The A4 Exhibition Blurb

Neil Spiller, former professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture, has been the muse and guide of the big idea Gothic Deviations. The scheme is broad and encompasses many media, but is focused around the crafting of the architectural detail through the use of the stereo-lithography printer.

Informed by my own original “poor-man’s” jewellery and a key architectural construction moment, that of the façade of the Cork Gallery by Erick van Egeraat, the design naturally moved toward Neil Spiller’s light and dark imagery which became the code from which the work developed.

Peter Cook of Spiller – “Underneath the bubbling and grunging lies an architectural mind of pure silver and a hand of boiling black ink..."

With Spiller’s Gothic imagery and ideals in mind, the shift changed and the work was designed for, and using the medium of light. Across four scale changes, that of the jewellery piece, the jewellery box, the dramaturgy (stageset) and the theatre, light has been the impetus for the work.

Spiller’s own interest in Neo-gothic subculture led the project in interesting directions. Research into Gothic literature brought issues of female emancipation from a highly structuralised patriarchal society to the forefront, and with this came the social and political stigma surrounding the fetish garment of the era – the corset. The wearing of the corset began as a highly repudiated piece of fetish clothing - a sexually liberating symbol for the trapped domestic woman, but quickly became dogma for aristocratic and bourgeois societies. “...the entire female body was one piece of jewellery, erotically stylized, deformed and alienated from its biological functions…”[1]

These ideas informed scale one of the design, the jewellery piece. A mask was a natural progression of this idea of identity and costuming especially when teamed with the original hanging façade detail and serves to gently “squeeze” Spiller’s temples.

Interest in the nature of the architectural drawing lead to the function of the jewellery box. A reconfigurable drawing board, made from standard but varying componentry, allows Spiller to store his mask while also serving as a functioning device. Resolved from a series of cuts in paper which was entitled “Black Ink”, the box is pinned together to create slits in the façade in which light can penetrate. It was designed as if experienced from the inside.

My own interest in theatre and design along with Spiller’s own love for theatricality and disguise led to scales three and four. The dramaturgic environment is drawn directly from the drawing board configuration. A stage set for a ballerina, screens which are unraveled from the ceiling serve to both deny her form and set her free, depending on their orientation, lighting and transparency. The theatre itself is a reconfigurable, flexible space used for smaller productions. Rostra can be orientated in many different forms allowing for innumerable staging and audience orientations, and the building affords generous green room and storage space below ground. The façade is the main detail – imagined as a blanket of light draped over the building, the curvaceous surface is made from tiles which come together to form a pierced surface, which allow poetic light moments to be experienced from the dark interior. The panels are also reconfigurable – arranged in patterns on the inside they can be manually adjusted to let light and air in to the interior spaces.

The project was realised in parts with the use of a stereo-lithography printer. In keeping with the Gothic aesthetic and function, the printed artefacts underwent a process of casting from which they emerged as gleaming bronze componentry pieces for all scale changes.

[1] Deanne Farneti Cera, Vivienne Becker, Rinaldo Albanesi. (1992). Jewels of fantasy : costume jewelry of the 20th century. New York : Abrams (1992), 52

Thanks

I would like to say a special thanks to all those who assisted and contributed to the project!

Judy Cockeram and the CAS team,

and a special thanks New Zealand Leather Supplies Ltd for their fantastic patent leather,

and to Cyborg at New Jewellery High St, and Regal Castings Mt Eden, for doing a beautiful job on the bronze castings!

The Gothic - Neil Spiller

It is my contention that Gothic and Victorian Neo-Gothic have considerable influence on the high-tech language and furthermore, that High tech, with it's dogmatised paletter of materials,

could be a stepping stone to a more lyrical architecture."

- Emerging from the quest to build heaven on earth, Gothic architecture seeks to dissolve the notion of the wall - making it transparent. The value off light is paramount to these spaces, creating religious awe and transporting the human soul into a reverie of divine contemplation.

Similarly, although much later, in the 18th Century, the emergence of Gothic literature is a rebellion of the ordered patriarchal society. In rejection of the clarity and rationalism of the neoclassical era, Gothic portrays the joys of extreme emotion, a quest for atmosphere and thrills in the sublime.

