When Alice Tatton-Brown found four photograph albums in an
Exeter junk shop, she was captivated by the lives revealed in the portraits
filling its pages. Who was this graceful, theatrical woman, so often captured
mid-dance, mid-leap? Who was the man holding her close or – more often – behind
the Leica III, intent on preserving her vitality forever? How did this couple,
who seemed to embody such passion and intensity, come to be abandoned in this
way?
Part audio installation, part performance, Ariel documents Alice’s quest to answer those
questions, and poses many more – about the relationship between the public and
the private, the attempts we make to counter the impermanence of life, and the
nature of curatorial responsibility. Moving and quietly contemplative, it
celebrates a life-long romance while tugging mortality gently but insistently
into the frame.
Instructed to gather by the enquiries desk, we are greeted
by Johnny (Rowden who, with Alice, participates in the piece) and told that we’re no longer required to whisper in the library, but
once led into the main reading room, where everyone is engaged in quiet,
private study, that comment reinforces the subtle shift in perception
associated with taking part in a private performance (the two participants for
each 30-minute session wear headphones throughout) in a public space. Surrounded
by the evidence of human endeavour, of myriad lives collected between hard
covers, preserved on paper, we receive the story of the couple in the photographs,
John and Muriel, the when, the where, the how; while we listen, Alice walks
around, putting away books, checking spines – her detective work played out
before us while her voice draws us deeper into the couple’s life together. In
the telling, Alice is seeking to preserve John and Muriel anew, creating fresh markers
for them in everyone with whom she shares their story.
The tension caused by the interplay of public and private
surfaces repeatedly throughout the piece, in its structure and its narrative:
we watch Alice and Johnny move around the library seemingly unnoticed by
everyone but us, while the intimate details of two strangers’ lives are poured
into our ears; we are led to the ‘special section’ of the library – the
‘private’ within the public – to see digitised versions of the photographs, intensely
private moments rising and fading before our eyes. Should I be looking at these
images? By accident or neglect or intention – but without the knowledge of or
consent from John and Muriel, that is certain – these photographs entered the
public realm. At one point we hear Alice discussing her distaste for Facebook,
and her fears about handing the albums over to be digitised – so that we can
see them – and yet here are these private, intimate photographs now being
viewed by two people every half hour, for eight hours a day, over the course of
seven days. Having bought the albums, Alice now owns the photographs; she can
display them how she chooses. In the telling and retelling of this story, John
and Muriel are alive again, in our ears and our hearts, but I can’t shake off
the feeling that looking at the images, many of a semi-naked Muriel, is
intrusive.
Is it surprising that, as a childless couple, John and
Muriel’s joint venture against transience ended up in a junk shop? It certainly
seems so, when we hear about their happiness, their achievements and their
adventures. But while Ariel
celebrates romance – and the piece is as much a paean to the library itself as
it is to love – it is also a reminder that mortality is always just at the edge
of the picture. In this place where deeds and ideas are catalogued, ponder
which aspects of our lives – perhaps those that reveal the most – might end up
splayed across the tarmac on a frost-bright, car-boot Sunday.
At the close, we are led down to the stacks, and invited to
stand within the monuments of manilla and have our photograph taken with a Leica
III, the same model used by John more than 60 years ago to preserve his
adoration of Muriel. It neatly bookends this thought-provoking, layered
Find out more about Ariel here.
This review first appeared on Exeunt.
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