File Note 96: Hannah Collins

Time and again in the photographs and films of Hannah Collins one encounters a paradox regarding the arts of travel and arrival. ‘My journeys have just a skeletal intention,’ she has written, ‘I experience a lightness that I never feel at home.’ This lightness is in her work too: a delicately conceptual and sometimes humorous play with objects, places and the image itself. But a kind of weight insists also, a density of concentration on object or scene. You could say, too easily, that this quality derives from composition and style: the way that some of Collins’ photographs fill the gaze, metres wide, or cram the field of the picture with things and textures that threaten to overflow. But her work is intimate and immersive in other ways too; if Collins is a traveller, it’s in the mode of a travelling shot — this is literally the mode of her film Solitude and Company (2008) — moving ever deeper and closer to a subject that remains somehow poised and not quite known.

Consider the photographic works she made in Hackney in the 1980s, when her methods frequently involved annexing to the studio items discovered near at hand in the not-yet-regenerated east end of London. ‘My aim was to create a momentary place or a real-life scale. The temporary combinations seemed to liberate each from its origins.’ In Grapes (1989) a wobbly tower of balloons describes a cartoonish rendering of a bunch of grapes. In Family (1988) an arrangement of dilapidated-looking speaker cabinets composes a comically formal group portrait; the objects have been borrowed from a club next door, but they inhabit the studio as if it were a domestic space. Home, in fact, is a recurring subject in these early works. Thin Protective Coverings II (1987) shows an expanse of cardboard boxes opened out to cover floor and part of a wall behind, where they meet large sheets of transparent plastic. The stuff of temporary dwellings constructed by the homeless expands to remake the studio, opening it up to the world outside the photograph. (It’s a feature of many of Collins’ photographs, this sense that the subject does not stop at the edges of the image.)

As regards Collins the traveller, there is perhaps no more exposing nor risky journey than into the work of another artist, and especially one whose own immersive excursion to the edge of things is or was so resonant. The African-American artist Noah Purifoy, whose exhibition 66 Signs of Neon repurposed detritus from the Watts riots of 1965, and who was subsequently a pivotal figure in the nexus of art, education and civic duty in California, relocated to the Mojave Desert where he constructed over a hundred sculptural and installation works. Collins’ photographs frame these works — a homage to Frank Gehry in corrugated metal, a wooden lattice based on a gallows from the Clint Eastwood western Hang ’Em High (1968) — with expanses of desert and sky that recall the great American landscape photographers and the interiors of Walker Evans, whose 1966 book Message From the Interior provides a container for smaller reproductions of Collins’ images of Purifoy’s desert assemblages.

Accompanying the eighteen large-scale prints themselves are the artist’s recorded interviews with figures associated with Purifoy and his first politically forceful and visible work. Among these, the artist John Outterbridge voices an astonishing metaphor for the predicament of African Americans in the wake of Watts, though it might also be an image for any artist’s proximity and distance from his or her subject: ‘We had no nation, we had no heart. Though, a lot of times you would take it out, and it would still be beating, and you would ask: “Could you use this? You want it? I don’t have any use for it.” ’