FLO RAY - A SPACE BETWEEN THE INTERNAL AND THE EXTERNAL.
M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) meet emergent artist Flo Ray - LONDON.
Please describe the installation that was presented at The Royal College of Art degree show in July 2022.
I made a series of new sculptures for the show that came together to form a larger work called The Movement. It’s comprised of variously anthropomorphic hanging objects that recall punch bags and/or a gathering of bodies. They’re all made from different materials, ranging from the faux-leather used in boxing equipment, to new and used clothing, and they’re held together by a variety of conjunctions – zips, string, cable ties, pins, tape. Both the objects and their surfaces invoke past and impending violence; they’re suspended quietly in space as though waiting for the next blow, their seams unpicked, restitched, and outward-facing. They each carry some kind of signifier, too – a clothing label, key, price tag, ID card, or similar – objects inferring a series of ‘elsewheres’; invisible systems, places, or people not present.
Because they approximate human dimensions, to be among the sculptures feels akin to being in a crowd. A key aspect in the conception of this project was the intention for it to be walked through and navigated by visitors; experienced from within, rather than gazed upon from a distance. This wasn’t able to be fully realised due to space restrictions, so the show was a small selection of a much wider body of work. But I wanted to think about types of action that transform uses of space by shifting perceptions of selfhood from the individual to the power of the collective body. What happens in that shift, and how is it felt? What’s lost and gained? We’re often taught to think of space as merely a container for everything in it, but this isn’t what happens on a social, architectural, or even physical level, among particles. The body and the space it occupies are relationally bound; they actively and mutually create one another. This understanding dissolves the distinction between them, and I’m constantly bowled over by it. By making non-linear passages of movement and thought possible through the work, I hoped that such a dynamic would implicate visitors as participants, rather than viewers.
I started making the work in March 2022, and I was responding directly to the intensified conditions that bodies in public spaces had been subjected to over the preceding couple of years: on one hand, the wide berths and rising suspicion normalised at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic; and on the other, bodies united in close proximity, filling streets in the name of Black life, trans rights, a free Palestine, and climate justice, among other things. In the UK, strikes and marches by staff at dozens of universities were also taking place – including at the RCA. All of these struggles are ongoing, but the polarised attitudes and behaviours towards public space were extremely pronounced from 2020-22, and that’s what I wanted to address. It all came to feel increasingly urgent just a few months later, when the government’s ‘anti-protest’ Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill was introduced.
One thing that really surprised me was how some people responded to the work. I had wondered if it might be perceived as vaguely threatening, given the wall of bodies it appeared as from afar, rather than a walk-through environment. It was the first physical show at the RCA in three years, and of course there was still some anxiety around opening to the public. But despite all the lockdowns and the isolation – or in spite of them, perhaps – a number of people were going up to the sculptures and holding onto them. I mean actually hugging them, and some for quite a while! What’s surprising when encountering the work, I think, is that the objects are not heavy at all; they’re light on their feet, so to speak. They’re in constant motion, responsive to touch, to other bodies moving through, with, among them. I’d expected some people might want to punch them, but not physically embrace them. Without wanting to romanticise that, I did find it quite moving (one iteration of the title I hadn’t accounted for); sensing in those gestures a form of hope that’s synonymous with solidarity – or at least a feeling of connectedness.
I was fascinated by the bag which was resting on the floor in the installation, the tension between these objects which hung like meat in an abattoir and yet suggest life at the same time - the prospect of the fight and the stamina needed within training. As an artist, what are you searching for within your work?
Yes, there are definitely multiple antagonisms at play. I’m glad you felt there was also a life force in the work. That’s crucial, I think – the potential for continuance, change, momentum.
I tend to think of the bag resting on the floor as failing or refusing to perform a given role. Because it’s not quite suspended, but it’s not fully weight-bearing, either; it’s only just touching the ground, and you can’t really tell that from afar. Maybe it’s doing just enough to pass. Maybe it’s exhausted. Or maybe it’s unable to perform the role expected of it. All bodies suffer in service to capitalism’s fallacy of exponential growth, while some are actively disabled by it. Perhaps all the bags are failing and refusing in their own ways. Even the red thread that runs through them is excessive, knotted, and complicated, like the labour that marginalised bodies are forced to perform in the very act of survival. But, as you say, they do also suggest life. For me, this is found in their difference and the proximity between them; in their ability to simultaneously create and occupy space. There’s transformative potential in that – whether it’s a picket line, a protest, a party... or simply a gathering of materials.
It’s moments and possibilities like these that I’m looking for, or hoping to create, in my work. It’s all part of envisaging new ways of relating. How might connections occur differently, without the usual power dynamics and modes of exploitation? How does one thing sit next to another – be they words, materials, sounds, images, or living beings – and what is created in the spaces between them? Do they collide, spark, change each other? What other configurations are possible?
