Islands, 2023, mixed media installation constructed of discarded artworks

Tropical the island breeze All of nature wild and free This is where I long to be La isla bonita

-La Isla Bonita, Madonna, 1986

At the start of the song, La Isla Bonita, Madonna whispers seductively ¿Cómo puede ser verdad?, which translates to, how can it be true? I imagine her struggling to come to terms with the otherworldly beauty of a tropical paradise, where she famously fell in love with San Pedro. This is another space, where ‘all of nature is wild and free’ (Madonna, 1986).

Even before I heard this seminal hit, I’ve always been fascinated by the fictional frame of the island and its enduring tropes of exoticism and otherness in the ‘western’ imagination. The island is a place that is isolated from the continental mainland forming its own ecosystem and possibilities which has inspired and informed a range of thinkers from Darwin’s evolutionary theory, More’s Utopia and Madonna herself. I believed in the island as a place for queerness and new possibilities.

Drawing on knowledge gleaned from my GCSE Geography coursework they are formed by the lava expelled from the boundaries of tectonic plates. Islands are created through disarticulation, erosion and fracture (Deleuze, 2002). The lava spewing out, matter out of place (Douglas, 2002), released into the ocean, an unknown and unbounded space. A place where separating and creating are not mutually exclusive.

I found such an Isla Bonita at Goldsmiths University of London. It’s the skip that sits outside of the Ben Pilmott building, the site where the Goldsmiths Fine Art courses are taught. A place where only 16.23% of applicants make it into the building (Admission Report, 2022). The skip is bright red, exotic and discordant with its surroundings. Encircled by a sea of tarmac, drifting askew of the main buildings of the institution. It’s appearance at the end of the academic year and disappearance contingent on time and space, giving it a mythical, liminal quality. Much like the island realms of Charles Avery, it’s populated by imagined architecture, creatures and beings created by the students on the Fine Art programmes. A place to clear out unwanted artwork. It contains what has been deemed as irrelevant, dirty, disorderly- to be expelled. Derrida’s parergon, emblazoned with the Biffa logo. An island for things that are refused and placed into refuse. Material, post-human refugees. In their new island home, the normative meanings and assigned places of these unwanted artworks are dislocated and destabilised. They lose status and become un-made, un-created and un-manufactured. The relationship between materiality and mediality (Deleuze, 1990) has been jolted apart.

As I explored this island I began to discover unwanted and rebellious objects, not worthy of exhibition or inclusion in portfolios. Objects that didn’t fit. The island of the Biffa skip, a paradise that hummed with rebellion and insurrection, it felt like a place for what Foucault described as “the revolt of subjugated knowledges” (Foucault, 1980)

The island became a site of research for me. When and how was the decision made to discard these objects? The material inhabitants formed the common language of my experience of contemporary art education. The dismembered limbs and accoutrements echoing what I’d seen in degree shows and A Level classrooms in recent years. The skip was like a sedimentary rock of research and material encounters. Plaster of Paris, expanding foam, metallic spray paint, OSB board and human hair. Part Phyllida Barlow, Kiefer, Kusama, Walker and Nelson- I imagined them whispering, twitching, gasping and prodding beneath and within the materials sourced from Hobbycraft and B&Q.

I began to take the disposed of artwork and place it in my own studio. Building up a repertoire of materials and matter from unknown artists and crafts people, akin to Ariel’s cavern in Disney’s The Little Mermaid where Part of this World (Muskar & Clements, 1989) takes place. A parergon (Derrida, 1987) that wanted to be the ergon. Without knowing their artists, these ‘stolen’ objects felt liberated. No artist’s statement or title existed and any claim to decipher the meaning or seek explanation from the author became futile. I would stare at each object from the skip, imagining them as ‘a tissue of citations resulting from the thousand sources of culture’ (Barthes, 1977).

There was a discomfort in the process- no consent had been given and I couldn’t help feel the shadow of Lord Elgin’s narrative as I pilfered and hoarded, enamoured by these encounters. I would never understand who owned these objects and their histories (Robertson, 2019)

As my collection grew they started to mimic the landscape of their own islands. I placed them on the floor of an empty classroom. The materials, histories, conversations and texts formed their own strange territories. They became their own places, realities and fantasy. The buildings, classrooms and lecture theatres sequestered into discrete faculties or islands of knowledge themselves had erupted unwanted lava into the Biffa skip and through my hands these now wanted to exist as their own islands. Both born out of disarticulation erosion and fracture.

I wanted to explore the need to rearrange new boundaries and territories in a pedagogic environment that I have seen to increasingly isolate and ‘islandise’ forms of being and thinking, preventing forms of communication and interaction. I imagined how the authors of these objects had created alongside a value system which formed a concentricity around the materials with which they are working (physical, written and verbal) and the parameters in which they should work or behave. Borders had been created and oceans had been formed. A separation had been made between civilised and savage, industrious and lazy, active and passive (Said, 1978). As a teacher I have been part of this process.

In the mythical island of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (Defoe, 1731), the island space is reconstructed from the reserve of European knowledge- everything is taken or mimicked from the ‘known world’. This is an English man that asserts his Christian moral and British superiority, a story of subjugation, domination and power. I imagined the hands and eyes of the institution doing the same; knowledge, materials, students and curriculum that doesn’t fit the ‘ergon’ being thrown into the ocean. Existing frames of knowledge and meaning used to discern value. GCSE and A Level assessment being constructed from the stripped assets of this ‘newly discovered’ land.

By taking these materials from the skip and forming islands on the floor of this classroom a mobile transitionary landscape is created. I’ve taken and displaced what has been rejected (Barthes, 1977) forming new territories. When sitting, isolated on the grey floor they become an archipelago, their own community. I want to propose a reflection on the individual ecosystems of the makers now that they are isolated from the continental mainland. A visit to the island gives us a view of the periphery, a chance to encounter and converse with terrains of struggle, independent territories where social and subjective territories can be formed and un-formed.

Chairs, 2023, Images of found chairs in the UAE