File Note 84: Nina Canell

In a wonderful essay on the poet Paul Muldoon, psychoanalyst Adam Phillips praises his subject’s ability to focus on an ‘odd detail that, singled out, singles him out and moves him on.’ ¹ Differently put, this might be thought of as a paradoxical talent for simultaneously separating distinct elements of the world (beckoning us near to a very precise something) and for discovering unorthodox means of connecting them, for stringing the world together in unexpected ways. ‘What occupies Muldoon,’ Phillips says, ‘is what sets him off, what springs the narrator of the poem from where he is to somewhere else.’ Muldoon maps a process of mental travel that compels him, as he says, to constantly ‘think of something else, then something else again.’ ² And it is thus a type of art, as Phillips observes, formed by ‘strange connections and unexpected affinities.’ 

There are many such connections and affinities in the work of Swedish artist Nina Canell — just as there is also a commitment to studious and eccentric singling out. There is much that tends towards the ‘joined-up’ in Canell’s slyly associative thinking. Her determinedly low-key sculptures stage variously centred or decentred, gently sprawling or more strictly constrained, combinations of objects and materials — producing out-of-the-ordinary correspondences between different organic and man-made materials, or between different states and manifestations of matter and energy. Canell proposes new affinities and unities between stone, metal, electricity, air, waves, heat and a good deal more. One such work is, in fact, called Affinity Units (2012). These are occasions of material convergence, conduction and coercion. Varieties of charged proximity — of enforced, energised nearness — occur between substances and, certainly, between previously unrelated ideas. Often, such connections are realised in subtly kinetic sculptural situations, wherein actual shifts in physical states are triggered: from material to immaterial, from solid to gaseous, or vice-versa. In these scenarios of surprisingly conjured cause-and-effect, ‘something’ meets ‘something else’ to become ‘something else again’.

Alluding to a typically concentrated and cryptic short poem by Muldoon called Something Else (1987), Phillips notes how a central reference to a length of chain in the work’s short, elliptical narrative is both a close-up focus of poetic curiosity and also a preferred idea of the poetic process itself. It is ‘explicitly, the length of chain with which the poet Nerval hanged himself ’ and at the same time ‘the immeasurable length of a chain of associations, of one word (and thing) leading to another.’ The chain is alluded to as the cause and circumstance of another writer’s mortal ‘ending’, but it also prompts Muldoon into a distracted mode of imaginative beginning: the poem’s concluding lines point to a newly initiated chain of thought, as he thinks ‘of something else, then something else again.’ Connecting chains, of one kind or another, have an equally uncertain status in Nina Canell’s ambiguously communicative sculptural practice. Recently for instance, in further reflecting on relations between visible hardware and invisible energies, one focus has been on electrical and communication cables: the physical links that are essential to the infrastructure of our contemporary immaterial world of wireless networks and cloud computing. These powerful cables are capable of channeling vast amounts of content over great distances — instantly springing us from where we are to somewhere else, immediately transforming the far-away into the near-here — and yet these physcical conduits remain themselves untransformed by the process of constant transmission. They are, to use Canell’s preferred term, ‘forgetful’ — and this forgetfulness is, she suggests, a crucial part of their functionality.