a space for photography in east London by Philipp Ebeling and Olivia Arthur
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a pocket of their own shape - Olivia Arthur
We are back with a new publication and exhibition, for the first time not at Fishbar on Dalston Lane, but up the road at Hangar Space! The good people at Bootstrap have kindly agreed to let us use their beautiful top floor, where Olivia’s new work will become a ghostly installation. If you didn’t get a chance to see this at Librairie 7L in Paris earlier this year, be sure to catch it in Dalston!
then Friday 20th - Sunday 22nd and Thursday 26th - Saturday 28th, 12am- 6pm
In the autumn of 2024 Olivia Arthur was invited to a residency at Librairie 7L the former studio of Karl Lagerfeld in Paris. Here Lagerfeld did much of his photography and kept his eclectic collection of over thirty three thousand books.
Drawn by the breadth of the books Lagerfeld had amassed Olivia decided to view them as a child might, as objects to play with and items to light up the imagination:
“I wanted to make something that played to the feeling of children’s books, of things coming alive, and not quite making sense. So I took my 10x12 box camera, paper negatives and started photographing the books as things: landscapes, houses, walls, boxes to hide in, the sea…”
She then double-exposed these with images found within the books and hand coloured the resulting paper positives to create unique photo montages.
The title of the work was drawn from a book that Olvia found in a discreet corner of the library called ‘1 walked out of 2 and forgot it’ by Toby Maclennan. The avant garde text, published in the 70s is a series of vignettes of an unnamed protagonist who finds himself in often contradictory situations where space and time don’t quite make sense:
‘The radio broadcast was soon interrupted by an emergency announcement reporting that without warning the spaces between things had suddenly drifted away, leaving all people and objects trapped in a pocket of their own shape, and that as soon as the people in charge could find a way to get past their own pocket, they would do their best to dig out the rest of the people.’ Toby Maclennan
“Stories where space and time don’t quite fit together make sense to children but we often as adults we lose the ability to go along with them as our minds become clouded with our rationality. It is this feeling that I have tried to search for and recreate in the images that I bring from the library.”
