Adjusting to the dark

Catalogue essay for ‘If the future is to be worth anything: 2020 South Australian Artist Survey’, ACE Open

by Annika Kristensen

Outside of my window it is winter. The solstice marking the season’s shortest day has just passed. How much of our lives have been lived in the dark these last long months? Uncertainty—a condition of being in the dark—has become the buzzword of recent times. Under lockdown, we install a bath in our garden, so as better to see the sky. 

Around one third of our lives are spent in bed: horizontal, dreaming. I think of this as I lie in our bath, stretched out beneath the blanket of a night sky. Adrift in warm water, my mind lost in the expanse of the universe, my body confined within a suburban backyard, I remember Oscar Wilde: ‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars’. [1]

Within our domestic lives, such everyday architectural features—windows, a bed and bath—become thresholds through which we might access an altered state of consciousness. They are spaces of projection and reflection, encouraging imagination and dreams. Tacita Dean speaks of the virtues of sluggardising—a process of idle contemplation or unconscious thought, best achieved while half-awake and, ultimately, in bed.[2] For Georges Perec, lying supine allowed for an examination of the ceiling, which in turn became his muse, putting the writer ‘readily in mind of those other labyrinths, woven from phantasms, ideas and words’. [3] Yet access to these heightened states is a by-product of the more practical purposes of these regular household features. What might an architecture specifically designed for dreaming look like? 

In a series of architectural models, Sundari Carmody considers the role of constructed space in encouraging unknown, ineffable or transcendental experiences. These models—among them baths, and a circular form with ascending and descending staircases—have been informed by the artist’s long-standing interest in giving visual form to the invisible or unperceivable; to the mysteries of the dark. Unconsciously inspired by the form of a water temple near Carmody’s childhood home in Ubud, Bali, as well as the experience of bathing in architect Peter Zumthor’s thermal baths in Switzerland, Carmody’s models are themselves abstracted from any recognisable architectural style. Instead they appear as universal, speculative or propositional spaces; architectures designed for the express aim of stillness and stargazing.

Cast in concrete mixed with black oxide, Carmody’s sculptures appear especially dark in contrast to the natural daylight that filters through the windows of the foyer in which the work is installed. Far from the negative connotations that are so often associated with the dark (for these are dark days, dark times), Carmody’s sculptures speak to the mysterious potential of the nocturnal, the enigmatic or unknown. Uncertainty—to return to that current buzzword—is, for Carmody, a state of possibility. Across her varied practice, encompassing photography, sculpture and installation, Carmody draws relationships between water and sky, consciousness and the cosmos, so as to—in her own words—enter into the mystery of the unknown, ‘hoping that my eyes might adjust to the dark’. [4]

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Annika Kristensen is Senior Curator at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne


NOTES
1 Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan, Act 111, 1892
2 Tacita Dean, in conversation with Juliana Engberg, 19th Biennale of Sydney, 2014
3 Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, 1974. Reprint, Penguin Classics: London, 2008, p. 18
4 Email from artist to author, 4 June 2020