Diving into the Wreck
Paige Perkins
Exhibition: 27/05/11 - 26/06/11
The inaugural exhibition at Meter Room is the culmination of Paige Perkins’ 8 week artist residency during the renovation of Meter Room’s project space and studios, where she has created new work with materials found on site whilst ceilings were being torn down and carpets ripped from the floors.
Diving into the Wreck, which takes its title from an Adrienne Rich poem of the same name, features several site-specific responses to the Meter Room’s premises – a derelict 1960’s City Council office block which formerly housed the Coventry Volunteer Service Council. Perkins has retrieved artefacts from piles of discarded Diving into the Wreck Press Release materials and used these as tools with which to fashion together new low-tech structures, giving flesh to the building’s broken bones. Cartoon humour and a touch of the absurd are tempered with an unsettling sense of foreboding and evidence of frayed emotional states that are as contorted as the materials that prop them up. Perkins reflects upon the need to contain chaos and how that chaos shapes the things that contain it.
‘I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.’
‘The thing I came for:
The wreck and not the story of the wreck
The thing itself and not the myth’
Diving into the Wreck, Adrienne Rich, 1973