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My Grandmother's Plait
Collection:CSM Museum & Study Collection
Date: 2021
Artist: Fiona Masterton
Medium: Performative writing (dissertation)
Object number: MISC.2021.58.CC
DescriptionDescription by the artist:
‘My grandmother’s plait’ is a performative piece of writing where Masterton weaves together a series of vignettes outlining a trip to her studio together with reflections and musings of the thinking and daydreaming that takes place during this journey filtered through the writings of other philosophers and writers. These include Giorgio Agamben, Walter Benjamin, Italo Calvino, Jacque Derrida, Georges Perec as well as more contemporary writers such as Yve Lomax, Nicolas Baker, Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart.
Masterton responds to some of the frequent themes that have emerged historically within modern literature and modernity which thinking about the fragment in relation to knowledge. These include ideas such as absence, alienation, collection, the encyclopaedic, interconnectedness, juxtaposition, rupture, trace, transformation, transmission and unity. She utilises performative writing as a vehicle to demonstrate and explore these various tropes and mechanisms in conjunction with exploring alternative styles of writing as art practice and research. Allusions to ideas of the past, memory, history, the incomplete and brokenness pervade her writing and throughout there is an overriding feeling of ambiguity and an inability to pin anything down. She has created passages of vivid recollection, fantasy, alienation and daydreams which like collected items have been pulled from their context and ruptured against the timeline of their presence. The secondary text acts as a further journey as she travels throughout her thinking and other philosophical wanderings in relation to the diarised content
‘My grandmother’s plait’ is a performative piece of writing where Masterton weaves together a series of vignettes outlining a trip to her studio together with reflections and musings of the thinking and daydreaming that takes place during this journey filtered through the writings of other philosophers and writers. These include Giorgio Agamben, Walter Benjamin, Italo Calvino, Jacque Derrida, Georges Perec as well as more contemporary writers such as Yve Lomax, Nicolas Baker, Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart.
Masterton responds to some of the frequent themes that have emerged historically within modern literature and modernity which thinking about the fragment in relation to knowledge. These include ideas such as absence, alienation, collection, the encyclopaedic, interconnectedness, juxtaposition, rupture, trace, transformation, transmission and unity. She utilises performative writing as a vehicle to demonstrate and explore these various tropes and mechanisms in conjunction with exploring alternative styles of writing as art practice and research. Allusions to ideas of the past, memory, history, the incomplete and brokenness pervade her writing and throughout there is an overriding feeling of ambiguity and an inability to pin anything down. She has created passages of vivid recollection, fantasy, alienation and daydreams which like collected items have been pulled from their context and ruptured against the timeline of their presence. The secondary text acts as a further journey as she travels throughout her thinking and other philosophical wanderings in relation to the diarised content