The artist Henrique J Paris works across different disciplines, ranging from film, performance, photography and object-making. For the Field Notes summer school it wasn’t certain what format his work would take at first, but his question was always clear: ‘What spatiality can be created for narratives that have been erased?’
Field Notes was organised by the V&A in collaboration with the environmental charity Sylva Foundation and was conceived as a platform for creative practitioners with an interest in wood as a material and forestry as a practice. Under the mentoring of foresters, academics, designers, woodworkers and museum professionals, the participants developed and applied woodworking skills in a workshop just at the edge of a small forest in Oxfordshire.
At an early stage of the project Paris shared an image-led presentation of interiors of churches, court houses and libraries – institutions that have been set up to preach, rule and teach about a dominant world view that often has been exclusionary and discriminatory of other belief and knowledge systems, especially those of people colour from Africa and its diaspora. With this in mind, Paris set out to accumulate images and texts that could centre a Black experience and amplify Black gazes through creating a new type of spatiality for holding knowledge and memory. ‘This project was an opportunity to develop the side of my practice concerned with spatial and memorial politics through materiality,’ says Paris of the process.
It was fitting that the English countryside was the setting for this exploration. As Corinne Fowler’s book Green Unpleasant Land investigates, despite being a direct consequence of the wealth accumulated through colonial exploits, the English countryside is often reflected on and portrayed in literature as entirely natural and unexploited, in so-called pastoral mythologies. Paris’s project questions these mythologies and the stories absent through such portrayal.
Alongside reading and developing the ideas and concepts behind his project, Paris created maquettes of his designs in paper, testing size and scale before embarking on the actual making in the wood workshop. Through discussion with the summer school mentors and fellow participants, the shape and direction of the project developed.
His findings ultimately resulted in an object that he describes as an archive holder and a receptacle of absent, or even erased, stories. The holder is made from an almost two metre long plank of Douglas fir, held upright by a perpendicular support that allows the plank to stand vertically. On this surface wooden shelves have been fixed in different constellations, but unlike a bookcase, where the shelves are horizontal, Paris’s shelves are vertical, and some have holes drilled through their sides in order for string to be stretched between them. Within the yarn, hangs texts such as Listening to Images by Tina Campt, who engages with lost archives of historically dismissed photographs of people in the Black diaspora. Other objects on the holder speak of themes of absence and discovery – a worn bible, a gold chain, a ring wrapped in cotton yarn to reduce the circumference of the hole. One side of the shelf is adorned by found photography directly transferred to the Douglas fir, the figure of the wood showing through the images.
‘I wanted to make an object that is a type of infrastructure and that is exploring immaterially through materiality, presenting a range of absent things, things that have been destroyed or removed from history,’ says Paris. As such his project, named Making Space for Absence explores what such things and such practices might look like and ultimately presents that which could exist had history followed another trajectory.
Henrique J Paris’s project and the Field Notes display is on view in the Dr Susan R Weber Furniture Gallery.
