore in my work. For example, what happens when moving between 2D and 3D, the miraculous increase in complexity when surface becomes a shape. The exciting meeting point when my agency meets the agency of the material I work with and the outcome is unpredictable and precarious. And even more chaotic and full of possibilities is the meeting of bodies when performers interact with my sculptures, adding movement and becoming part of the work.
