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Sara Givins, In Search of Percival Redwood, 2010. Vinyl, pine ply wood, light. Dimensions variable. Photograph by Joy Lai
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Those words are from the confessions of Amy Bock, a con-woman known as
‘The Masquerader.’ Bock committed numerous petty thefts and frauds in New
Zealand in the early 20th Century. Her crimes included disguising
herself as a man, whom she named Percival Redwood, and marrying an unwitting
heiress.[2] It’s a story of multiple deceptions of identity, gender and
sexuality. And it straddles the contested boundaries of fiction, non-fiction
and autobiography with which contemporary culture is currently
preoccupied.
However fascinating the subject, Sara Givins isn’t trying to tell us
the tale of Amy Bock’s misadventures or the way her unstable self prefigured
postmodern treatments of identity. Givins’ target is the slippages of
communication that the story demonstrates, the misrepresentations, ambiguities
and misunderstandings, and the claims of language to tell us much of anything
we can hold onto.
Givins’ installation In Search of Percival Redwood (2010) takes Bock’s confession and treats it like a found object.
She has enlarged, mutated and abstracted the text, rendering it illegible.
Brightly coloured opaque vinyl is applied to the window that makes up the front
and side of Firsftdraft Gallery. It is a veiling device that entices and
prevents clear vision. The pattern is made up of cut-away letter shapes
stretching out from a series of vanishing points like hyped up cartoon
graphics. Inside the gallery, a sculptural form is echoed and repeated four
times in different sizes and permutations. Reminiscent of kit homes and of
magicians’ boxes, they are constructed from mirrored triangles of marine ply,
masked with the same adhesive vinyl from which more of Givins’ distorted font
has been sliced. Givins has deliberately not used a code or a system to
generate her hieroglyphs. Each letter has been individually morphed and sweetly
cut out by hand. The resulting characters are reflected onto the floor and
walls of the room. Some appear almost familiar, like skewed gender symbols,
arrows or punctuation marks. But they can only hint and allude to meaning. And
the projection of shadows reconfigures with each slight shift of natural light.
Givins suggests that language warps through context, reflection and
memory into abstraction. That as soon as we have read, or heard or spoken
words, they start to disintegrate and reform as abstracted impressions. And
this is what Givins makes material in this installation, with the changes of
scale, the mirrored surfaces and the flickering play of light.
Amy Bock’s words have been reconstituted as a delirious, sensory
experience. The audience is enclosed by the text, their image captured in
mirrors and reflected back as ciphers. Givins’ use of kaleidoscopic colour
startles, and then disarms. The work implies that language is a space we
inhabit with our bodies, and that it is one of pleasurable disarray.
Givins’ ongoing influences are as much from the worlds of
literature, from concrete poetry and storytelling, as they are from the
immersive installations of visual arts. Edibleland (2005) at The Physics Room consisted of adhesive vinyl silhouettes
and text that spread out over the walls and the ceiling, a fictitious creation
narrative of the founding of the Canterbury region of New Zealand. This work
also made merry with colour and playfulness. The graphics and the text had the
appearance of a child’s fairytale but the rampant desire depicted inferred that
Givins’ seduction of the viewer was intended to disturb. In her own version of
a confidence game, she misled her audience for their own good, so that they
might not be fooled again.
Another of Givins’ works, Swarm 11:9
(2007), was based on the Biblical account of the Tower of Babel, in which God
punished humanity by creating multiple languages and nations, thus removing
people’s ability to understand one other. Givins did not use text to represent
this cataclysmic loss of comprehension. The installation took the unsettling
form of 119 wooden cutouts of insects in massed flight around the gallery
walls. These earlier artworks point to Givins’ ongoing interest in the function
of language in myth making and grand operatic narratives. It’s the promise of
language and its failures that inform her visual practice.
In all of Givins’ work, language mutates between its potential to
disclose and to withhold. In Search of Percival Redwood makes use of both tendencies. Masking the window of the gallery has
created peepholes for passers-by. The indecipherable text that reverberates
through the gallery is a slow disrobing, teasing the audience and distracting
them from the quest. Percival Redwood is an illusion of language. Strip back
the veils and there is nothing left to see.
What Givins’ search results in is the suggestion that what is lost
or hidden in attempts to communicate is as tangible as what remains.
Lynne Barwick
Firstdraft Gallery, 2010
[1] http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=OW19090728.2.336&l=mi&e=-------10--1----0-all
(Accessed May 01, 2010
