Philippa Steele

Philippa Steele (TAS)

2007

After the Cut-out

Cardboard box, digital photographs, paper and pen.

After the cut-out is a project that takes everyday objects from my own home into the public sphere. Through analytical processes, personal contexts and significances — often associated with an object — are disregarded for ease of public consumption.

A description of the object’s properties and relations are documented alongside photographs — liberated from subjective representation, the objects undergo rigid classification.

However — as though an invisible thread held the object together — the fragmentary process of classification has excised the object from existence. Likewise, the objects are ‘cut-out’ from their photographic record.

In an attempt to recover the missing objects, I ask the viewer for a personal description of how such objects are perceived in their mind — through the senses — to hold, to touch, to taste, to hear, to see.