Adrienne Kenafake: Stone Tape Theory
Words by Christine Morrow
“The works I have been producing relate to residual energy in the suburban landscape and the theory that memories, experiences and emotions can be stored in objects, buildings or places and replayed as ‘hauntings’.”
Adrienne Kenafake’s exhibition of new work from her September 2018 residency at House Conspiracy takes its name from a speculation or theory that objects of the material world keep a memory of past events or energies. Stone Tape Theory won’t pass any test that experimental science can throw at it. Especially Physics. It resonates with art, though, because art knows, remembers, and tells.
Art knows that physical material can express moods, sensations, energies, impulses and impressions. Just like Stone Tape Theory, art deals in those things that are processed through the mind, the eye and the gut but don’t make sense on any graph or table, can’t be quantified on any spreadsheet.
Art’s back story: when humans first drew animals in caves, a psychic connection between the depiction of the animal that was hunted and forces in the universe pulsated through the drawing and provided the hunter with the next kill.
Yet Stone Tape Theory is a much more recent expression of this ancient connection. It can firmly be traced back to the Nineteenth century, a time of Ouija and séances; mesmerism and the occult; the supernatural and the paranormal. Stone Tape Theory is exactly the kind of belief that ensures a psychic medium will always ask for an item of clothing from a missing person and try to locate the lost by reading the person’s thoughts and experiences through the cloth.
That’s a kind of clue to Kenafake’s new works. She is passing all kinds of material through her hands and reading its memory. She shares the material with her audience. Together, we need to consult the objects’ residual psychic energies to search for what is lost, try to locate what is missing.
One of the lost items is a dead cat. It was killed by a car. Many of the missing items are lost property like elastic hair ties, a lost bag of food shopping or found items of underwear. The artist singles out things that are overlooked. Abject objects. And not just things either. Sometimes places. Places that are ugly and unappreciated. Vacant lots. Stormwater drains. Culverts. Places on the fringes of suburbs. Places overgrown with weeds. Non-places. Non-places and non-things.
Most of Kenafake’s work harnesses a kind of melancholy or abjection. She uses sombre objects and images that appear to retain memories of their own past that hover just beyond reach. One of her works is even a small shrine-like installation of bread and cheese she found in someone’s abandoned shopping. Like most religious offerings, it’s a meal that can only sustain ghosts.
A big part of Kenafake’s practice is that of encircling. She encircles bundles of plant materials with a wire armature. Sometimes, she rings the corpse of a small road-kill animal with fire resistant wire that will retain a memory of the animal’s shape after the carcass is cremated and only the trussing remains. The wire is the last thing that touched the animal’s corpse and it carries forward this trace.
It is very important that Kenafake must keep drawing circles around things. Otherwise they may be overlooked and remain unseen. Her logic of encircling is so strong that she goes searching for these hair ties, scouring the beach and the change rooms at Burleigh. Elastic bands and scrunchies alike, they grasp bundles of hair and encircle them. They retain a memory of their wearer. Not to mention stray strands of hair and a lingering human bodily smell. Perhaps the hair ties are even communing with one another covertly.
While she works across numerous media, Kenafake’s work reverberates with the logic and meaning of sculpture. Specifically moulding and casting. Because every time a mould is made from an original and every time a multiple is struck from a mould, the process ensures that one material retains and restages the memory of the other. Even when she’s making videos or doing performances, she is always a secret sculptor. Sculpture remembers and reveals the touch of the human hand that made it.
Kenafake deals in the absent, the dead, the discarded and the overlooked. She repositions them within a cycle of acknowledgement and memorialisation. Things that are cast aside are brought back into the centre: non-objects, non-people and non-places. Like a psychic medium, Kenafake uses her powers to locate, rescue and restore the lost.
Christine Morrow,
Brisbane, September 2018.