Dorian Gray by Neil Spiller

Take optimisim and ambition,

bolt to the evils of gratuitousness,

cast a shadow of Perfect Strangers,

fiddle with Dorian Gray.

Sear and perforate all with a red hot line.

Bathe for a season in the abyss.

Some more Neil Spiller

Peter Cook on Neil Spiller: "Underneath the bubbling and grunging lies and architectural mind of pure silver and a hand of boiling black ink..."

"By choosing (or rather enjoying) the inked technique and the big black sky the ultimate feeling of the work is unmitigated power - even, occassionally aggression"

Corsets: A Modern Guide

These images are from Velda Lauder's fantastic book entitled "Corsets: a Modern Guide"

Lauder, V. Corsets: a Modern Guide. A & C Black 2010

http://www.veldalauder.co.uk/

Here are some quotes from "Gothic Feminism"

• Long Hoeveler, D. Gothic Feminism : the professionalization of gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës
• University Park, Pa. : Pennsylvania State University Press, c1998.
• 
  
• "...I discovered that these novelists were not trying to reshape their worlds subversely or benignly through their writings. They were instead constructing a series of ideologies - a set of literary masquerades and poses - that would allow their female character and by extension their female readers a fictitious mastery over what they considered an oppressive social and political system through the pose of what I am calling 'professional femininity'." XII
• 
  
• - Terry Eagleton - "...bourgeois feminization of discourse" - "prolongs the fetishizing of women at the same time as it lends them a more authoritive voice."
• 
  
• "...to see the gothic novel functioning as a public coded and veiled critique of all those public institutions that have been erected to displace, contain, or commodify women." XIII
• 
  
• "...help women adjust to their confusing and often contradictory status in a newly emerging bourgeois culture."
• 
  
• "...fictional feminization of the masculine world."
• 
  
• (Of Rachel Brownstein) "She is a young woman perfectly chaste, dutiful, obedient, religious, useful, orderly, charitable, thrifty and kind. She acts and requires others to act according to a firm ethical standard. But her essence is aesthetic. In effect the bourgeois Christian Exemplar is an adaptaion of the cliche' that a woman is a goddess, a convention of courtship, literature, and polite society that, as Richardson knew and Mary Wollstonecraft was soon to say, has long served to enslave women."
• 
  
• Matthew Lewis on female authors - " I hold, that a woman has no business to be a public character, and that in the proportion that she acquires notoriety, she loses delicacy: I always consider a female author as a sort of half-man."
• 
  
• "...slow motion followed by sudden flurry, the revolving cycles of inertia and mania - is characteristic of the long - winded, hysterical prose of the female gothic."

Yvonne Todd

Yvonne Todd’s spectral subjects sit patiently against smooth dark backgrounds. Her clever lighting techniques afford her characters a formidable presence as they stare through the lens. Through formal training in commercial photography, Todd has developed what she calls a ‘pathological obsession with technological intricacy’ using her large-format camera.

Todd is trying to manipulate us. Her photographs expose the subtle but insidious notions of body image and the feminine ideal – largely through the portrayal of unhealthy women. She never explicitly states anything - her characters are pristine and shining in their attire – but their stoic, seemingly apathetic postures scream of their inwardly damaged psychology. A state of disruption also pervades the onlooker as these females are both heavily victimised by Todd while they retain a certain predatory air.

The ladies of The Sea of Tranquility represent the female at the epitome of the domestic ideal. Their long, voluptuous hair drapes over the shoulders, and their carefully decorated faces sit jarringly atop stiff mannequin-like busts. The dress Todd has chosen for these women makes them seem dowdy, Victorian and somewhat chaste, with their high-necked white garb. This contrasts their made-up faces, but reflects their mournful expressions. Why are these ideals of perfection unsatisfied? Are they placed in this position by men, or is this a shared self-inflicted state of consciousness?

Here is the link to Yvonne Todd's site Evron: http://www.ervon.com/photographs/sea-of-tranquility/

Deviations

A page from my sketch book of initial research, when deciding on my "Big Idea".