title_ Veiling Space: Incarnations

date_ 2001

materials_ hanging voile, glass, sulphur, laboratory glass

location_ Uniting Church, Paddington, Sydney, Australia

curated_ by Rod Pattenden

photos_ Peter Solness

text_ Ah, not to be cut off
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars
The inner – what is it?
if not intensified sky
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming
- Rainer Maria Rilke

The Church, a space to experience the ineffable. The Church is also the manifestation of an idea – a pathway for transformation where faith, as a veil, can shift our perception of the world.

Hanging translucent material in space, this work explores the fluid and experiential passage where the body, space and time enfold into one another. It is part of an ongoing project that creates fugitive and transitory spaces as an exploration of an ephemeral architecture.

This church provides a special dimension to this work.

Within the confines of the building the work is designed to act as a literal and metaphoric veiling. We look at and through layered veils… drifting and still, open and closed, in-between spaces, hiding and revealing, inside and outside.

The work enables the re-experiencing of the building, where the materiality of stone walls is juxtaposed against the weightlessness of the veils.

Within this space a relationship between matter and immateriality is formed. The warm stone-walled structure encloses and protects; transformations of thought and perception are made imaginable. The spiritual question returns to us as a transparent possibility.

The work grasps at making visible states of transformation and the shift between perception and memory.

It is the still space of the Church that enables our experience of our being in a space. This space, sensitive to motion and actions, which unfold within, makes it amenable to the present and presence. The Church creates this space for becoming.

Janet Laurence