Kate Bohunnis (SA)

2nd February 2018—2nd March 2018

I fold and I rise. I accept and I deny.

Perhaps these aren’t opposites creating difference, but a simple, soft, performative machine that begins in the centre, oscillating between stability and fluidity. It is both, but isn’t quite either yet.

I thought I had learnt to manifest a durability. To be a house, secured for a storm that won’t ever come. But this doesn’t take courage, and does not accept uncertainty. There is no invitation to transform. Freedom of movement doesn’t come to those that have already been defined.

This does not mean that to remain open, one must only self-expose; harboring a porosity that forever welcomes. Perhaps the answer is not to create so many passages inwards, too many holes prevents movement. The importance is to use both. How to be less like the house and more like the garden.

Examining the productive power of not knowing in the pursuit of an inventive passage, Kate Bohunnis’ installations call into question one’s inclination to self-define, residing only within the restrictive parameters of what is known of ourselves. This individual ingenuity is not a discretely interior reorientation, but can also be enacted in outward physical manifestations, softening the conditioning of who we are and how we should perform. Bohunnis’ practice operates in this way, moving from the orthodoxies of printmaking into an expanded practice, Bohunnis considers this path of potentiality must be established through an openness to all material engagement.

Examining the productive power of not knowing in the pursuit of an inventive passage, Kate Bohunnis’ installations call into question one’s inclination to self-define, residing only within the restrictive parameters of what is known of ourselves. This individual ingenuity is not a discretely interior reorientation, but can also be enacted in outward physical manifestations, softening the conditioning of who we are and how we should perform. Bohunnis’ practice operates in this way, moving from the orthodoxies of printmaking into an expanded practice, Bohunnis considers this path of potentiality must be established through an openness to all material engagement.

Images by Christopher Arblaster.