For all the modes of collectivity imaginable, our vocabulary is wildly insufficient. For example, ‘community’ is often romanticised, even fetishised, and rarely talked about as violent or manipulative, which it can also be. The word implies so much more, whereas ‘friend’ often doesn’t imply enough. It’s stretched so far and so thinly to cover a wide range of relations, almost diluting the potency and radical kinds of love that friendship can entail. These words and categories have always felt somewhat elusive to me; non-specific and coded, often operating via unspoken rules, with invisible boundaries and unacknowledged hierarchies. I guess I’m trying to get at the nuances of these, to do away with the idea that solitude and togetherness somehow exist in opposition to one another. It’s ultimately a reimagining of space, because it does away with the myth of the internal and the external. It does away with the very idea of opposition, because none of these things are binary.
The materials that you engage with and use within your work are very specific - please can you explain the process behind these choices?
There are always multiple factors that determine how I work, and what with. Most obviously these have to do with time, space, and money, so choice is often limited from the start. I rented a little studio in New Cross for a few years – a long time ago now, back when it was slightly more affordable to do so – and I taught myself how to pour concrete, how to sew on an old Singer that someone had given me, how to work with various other tools. Like many artist’s studios, they were then bulldozed and replaced with ‘luxury’ apartments, so that was followed by a period where my one-bed flat had to suffice. I threw myself into reading a lot more, and started to write with more intent. I also started drawing more, which I’d stopped doing for a number of years. Later, I had access to an old football club which meant I could work on a larger scale again. These days I mainly have desk space, so I’m working more with film and audio. But writing and drawing continue to be the two constants, and they’re often starting points for everything else.
At the same time, the medium I work in is specific to whatever set of concerns I’m dealing with. I couldn’t have made The Movement as a film, for instance, because with film you’re bound by linearity; there’s a beginning and an end. That work needed to be open and embodied. Equally, I’m working on a film at the moment which couldn’t be a set of sentences or photographs, because it’s so much about the rhythms, overlaps, and transitions between voice and imagery.
Regardless of my circumstances, I will continue to be materially promiscuous. I’m not interested in mastery, and I’ve become increasingly suspicious of the need for control. There needs to be room in the making for mistakes and surprises, because those are often very generative; they allow for connections and experiences that aren’t predetermined. In a way, I don’t see all these materials or disciplines as separate. Of course they all come with their own histories; those are important, and sometimes they’re also what I’m responding to. But there isn’t a huge difference in how I approach composition – whether it’s linguistic, material, emotional, or digital. I’ll punctuate space or sound the way I might a piece of writing.
You engage with and return to layering and collage within your practice - please can you explain your process and why you choose this media?
Again, it’s very much to do with relations and transitions between parts, and not in any metaphorical sense. Or... never solely in a metaphorical sense. Sometimes it manifests as collage, where parts clash, bleed into, and disrupt one another, creating all sorts of tangents and productive distractions. Much of life is experienced in exactly this way – as fragmentary, discontinuous. This is intensified by the onslaught of sensory stimuli that we’re consistently subjected to.
Often, though, I tend to view my use of parts as being closer to metonymy, which preserves context and allows difference between parts to remain unchanged. This is a way of acknowledging that everything is already multiply referential and heavily contextual. It makes some of the groupings in my work feel more like paratactic arrangements, which can exist without merging and without hierarchy.
Working in these ways resists the coherent, singular narrative, and honours multiplicity; especially where contradiction is involved, and it usually is. There’s a lot of disorientation regarding subjectivity in my work; particularly in my writing, which focuses on junctures between selves and parts of selves. I’m interested in how we exist in relation to one another, but, crucially, how we can exist outside of that formula, too.
What are you working on at this time?
I’m about to finish a short film called No Internal Thing, which is a pandemonium of what’s usually referred to as inner speech, but without the accepted distinction between internal and external. It’s a dynamic landscape of sound and imagery jammed together in an attempt to explore the panoply of voices that occupy a single head.
After that, I’ll move onto editing another film that’s been shelved for a long time. It involves a number of actors, and we started filming it before the pandemic hit, then obviously had to stop for a while. So I lost the momentum with that, but finally managed to finish the filming last year. It’s also about language of a certain kind; it’s called Recital, though there’s no speech. It’s more concerned with the performative dynamics of speech – repertoires of adopted gesture, and non-verbal communication. The film will examine the roles these play in the production of self, and how they intersect with gender. Broadly speaking, it’s a montage of headshots involving some fairly dubious examinations of the mouth.
Photography by Lucio Martus