Within and without Ida
Kira O'Reilly, 2nd March, 2015.
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how things become space
how space becomes flat
The mysterious parsing of when something becomes nothing and nothing becomes, well, something.
Such was my dialogue with Helen Rousseau’s installation Ida within Extractor Space, the former kitchen within the old Tidemill School building just off Deptford High Street. Gradually over several weeks in the tiled stony chill Helen had crafted, engineered and executed a series of acute material interventions – structures, crisp markings and precarious spillages that performed, uttered and acted tensions and pathways of becoming and unbecoming.
Diagonals, parallels and crumples - hauntings of the precise discipline of patterning, making and construction, echoes of tailoring but never settling into anything obvious; instead I found a spatial sculpting in which these material constructions performed as fulcrums, indicators of positions for me to assume and view and inhabit within and through Extractors angular space.