Ett Mobilt Hem (Extract) by gregcaffrey

Helena Norell and Greg Caffrey met in Paris in 2006 and immediately began to work together on several projects.

The term “mobile home” itself means different things to different people. It may mean a holiday home designed for family enjoyment or perhaps a temporary portacabin for short-term housing. It can refer to a high tech vehicle that allows luxury family travel throughout the continent or, for some less fortunate people that the artists have encountered on the streets of Paris, a mobile home was all they possessed (a cardboard box and perhaps a blanket). The term itself, therefore, may represent a vague notion of who we are socially.

The installation uses the cardboard box as a three dimensional canvas for the abstract work of Helena Norell. This is in stark contrast to the practical purpose these objects have: as vessels to transport often-mundane objects or to hold our belongings when we move house; to store unwanted items or items of sentimental value, packed out of sight in our cellars and attics. We may, as already mentioned, even live in these cardboard constructions! It is the new beauty these objects acquire here, when removed from and seen incongruous to their practical world, that provokes a paradox.

The canvases themselves (boxes painted white) are in all sizes and are suspended from the ceiling at different heights so as to surround the visitor to the gallery. They are painted with changing motives and themes inspired from musical language rather than the visual and they juxtapose geometric concepts, lines and squares for example, against a more aleatory and spontaneous pouring and dripping of paint. This contrast of technique reflects the opposing meanings suggested in the work’s title: settled, unsettled, safe, unsafe, ugly, beautiful. The lightness of the material permits some small movement of the objects in the natural air current. A seated area is provided in the centre of the gallery space to allow visitors to see and hear the development of the work in time.

As the work is mobile, so too is the soundscape that accompanies it. Here Greg Caffrey uses four acoustic instruments to provide the ambience to the work. The problem of how to create a musical work that seems never to repeat and that moves in space is solved through the creation of mobile form in the music. The technique of isorhythm sets melodic phrases of fixed lengths to shorter or longer rhythmic phrases resulting in successive repeats of melody occurring on different rhythms and vise-versa. Instrumental phrase lengths too are of different lengths ensuring that while there is a certain amount of repetition within individual parts, as a whole the piece will last for approximately five and a half hours before any exact repetition is heard. Greg Caffrey uses the earlier experiments by Morton Feldman as a starting point for his own creation but builds a more personal musical language by, in this case, through-composing one of the four instruments to link the processes of the other voices throughout the duration of the piece. The four instruments are diffused through four separate speakers to compliment the spatial nature of the visual work.