Carolyn Eskdale, Victorian
model, charcoal on paper,
80cm x 100cm, 1991.

Where do the lines of a drawing lead? They are compressed in the declivity and stretch and elongate the fibres of a paper surface. Pressed together and separated, they travel the length of a page. Is this a fiction or is it a critique? I have written about Carol Eskdale's work prior to this with a particular emphasis on the narrative elements which form connections between the different mediums. How many stories are there? How does a ficto-criticism draw out the underlying speculations embedded in creative works?

Carol Eskdale has produced an extensive body of work, including separate installations with the generic title of room. These are spaces, empty or full, enclosed in or protected by walls of muslin or gauze. Her oeuvre also includes assemblages containing the artifacts of a familial territory, exploded and reassembled furniture, drawings, found object collections and paintings. Yet the items that Eskdale works with - fabric, furniture, geological fragments - are things that have been stored rather then collected. They are not valued as fetish objects, rather they recall a pathemic dimension that has outstripped the simple narratives of desire. Instead of being analogous to the aesthetic lifelessness of objects in a museum, the materials have been gently gathered in folds, draped and wrapped or gouged, dismembered and remade, not only for the purpose of analysis but also for the purpose of establishing connections. The role of the affect has a significant part to play in the elaboration of the visual narrative; it allows for the play of emotional transformations evolving from within the archive with its assemblage of dream-like artifacts.

For Eskdale the contemporary art project does not rest in the deconstructive function as an end in itself. Instead, the work is speculative and propositional as it transforms and recreates. How does this transformation take place? In her rooms two significant aspects of her work intersect. The first is an analytical or deconstructive mode and the second, a pathemic structure or logic. The deconstructive aspect is often described as a "surreal" component of her over-all aesthetic. With the pathemic aspect, a conglomerate of connections, threads and pathways are linked by a somatic filter . These twin modes intersect with each other like light passing through the filaments of a fine fabric outlining a solid form like the panel of a wooden cabinet. But to what end? Not in the service of a nihilistic destruction of elements but in the piecing together of a relation between the elements. After the explosion there is an accumulation of debris. The pieces are picked up and restored, albeit in a different order. Out of a passional conflict arises a transformed relation, containing the old and the new, the renewed and the worn. The prospect of beauty is an accomplishment of the artist's labour which it is possible to narrate.

(Untitled Room 12.96)

What kind of time line is this? A period of ten years or a lifetime, a brief occupation or an infinity of transformations? In this fictional fragment the artist walked the length of her new carpet, as one day someone else might do after she has gone, not in the act of laying out new material, but in the ritual of unpicking the seams and transporting the floral field to another public site. The remnant of a rose pattern, compacted with dust and the accumulation of other waste, bears the residue of a former presence. There is an expression of effort in the lifted floor covering, and its storage and installation in a temporary site, where it is shielded from direct scrutiny by walls of muslin. It is manifests as drawn threads which at some later date may form the line of a drawing or become a book of lines in someone else's room.

(Untitled Room 8.95)

She places four items of household furniture in a small enclosure, they are wrapped in a loosely woven material, the threads of the fabric are thick and cord like, they solidify the lines of the furniture that they protect; aesthetic dust sheets moulded to support the shape. The floor is laid in a pattern of grey and red tiles, the addition of colour segments the space as though the logic at work in the assemblage were multiplying like words or numbers on a page. She is preparing to elaborate, to locate the connections between the visual and the pathemic.

('Men's Wardrobe' 1994)

Eskdale's works are undeniably gendered. She has transformed the image of the feminine, but what is to be the fate of the masculine in this story? She takes apart an ordinary wardrobe in order to transform its appearance. Is this violent? But this is no unrewarded action. The matter is reformed. It is harsh and muscular. The glue and metal that held it together in its former state have been cleaned away and it has a new logic: The logic of surfiction, a fiction that disrupts the traditions of surrealism. It explodes the ordinary material of an artwork. It is a productive dissolution, a musical force working in and through the surface of the narrative. It does not oppose the real to the surreal, but rather lays claim to both categories at the same time. The breakage of a sentence, the surcease of images, or the explosion of objects affirms a new sequence of events.

('1930's Model' 1991)

Eskdale's dressmaker's model drawn in charcoal is feminine, delicate, yet practical, appearing in a painting, or as a solitary object. Its body is nameless and lacks a head, but is nonetheless a central character in her surfiction. No longer a simple metaphor, clone or template, she has removed the figure from the series. The body has been deconstructed thread by thread, or remade line by line in the form of a drawing, but it remains like an after image in the altered landscape, as though in continual motion between an empty room and a full room. In going beyond the morphology of an isolated body, in the transformation from one medium to another, we find what is continuous in the somatic dimension of existence yet simultaneously discontinuous; being next to another object, body, word. The proximity of the image at once touching and separated - is renewed by virtue of the pathemic relation. According to Giorgio Agamben it is the advent of just such a contiguous singularity, and not of identity, that is imperative to recent philosophical inquiry: Not the one, but the one as singular in connection with other singularities.¹ Perhaps it is artists and writers who having exhausted the texts of differentiation, are concerned with the state of alterity, the fact of our contiguity with and relation to others.

