Ritual | Repetition

Abstract

“Ritual | Repetition” is one of eight essays that explore correlations between architecture and textiles, those surfaces that both enclose and enclothe us, and foregrounds the significance of the surface in our understanding and experience of place. Arising from a series of photographs of Melbourne’s mid-twentiethcentury façades, Urban Fabric: Greige, in which the latent image of Harris Tweed was exposed, readings of correspondences between surfaces are drawn from a photograph of a curtain wall façade and a swatch of Harris Tweed juxtaposed. It is not these images themselves that are so much transcribed, but rather those that have emerged in their wake. In Ritual | Repetition the body’s shaping of the world through semblance and play is considered, in light of the rhythms of work and labor. The significance of ritual, as demonstrated in the waulking of the cloth, in its perpetuation of an ever-changing tradition, is contrasted with the deadening nature of labor, evidenced in the production of the curtain wall. The effects of these two differing modes of production are reflected in the nature of crafted artifact or artwork, and the commodity. While technological reproducibility was seen to disengage the artwork from the domain of ritual, through translation and transmission, it is suggested, it also enables its return, through the playful reengagement of the thinking hand and the marks that it makes, giving rise to meaningful impressions.