(Ben Thomas, Curator of Learning) I think the title of the show is for me the best place to start
You start with this title, Emotional Archaeology, what does Emotional Archaeology mean?
(Josephine Lanyon, Freelance Curator) One of the reasons for calling the exhibition Emotional Archaeology
and writing about the exhibition in the way that I have is to encourage people to bring their personal experiences
into the space and to not be afraid to bring emotion alongside any kind of academic understanding.
(Ben Thomas) When you walk into this show you see a number of artworks that work like artefacts
and you can piece these together to tell a story about emotion and about feeling.
(Josephine Lanyon) I really like the idea that one might enter the space and become an amateur emotional archaeologist.
(Rob Bowman, Director of Programming, Arnolfini) The intention was to bring together a range of different
pieces that Daphne has created over the course of 20 or 25 years of making to give our audience the opportunity
to get a real insight into the range and diversity of the work that she’s made.
(Ben Thomas) When you walk into the show you don’t see lots of text on the walls
it’s not a show which says here are all the answers, it's a show which presents these objects
and asks you to think about the relationship between them and have an emotive response.
One of the challenges with Daphne's work was there's so much of her work that is very fragile
that there've been some losses and there've been some works that have been destroyed
and as part of this process of putting the exhibition together one of the unique opportunities that we had,
was to enable her to support her to restore particular pieces of work
so that they could be shown alongside more recent works too.
A lot of the work is a visual decoy, so in many ways we can all understand what we can see in this room
in particular because she deals with figurative work but she knows her art history really well.
She understands myth and legend and tries to bring in universal ideas to do with foibles and man's weaknesses
and all of those things are somehow filtered into the works.
With a really large physical object like Stallion you can't help but be physically affected by it.
On the one hand she works in a lot of different forms that suggest a kind of conventional approach
to making sculpture, for example it's quite figurative, but within that what she's constantly doing
is somehow subverting our expectations. For example, in the case of a work like stallion there is this toppling
of the monumental beast that normally would stand atop a large pedestal, onto the floor, and it's confounded
and it's distressed, and I think that what she's doing with the audience in presenting this alternative view, is asking
us to stop and think about what meaning we extract from these objects, how do they matter?
(Josephine Lanyon) I think it probably is this idea of rigour and ruthlessness,
so she'll read incessantly to find out about dementia, to find out about parenting
and she'll experiment endlessly and almost destroy enormous numbers of works
before she boils down and gets something right.
There's also a degree of subversion going on within her work in the way that she uses materials
so she uses clay and she uses other domestic materials like tin foil. But she uses
labour intensive processes to make works so that they don't seem like they're made in a logical way.
I think she's really brave to work with realism
and to work with a bunch of very skilled makers and craftspeople.
(Georgie Shire, Fabricator) The piece that I worked on for the Arnolfini is called Domestic Shrubbery
and it was originally made in 1994. It's been stored up underneath Daphne's house and we had to get it out
on a crate, piece by piece, and organise it into sections depending on what state they were in
whether they were in really good condition and didn't need much work
or whether there were bits broken off here and there, which we would then have to remould and reattach.
Each piece had it's own personality, the wire was put in a different place, therefore it would hang differently
so during installation Daphne described it as 'knitting', in the way that you hang one piece and the next piece
makes it swing to another direction. And then it swings again as you hang different pieces down so the whole
thing is moving and creaking as you're putting it up and it's made out of plaster so it's quite fragile.
Daphne chooses to use very fragile materials a lot of the time. We constantly have these epiphany moments
where something works and you think yes, we can go forward with that process
but we're always getting different kinds of materials in to test with other materials.
(Janet Haigh, Embroiderer) The most distressing thing about Primate is you can see every single hair on it.
And I thought that's really affecting on it's hands and it's feet. So it was a pelt and you wanted to stroke it
and it was your connection to it. I was concerned about the materials that we were going to use.
If we used a cotton or a linen which is the, you know - bodies get wrapped in linen
so that was part of the tradition of the death rituals, but that would stop the light from moving
And I did say, I think the silk would create much more movement.
It took me about four months to make the piece, I made it here. It wasn't a hard thing to do
but it was a relentless thing to do to just stitch and I had to develop techniques,
whereby I could get everything to adhere and be safe on the animal.
It doesn't matter who walks in here, whether it's a Tuesday lunchtime or a Saturday afternoon
There is a different way in to getting involved in the exhibition and starting to understand it on your terms.
There's also a series of objects that Daphne's provided from her studio, so there are examples of the work
that you can touch and you can have a real relationship to because they're incredibly tactile
and I think we have a different relationship to the work when we start touching it
and handling it, compared to when we're just looking at it from a distance.
(Jospehine Lanyon) One of the reasons why I thought Daphne was such an interesting artist to survey
is because she does very rigorously explore a subject matter and a material
and then moves on and invents a completely different vocabulary.
This is almost like a group show because there are so many different languages within it.
She has spent a lot of time, for example with the cast objects, developing a process to make these casts
the way that she wants them. And actually she's said this is one of the approaches she's very interested in
is to work through using a material in a particular way and to try and get it right
and then at the point where she perfects it she stops and she moves on to something else.
(Josephine Lanyon) For me she's really important because she is prepared to look at subject matter
that is uncomfortable and is not necessarily represented within art history.
She's been a really successful artist, she's grown up alongside the YBAs and gone to college with the YBAs,
shown alongside the YBAs, but she's never been a YBA.
(Rob Bowman) The fact that an artist like Daphne can be making work for 25 years and somehow not be making
work that ticks boxes is really interesting and for us to give space at Arnolfini to her is really an amazing
opportunity and I think one that merited a display here, definitely.