('Remaking a Rock collection' 1996)

A collection of rocks scattered on the floor of a cabinet in imitation of a landscape, then secluded in individual sites retains the singularity of individual form. Barely different from each other, these geological specimens exhibit an inexhaustible distinction. It is possible that the storage and display of this miniature landscape in an underground passage of railways station, where it is viewed by countless passing travellers, might accomplish the objectives of a narrative; the beginning or end of a story.

She returns to the space enclosed by walls of muslin. How many rooms are to be emptied and filled, whether in dreams or through the tenuous endeavours of an artist? The beginning is elusive. Perhaps it is true that the fabric came from a hidden store, a discarded parachute folded inside a trunk, to be discovered at a later date as though she had forgotten its existence. Eskdale finds an alternative use for the store of material. One forms a false ceiling in a narrow space (a barrel vault, revealing a soft architecture) and the other a severe intersection of planar forms crossing overhead. And later the same stuff becomes a partition, bordering a piece of carpet, or a long narrow wall falling onto paper as though the individual threads might transform into a cascade of lines. Family furniture, which has been clothed in or protected by the same fabric, gives way to the opposing emotional force and now appears as a sheer panel encasing a disassembled, plundered wooden bed.

('Reconstructed Daughter 's Bed', 1997)

In this work, Eskdale refuses to complete the fourth side. The actual wall is solid and the space vast. Inside she pulls a bed to pieces: the coarse stuff of a mattress, the coils of metal, large bolts, a wooden frame. Is this an inheritance? The domestic threat has been altered. It has the form of a musical notation. It is capable of being heard, like the final sentence in a novel. The waves broke on the shore.² One wave next to another. Singular repetitions form a refrain: a thread in a screen, a line in a drawing, a moment in the filter of perception.

In the unmaking of a work or a shelter, in tracing the links from one material to another, finds a correlative in Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon: a visual narrative which reintroduces the psychoanalytic horizon without being specific. Deren is known as the mother of American avant-garde film. Working in the 1940s, Deren was one of the first experimental film makers to include surreal and psychoanalytical references in her films. Yet, according to Alison Butler writing in the journal Screen, her critical fate might be described as strange, for while she produced work which pioneered the cinematic use of psychoanalytic material, her role in the history of film has been obscured and neglected.³ Has this situation altered or is it that in this post-feminist zone we inhabit a criticality that is blind to the logic of the pathemic dimension?

In the Meshes of the Afternoon a woman runs up a series of steps, she has a key concealed in her mouth, it lies on her tongue. She is dressed in black. It is possible to account for the symbol of the key. It has been said that the unconscious is of a simple structure. Does this refer to the feminine unconscious? One artist discovers an endless roll of film. And another the fluid line of a pencil drawing. She wraps the key in folds of material. In another version the fabric might be red. The strategies of sublimation resemble fiction, they include modifications, contradictions and ruptures. They redefine the ending of a narrative and break the sequence of a complete sentence.

(Drawings, Temple Studios, 1997)

She is left holding a handful of threads, or she looks at the charcoal smudges on her hands and not at the drawing, and she repeats sentences taken from a character in a novel. The story has a sequence and a logic. They filter the passage of water. She seeps through the fibres. He is divided. Words fill the empty room. A store of phrases is released into the course; they touch and separate. I am made and remade continually. different people draw different words from me.⁴

Endnotes:
1. Agamben, G., The Coming Community, University of Minnesota Press, USA, 1993.
2. Woolf, Virginia, The Waves, Penguin Books, England, 1973.
3. Butler, A., Screen, 33.1, Spring, Oxford University Press, UK 1992. Review of The legend of Maya Deren: "Signatures", Volume 1, Part One, (1917-1942), Anthology Film Archives/Film Culture, New York, 1984; "Chambers", Volume I, Part Two, (1942-1947), Veve A Clark, Millicent Hodson and Catriona Neiman, 1988.
4. Woolf, op.cit, p 17.

© The artist and
Courtesy of the artist .

Carolyn Eskdale, Untitled room
8.95, furniture, gauze, synthetic
weave, 300cm x 372cm x
186cm, 1995.

Carolyn Eskdale, Barrel vault,
gauze, steel, paper,
var. dim., 1995.

Carolyn Eskdale, Reconstructed
daughter's bed, single Queen
Anne bed, aluminium, muslin,
239cm x 200cm x 61.5cm, 1997.

Carolyn Eskdale, Untitled, 4.96,
ink on paper, 10.5cm x
11cm, 1996.