Isabel Mallet

In Practice, SculptureCenter, 2023

Audio description of exhibition:

Three stones inhabit this room, all formed hundreds of millions of years ago, deep underground, then dragged or pushed to the surface through tectonic activity and subsequent erosion.

They were extracted from three quarries still in operation, all of which have historically supplied stone for the buildings of New York City.

These stones endure throughout the city: underneath our feet in public spaces, in universities and train stations, as pedestals for monuments, coping on façades, benches and blockades, pillars, curb stones, gravestones, bridge foundations.

A lighting system illuminates the ground, faulty gallery lights dismantled and rewired with “barn lights”, LED panels connected to light sensors. When installed outside, they turn on at dusk, and turn off at dawn, like streetlights. When installed in groups or in a small space, the lights affect each other, turning on and off in a random pattern, entering a feedback loop.

A Datura Wrightii (moonflower) plant blooms at night, the spiralled bud slowly unfurling along five rays of radial symmetry into a trumpet shaped flower. Each flower blooms only once, lasts one night, and if it is pollinated, droops and turns into a spiny seedpod hidden underneath the leaves.

A spell doesn’t need a name. A binding to and/or a release from ___ . Incantation as rhythmic intensification of the present (devouring itself). A breath forming volume and shape – conjuring the unspoken into the world for an instant (repeating).

With thanks to:

Stony Creek Quarry and Darrell Petit

Rock of Ages Quarry and Rob Boulanger, Marco Parent and Jonathan Houghton

Vermont Verde Serpentine Quarry and Tom Fabbioli, Peter Fabbioli and Mary-Margaret Fabbioli, also for the use of their shop and tools

Compression & the song, 2021

audio description of exhibition:

A  Dolomite Crystal emerges from a block of Marble almost two hundred years after the block became façade, and about four hundred and eighty million years after its metamorphosis during the formation of the Appalachian mountains.

Extracted from the Earth by bodies extracted from society by the State*, the block is just one piece of a monument that slowly releases its saccharoidal edge into the world. 

Toppled or being toppled. Bronze lumps like Ozymandias rolled into the sea only to be dredged out by city councils and others who hire conservators to polish graffiti and place relics in glass cabinets with lots of words for all to see.  

Solidity is only aggregate held in place for a geological instant, and everything on Earth is permeable to a varying degree. We keep on making holes, filling holes, but the ground is moving too. A rock slide, a run-down – a show by – atmospheric pressure, magnetic currents, lunar tides and churning magma.

*[Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York (opened 1826) and HM Prison Portland in Dorset UK (opened 1848) were both constructed on quarry sites using unpaid penal labour. Inmates were tasked first with building their own prisons, marking the beginnings of the prison-industrial complex. Marble extracted at Sing Sing was used in various buildings and monuments in Manhattan, including Federal Hall on Wall Street and Grace Church on Broadway. In Dorset, England; the Verne Citadel and the Portland Breakwater, built to protect England from invasion, were constructed by convicts who were eventually ‘released’ to Australia.]

I crumble soil in my hands and a rat skeleton falls apart in my fingers. I pick a perfect sun-bleached jawbone out of the dust and put it in my pocket.

The sun breaks plastic down slowly into microscopic plastic aggregate that is suspended everywhere for ‘lifetimes’. (Geological time is edgeless) 

“…and where is your edge?”        ask the three hundred and eighty trillion viruses contained in what I consider to be me.

I study new edges of old places as I walk through them with many others. We use voices, hands and feet to hold space and take time, often we sit down and listen. I amalgamate these and other edges I look at on screens to make these transparent cuboid places that are not entirely fiction, not all fact. 

I gather pieces of clear acrylic (perspex or plexi) from local fabricators’ scrap bins and sidewalks. Clear plastic used in the minimalist notation of an edge, the temporary window, the pass-thru, the sneeze-guard. 

I make dimensional drawings with cardboard because I cannot shift scale in two dimensions. I cut each acrylic piece on a bandsaw and sand and sand and sand. There are so many edges! I wear a mask with special filters so none of the edge-dust gets into my lungs.  I hold each edge together and carefully inject into the microscopic gap a chemical that melts the edges, welding them into one piece. I leave the different parts (wall, pedestal, stairs etc.) separate so when I tip the box that holds all the welded pieces to one side they all slide over in a jumble.

From the beginning I imagine them as containers for an unknown liquid. Each one an ‘inert’ system, like a cryogenic tank. I fill one up with water, then dirty the water with sludge. I try pond water, rain water, river water. Drain it out.  I find some mineral oil in a tractor supply store and discover it is a byproduct of petroleum distillation from crude oil and has many uses, including being the filling inside the radiator that I hunch over all winter.

When I pour it in, the acrylic edges get confused. I can see with my eyes what’s happening but when I send people the pictures on my phone they ask for “a better image.” I think maybe the mineral oil has similar refractive properties to acrylic, meaning, the hard internal edges become volumes, reflections happen within reflections.

I cut a piece of plasterboard out of my wall and build a column up from the floor and down from the ceiling. In the middle of the column is a slice where I slot in the oil-filled tank like a slide into a slide projector. I clip a lamp to the top of the column pointing down into the hollow and switch all the lights off. The surface of the oil quivers. As the light moves through the moving oil a projection of liquid light ripples inside the column.  

doubt systems, 2019

inkjet print of tobacco flower on transparency, aluminium;
warped steel bolts collected from building sites — sliced, forged and nickel-plated into irregular discs — mounted on invisible magnets embedded in the wall;
repaired vending machine, sandblasted cans, dollar bills;
cast concrete slabs, water (one underneath vending machine);
cast concrete stack with cuts

resisting the centre, 2019

cast concrete with cuts, polished steel plates
nineteen borrowed stage risers, one re-made stage riser
cast concrete pieces (by door)
all bulbs removed from overhead lighting track apart from one nearest the door

LUCID COLLAPSE 1, 2018

“If you send me your address, I will send you some words in black-powder-fused-to-cellulose-pulp form aka lucid collapse 1; an experiment in the physical consumption/excretion of (some) language”

Text available on request (to be mailed, provide address and postage cost only).

