06 Dec Janet Ruth Davies
Residency period: November 2018
Walking after Midnight
Blanca sits in a river valley. Orange and lemon groves rise out of its periphery towards a cirque of mountains forming a distant horizon. During Janet’s residency at AADK she has been researching notions of territories, what they are and what they are not. Her work is located in the manmade territory of the township, which sits in contrast to the territory of a riverbed formed over millennia.
Walking in the night, photography defines a multiplicity of boundaries, the imaginary fluid space of the in-between where the urban and the rural intersect.
What is this edge? Janet uses satellite GPS to track and disrupt the threshold of private space into public space. A line made by feet is translated into a line made by hand.
Territories are more than just spaces – it is what they express. Territories are in a constant process of being made and unmade. At dusk, Janet walks into the Rambla, a dry riverbed that waits for rain. Tracing its path, as a body in motion, is to be in a labyrinth, unburdened, traveling through the terrain of the imagination making the invisible visible. The Rambla becomes a map as she journeys into the realm of the symbolic.
Janet takes residence in Casa Jasmine, a once occupied house situated on the edge of town and built into the hillside. She invites a spatial and sculptural provocation for bodies to move in-between a heartbeat within this assemblage, this veil of masonry we call home. In the liminal hours of twilight, she asks again what is private space and public space? Home is not the house but is the unfixed and the fixed, a continuous attempt to create a space of comfort to imprint on the memory, genius loci of the internal landscape.
