Past Exhibitions
Etak
an exhibition about locating and location
The Puluwat islanders in the Pacific ocean use the principal of Etak when travelling between islands. They do not use maps or think of distance in miles nor do they imagine themselves as even moving while travelling. Rather they use a highly abstract, complex and creative cognitive map to travel from one point to another.
Using Etak as inspiration four artists locate Elastic residence.
Nothing
to Declare
Rebecca Feiner explores
cycles of displacement through ethnicity, culture, religious and political
waves of immigration to the East End streets of London.
Cuboid
Jon Fawcett presents the first
complete work in his entities series; a large, non-physical object that
passes through the gallery.
Layers
of Ambivalence
Deej Fabyc performs a lecture about
mapping ambivalence and also performs a series of painted drawings based
on maps of Whitechapel
from the sixteenth century until the present.
East End Aussie
East End Aussie, Joanna Callaghan
Etak
28 October – 14 November 2004
Open Saturday & Sunday 12-6
or by appointment
079309 19075 exhibitions@elastic.org.uk
Joanna
Callaghan navigates geographical points that surround the gallery
via personal history and emotional indicators.
‘Since arriving in London in 1997 I have lived, loved and lost
within a one mile radius of this gallery. This is a map of how I came
to be here and the things that happened.’
more images from etak can be seen here
About etak
Basic directions in etak are defined by the places around the horizon where particular stars rise. The navigator knows star courses between every pair of islands in their own vicinity. This provides the basis for the system of knowledge. However stars are not reliable sources of directional information; they cannot be seen by day or on cloudy nights. When travelling between one island and another, the navigator keeps in mind a third island, the etak island to the side of the course. The voyage is imagined in terms of the movement of the etak island, as if the canoe itself were stationary while the etak island slid slowly backward along the horizon. Other information is gathered from the relation between time and land/sea marks and between land/sea marks and stars.
The etak principal is highly abstract – the reference island is
never in sight and the star positions under which it moves are rarely
visible either. Much of the relevant information comes from dead reckoning,
sea marks, wave patterns and birds however the navigator refers this information
to the imaginary movement of a remote island under the unmarked rising
positions of invisible stars.
I am interested in the process of navigation (location) and how it forms and informs the outcome (the located). I am interested in how cognitive maps are created through information that originates from disparate sources via contextual frameworks such as historical, personal, virtual, cultural and political. I am interested in navigation and orientation as metaphor for displacement and integration.
Joanna Callaghan