Lauren Burrow on lucid collapse:

new cells, new voids, 2018

hollow, screen-printed light-boxes containing barn lights in a sensory feedback loop; emergency glow sticks; tropane alkaloid producing solanum images in floor cavity c/o Dr. Sandra Knapp

Collaborative show with Sophie Lee at zona mista, London 2018

ROUGH MAGIC

in the sound of demolition, buildings becoming walls becoming bricks becoming aggregate becoming dust, ash of the burned, spurned, discounted, reformed, cast into the new void that is

arkhe-tekt-ure

40N concrete, rainwater, absent ceiling tiles (cavity space), borrowed clothes

coming up

the origin of the house in the basket, the origin of the basket in the web, building in darkness, instinctive dwelling with own bones in filth, cave floors dripping with freon, a thirsty hum, discarded appliances as exhausted bodies, (also) scale models of high rise buildings, continuous cycle of compression and depression, gases cooling warming, pavements drinking sweat, spit, piss, evaporation contained in systems spreads over the earth’s semi-permeable urban membrane, tough like 40N. For railways, manholes, footings, foundations, fingerprints from the other side, earth stretched out inhuman rendered,

acoustic crescendo from initial hollow, slow rhythm reflecting,

geological chirping            barking/woof/howl

coming down

gurgle

                 gurgle

        gurglegurglegurglegurglegurglegurglegurgle

gurglegurglegurglegurglegurglegurglegurgle

discarded fridges, contact microphones, mixing desk, harmoniser pedal, PA system

All images © Ollie Hammick 2018

floorplan

two-to-the-power-of-two-to-the-power-of-one-plus-one

Confined to this building, we scan the ground for openings, finding five.

Five circular panels of stainless steel about the size of a handspan, each engraved with ten concentric circles.

Five digits one side. Ten Digits as a whole.

Two parts mixing in my two hands, kneading, working until consistency allows pushing into middle of panel, fingers flatten mixture print by print, filling one groove at a time until spread over the whole panel, covering it’s own fingerprint with hundreds of ours.

On the floor peeling off the mold, we listen to this perfectly concentric fingerprint that conceals the vessel, the network, the architectural hollow that is in permanent shadow (guts). Put a fingertip on this fingertip. Our ridges move over your ridges: it sounds. Receptor or erogenous zone. Orifice or neuron. Black hole or supernova. Spitting or swallowing. Action potential is above and below but who is receiving what? Whose receptors, whose fingertips? Who’s fingering who? Who’s feeling who?

In each one (of these five elements, phases, agents, movements, processes, planets, receptors, orifices, neurons) there are three screws. We take them out and pop the lid. Concealing the truth is darkness (and cobwebs) but we smell and feel the centre. Each one a vessel, which is really a tube, a network of tubes, not a pot or a hole: a vessel. Five vessels, cores, reaching for the centre, we know because the drill bit melts when we reach eight miles down, but we still have another 3,992 miles to go until we reach the – centre of what?

Dendrochronology is time according to trees, time as a series of concentric tubes. The earth is not flat or tube-like but a flexing spheroid. The eight mile core sample came out and we laid it out, every step another million years. A Correlated History. The annulus is the space in between concentric circles. Annulus, anus, Annus. That’s time. Rings around a hole. Time is space and volume. Steps. The first step reveals scraps of metal and plastic, nothing really, then for the next several millennia bits of broken pottery, a few steps, then finally some soil before the misery of agriculture, some chert flakes, cracked stones from campfires, a few more steps and we’re underwater, then molluscs and brachiopods and echinoderms for lots and lots of steps. After 380 steps we see a spider (?!), we put down a survey pin. But we’ve seen plenty by then. We’re not even an eighth of the the way there. It’s getting hot.

We look at these five core samples, laid next to each other in parallel, imagining an interpolated volume from these five sites (elements, phases, agents, movements, processes, planets, receptors, orifices, neurons) to the centre, what are we seeing, hearing? Grumbling magma. Nearly a straight line, we guess. They are so close relative to the size of earth, at most twenty feet away. Why are they not placed further apart on the Earth? Hm.

[Exploding creates crossing creates splitting creates drilling creates (all this) crushing.]

The number five makes us turn our gaze from the centre – us – to the edge – them. WE SEE. We are seers, like Giordano Bruno on the rooftop smoking, concentricity disappears in a single moment. The volume is becoming something substantial, warped pentagram projecting toward the outer reaches, the distance between the five (sites, tombstones, elements, phases, agents, movements, processes, planets, receptors, orifices, neurons) becomes greater until it reaches the edge of the universe, unspeakable infinity, but here is nowhere; you can’t measure distance at the edge of the universe because it’s not linear, you can’t place a point, only an idea.

So the volume of the five (sites, tombstones, elements, phases, agents, movements, processes, planets, receptors, orifices, neurons) dissolves (thankfully) and we’re left with the place and space they are in now. Polyurethane accumulating in the concentric grooves. Dull blots compared to the infinite space of a page. But they are not dull, and a page is not infinite. It’s a premonition. If you hang around long enough you’ll see.

Trigonotarbids Are Not True Spiders

LED lights, ventilation cavities