Amanda Davies: Vent

The overwhelming nature of researching Willow Court warned us against trying to represent its histories directly and we turned instead towards more material and conceptual approaches. Responding to the building as archive and imagining its unconscious workings felt initially like what Anthony Vidler has called ‘a psychoanalysis of architecture’ ...‘that would reveal, by implication and reflection, its relationships with its subjects’.2 As the conversation developed, we began conceiving of The Barracks as a kind of psychosomatic space, a place where the origins of unease are not visible to the observing eye. After spending several cold afternoons in the old wards (now the gallery rooms), the building appeared as a ‘perforated place’, a deeply-worn threshold between past and present with a ‘half-half’ nature, half-empty with the losses it has endured, half-full with the memories it retains.3 The echoic sense of ‘absence, the highest form of presence’4 in the rooms unsettled our own stability as bodies, as subjects and as artists – exactly what was art supposed to do here?

In what became something of an imaginative archaeology, Amanda began painting in the spaces between the body and the building, conversing with The Barracks as one might a distressed patient, listening and learning to speak its language. Responding to the irregularities of its painted surfaces, timbers, glass, brick, structural elements, vents and windows, she produced intimate portraits of its interiors and exteriors, taking the central bell tower as her key subject, the building’s site of consciousness. After visiting the rooms in the disused wing of The Barracks, her paintings of abandoned furniture, medical machines, discarded scaffolding and electrical fixtures record the collapse of a building once built for purpose, still conscious, but suffering neglect and decay, revealing something of the human traumas endured. This approach led to using building materials such as pegboard, timbers, wire mesh, and old institutional colours of pink, yellow and blue in the works to further explore its structure and historic subjectivity.

Over the next year, a profound series of works emerged that engaged with different elements of the building, its spatial dimensions and affective force. A key part of this collaboration involved reconstructing the building’s most porous elements - the vents in the wards/gallery rooms - and reconstructing them as framing devices. Sliding panels operate in many of the works as thresholds that simultaneously reveal and conceal the paintings, sometimes showing the same image in different palettes, sometimes similar images from different perspectives, and sometimes whole images of which we can only ever see a part. The heaviness of the frames lends an architectural weight to the works, conveying the building as a dominant force that entraps the painting, the subject within. The frustration of un-movable vents that prevent access to some paintings, highlights the building as a barrier to health, as noted in Cunningham-Dax’s 1963 report ‘the most unsatisfactory feature of the service is the buildings’.

Such formal and conceptual strategies are visually and psychologically complex. The vented frames destabilise the concentrated observation we might usually bring to the act of viewing painting, setting up perceptual challenges whereby we look for relationships between the images, assessing differences and similarities and becoming disoriented in a game of visual perception and memory. The work Blind Windows, highlights these effects most explicitly referencing the trompe l’oeil ‘blind windows’ on the exterior of The Barracks and the illusion of symmetry they presented to the outside gaze. Revisioning the windowpanes as an eye disease chart, the work evokes ill-health as an effect of the internal dynamics of the institution and structures that controlled patient relationships with the outside world.