Anna Barham Magenta, Emerald, Lapis 2009. Courtesy the artist
In Magenta, Emerald, Lapis, Anna Barham uses puzzles to explore the changing structure of words and how meaning is made and modified
Barham builds words using a tangram puzzle (a square cut into seven pieces that can be re-formed in various ways). She rearranges the tangram pieces above a light box until they become recognisable as letters. By doing this, Barham demonstrates how easily symbols can be transformed, and meanings changed.
This process of reordering and transforming poetic texts is a recurring theme for the artist. She has made many works with anagrams – puzzles that involve rearranging the letters of a word or phrase to produce a new one. This stems from her interest in the idea of revealing a word’s ‘unconscious’ meanings by exploring its associations. Barham says she uses word play to ‘set up a situation where meaning has to be actively constructed by the viewer.’
Barham’s fascination for anagrams began with her interest in the archaeological excavations of the ancient Phoenician city of Leptis Magna. The city is located on the coast of modern-day Libya. Stones and artifacts from several ancient buildings were plundered from the site by a British Army officer in 1816 and used to build an elaborate folly at Windsor Great Park. The remnants of the ruins had been taken out of their original context and remade with a different meaning. This echos the way meaning changes when rearranging the letters of one word to make another. One anagram of LEPTIS MAGNA is PLANT IMAGES. In Magenta, Emerald, Lapis, Barham spells out a poem written from the letters of REPLANTED IMAGES and the work manifests how language is endlessly restored and reconfigured
Daria Martin, In the Palace 2000
In the Palace is the first film in a trilogy followed by Birds 2001 (T12743) and Closeup Gallery 2003 (T12175). It constituted Daria Martin’s MFA thesis at University of California, Los Angeles and was shot with a 16mm camera and released in an edition of four. °Õ²¹³Ù±ð’s copy is the fourth in the edition. The film is set in a scaled up twenty-five foot (7620 mm) high version of the sculpture The Palace at 4 A.M. 1932 (Museum of Modern Art, New York) by Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti (1901–66), from which it takes its title. Giacometti’s sculpture is a fragile structure made of wood, glass, wire and string, and is open and accessible on all sides. When seen from the front it appears to be divided into three cages, inhabited by isolated forms and figures. Martin first saw Giacometti’s sculpture in her visits to the Museum of Modern Art in New York during her student years, and became attracted to the work’s ‘particularly evocative feeling, as if the figures within it have each been caught within their own dreams, simultaneously sleepwalking through the same house’ (quoted in Daria Martin, p.76). The artist measured the sculpture in MoMA’s archive for the correct proportions, and built the stage herself with the assistance of her art school friends. ‘The idea that sparked In the Palace’ Martin has explained, ‘was a desire to literally realise my own fantasy to inhabit this small sculpture, to blow it up to human dimensions and to populate it with performers’ (quoted in Daria Martin, p.76).
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artworks in Anna Barham
Art in this room
Daria Martin
In the Palace
2000