Artist's Statement
In sites specific and gallery contexts I investigate resonances through the placing and siting of objects, text or images - as large format photographs or projections. I am interested in histories in relation to the present. My installations enhance atmospheres evoked by empty spaces through absence and presence in that which remains - these are my source materials. Recent installations include a multi screen video piece, an art council book work Living Room, pub March 1998, (both are sites specific works which envolved local communities) and alongside these Charged Atmospheres is an on-going series of gallery specific large format photographic installations, 1993-8. Relicta - all that remains is my solo installation which opened at Cambridge Darkroom Gallery (19 September - 1 November, 1998) and is available for tour - contact Hannah Lilley (01223 566725) for further information.
Alison Marchant, 1998

Alison Marchant - Charged Atmospheres

' The Stately Homes Of England, How beautifully they stand, To prove the upper classes, Have still the upper hand' *1

The exhibition originated in a chance discovery. Several years ago Alison Marchant was given a stack of post card size photographs. They had been discarded by the public agency for historic monuments and each showed an abandoned domestic interior in an advanced state of dereliction. They dated from the 1970s, a decade when the plight of Britian's older mansions was energetically highlighted, and were probably made to help decide which properties to earmark for renovation. The rooms themselves had no geographical or stylistic kinship other than sharing the catagory estate agents call desirable. This might have been a gift of dubious value to many people. But Marchant's interest as an artist had already begun to turn to the communal history of buildings and whole districts often faced with drastic change. This was not then, nor has it since become, an excuse for nostalgia. Marchants focus is fixed on the present. In Britain in the mid-1980s, the pace of environmental and social change seemed to quicken, and the merits and methods of this economic phenomenon were extensively argued. What stimulated Marchant was the impact of this change on ordinary people, and how enfranchised they were to influence events. In community and gallery-based projects she has participated in over the years, Marchant has investigated the resonances released by siting archive photographs, usually of people who might have lived or worked in a particular place, either in that location or in a clear reference to it. In addition to the sentimental yearnings inevitably sparked in some modern observers and the surprised double-takes of others, these unexpected placings prompted searching thoughts about the nature of current change. None of the discarded photographs which form the basis of this exhibition was used in these earlier projects. But all the while Marchant found herself going back to them time and again. Two things had quickly struck her about them. One was the smell of the original prints; part chemical and part age, it brought to mind the world of archives and research, of accumulating and evaluating information. Perhaps unconsciously, this became a guiding principle as she whittled the pile down to the select eight, what historians might call the major images. The other quality that attracted her was the visual poetry she perceived in them. Not knowing these places herself, her choice homed in on this pervasive quality. It is perhaps not hard to sense in these abandoned rooms a latent power of narration, a growing volume of stillness that prods the observer to seeking out some meaning in them. One room contains bedroom furniture: it appears to be complete but the dressing table is missing a mirror along with its reflection. Absence is made curiously visible. A darkened patch on the wall of one room denotes the absence of furniture that probably long stood against it, and yet suggests a lingering melancholic presence. And although the rooms are deserted of people, traces of them keep cropping up, so that the mound on a floor reads equally as shrouded bodies and an innocuous pile of dust sheets. There is a positive invitation in these images to create as many new histories as there are viewers to think them into imaginative life. Measuring eight feet tall and ten feet wide, they represent unexplored worlds intruding on the actual space of the gallery. The invitation to enter them is mentally is compelling. But there is also a dimension that disconcerts. The way some images fade to nothing might fuel it with overtones of mortality, but this unsettling quality lies more insistently in the imagery itself. The possibilities for meaning shift before the eyes from banal ordinariness to the fertile realms of tabloid sensation. This uncertainity seems built into the form that the encounter takes. We are probably most familiar with the photographic images that serve as documentary function or are related to elucidating text. Detacted from their context, meaning becomes elusive; presented on this scale we are unsure of what to expect or how to react. While the graininess of the hazy surface brings drawing to mind, the grand scale of the work suggests painting - even the medium of the message is in doubt. Enlarging the photographs encapsulated the memory of feeling kept apart from a space, by obstacles physical and cultural. Here the dappled skin of each image, literally the damaged surface of the thrown-away photographs magnified, and its ungraspable faintness of detail caused by massive enlargement, conspire to defy the natural urge to enter the rooms. These stark, uncoloured images are light years from the seductive colour magazine world of gracious living that seems to surround us. The tension between Britain's vigorous self-promotion through its aristocratic heritage of houses and institutions, and another reality of homelessness, sleeping rough and squatting, might emerge on a metaphorical level. This dissonance also occured to Marchant, a naturally political artist. Two images particularly evoke this tension. In one, the windows and the doors into a spacious room with elaborately stuccoed decoration have been boarded as if in haste to protect the interior. In the other, the citadel appears to have been breached and on the walls names of intruders have been painted as a symbol of some sort of conquest. The strength of this work is that it readily admits a broad interpretation. Its elusiveness makes us aware and alert, asking us to be prepared to reassess our perceptions and expectations. Charged Atmospheres sustains the chance discovery of its origins.
Martin Holman

* 1. Noel Coward, The Stately Homes Of England, from the show Operette, 1938.

Published by Camden Arts Centre. Copyright 1993, The Author & the Trustees of Arkwright Arts Trust, London.

Shortened CV Solo Shows:
1998 Relicta (all that remains), Cambridge Darkroom Gallery,
Living Room, Launched at the Whitechapel Art Gallery & funded by Arts Council First-time publications
1994 Turning Keys, Walsall Museum & Art Gallery
1993 Charged Atmospheres, Camden Arts Centre, London Cambridge Darkroom, Southampton Arts Centre, The Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast Northern Ireland
1992 Tying The Threads, Oldham Art Gallery
1991 Time & Motion, Lewis Textile Museum & Blackburn Art Gallery 1989 Wall Paper History/Eradicated Pages, Central Space,
London Group Shows:
1998 Aggregatzustand, Paul Linke, Berlin
1997 Interior, Interim Art, London The Berlin Art Fair - Represented by Maureen Paley 20thC Art Fair, The Royal College Of Art - Represented by Maureen Paley Open Studios, Limehouse Arts Foundation, London
In The Company Of Strangers, Leeds University Gallery
1995 Projekcie Site Gallery, Sheffield Projekcie, Tatranska Galleria, Poprad, Slovakia
1994 Renegotiations: Class, Modernity & Photography, Norwich Gallery (touring) In Search Of The Black Country, Walsall Museum & Art Gallery
1993 The Whitechapel Open, The Whitechapel Art Gallery, London
1992 17th International Art Exhibition, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum Of Art, Japan In Transit, W139 Gallery, Amsterdam 1991 Human Properties, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham
1990/1 Hertiage: Image & History, Impressions Gallery York & Manchester Cornerhouse (touring)
1990 Domestic Interiors, Victoria & Albert Museum, London The Invisible City, The Photographers Gallery, London House Hold, Sites/Positions, Glasgow Gracie Fields Live Art Commissions, Rochdale Art Gallery Artist From East Anglia, Cambridge Darkroom Gallery
1989 The Whitechapel Open, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London The Whitechapel Open Studios, London Reclaim The City Artworks, Glasgow
1988 The Medium & The Message, Rochdale Art Gallery 1987 The Whitechapel Open, The Whitechapel Art Gallery, London Breathing Spaces, Camerawork Gallery, London 1985 Domestic Stories, Camerwork Gallery, London The Riverside Open, The Riverside Gallery, London
1983 The New Contemporaries, The Institute Of Contemporary Arts, London