To Occupy installed in the Photospace Gallery ANU 4-15 August 2008
Alison Bennett is a visual artist investigating the theme of 'negotiated inhabitation'. She holds a BA (visual arts) majoring in photography from the UNSW College of Fine Arts and is completing a research Masters of Fine Arts at Monash University. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Verticalism: gothic ceilings’ to be featured in the September 2008 issue of Artichoke magazine; 'In Ruins' exhibited at Platform2 in 2005 featured on the cover of Arena magazine #78 and ANTIthesis journal #17; 'Woolsheds and Shearers' Quarters' reviewed by Philip Drew in Indesign #24; and 'Inside Hill End' reviewed by Charles Rice in Architecture Australia July 2004. Robert Nelson, reviewing 'Making Hay' in The Age 15 Nov 2006, compared her work to Walker Evans. She curated the group exhibition 'Frames of Reference' for Bathurst Regional Art Gallery 2005 and has works in the collections of the National Museum of Australia, the Historic Houses Trust of NSW and the City of Geelong. Forthcoming exhibitions include 'to occupy' series at the Vivid National Photography Festival in Canberra August 2008 and the 'caving in' project at Horsham Regional Art Gallery in January 2009.
"It's like an addiction, a compulsion. I search for these places, I network, I hustle. I read and I talk and I research. I'm good at it; its my special gift. I can be so charming, as only the addict or collector intent on their fix can be. I collect stories and memories in conversation and books. All in search of that moment of frisson, that shudder of intense excitement at encountering an extraordinary room, the thrill of being outside of regulated space. I know I'm not alone. You've left traces, you've written on the walls. Online zines such as Infiltration document your exploits, the evidence of being in places where you are not supposed to be. I am not so flagrant, unlike the boys who got inside the Roswell Silos or the man who collects photographs of hotel swimming pools. Those guys are practicing a more radical form of outsider archaeology. My challenge is to get people to say yes, to allow me into their ruins.
The experience of space is imaginative and visceral. As an artist, I explore aspects of the experience of place and time through images of ruined interiors, seeking an uncanny fusion of document and distortion that mimics the experience of interior spaces. I am interested in exploring the conflation of architectural and psychological 'interiority'. I am interested in the space between the physical fabric of a building and the lives enacted within it. I am interested in the shudder, the space between what it feels like inside my head and what it feels like inside this room. I want to bring your attention to the physical experience of a room. The experience of space is imaginative and visceral, a physical experience, a gut reaction, an intrinsic relationship to the interior space of the body. Patricia Pringle, writing on the fascination of space in SCAN journal stated: 'We know space through our knowledge of our bodies, but since that knowledge is itself uncertain, space too is uncertain, subjective, and contingent.'
Interiority begins to describe the attraction and elusive flows between surfaces, between the surface of my skin and the enclosure of walls, its thresholds and apertures, the geometry of intimacy and defence. The physical sensation encompasses the skin like a breath and transforms at the collision of surfaces, the collapse of the space between, the touch of a hand on a doorway, the strike of a shin on a step. Touch is where interiority shifts from spatial incarnation to tactile and sensual, a point of contact, the collapse of the space between. Touch is the perpetrator of the trace, the patina of occupation.
To live is to leave traces."