Patricia L. Boyd “Contents in the Storage Problem” at Heidi, Berlin

These boxes were used in actual house moves, filled with my belongings and transported several times, between several places. But in this exhibition, in their holding of contents, the boxes are reconstructions or representations of interiority. A box contains things, is used to store them, acts as a framing structure, and can be breached. There is an outside.

Although they’ve found a resting place as art, they are still on the move, with elements migrating between boxes from one exhibition to another—or removed or changed and new ones added. When I set out to use the moving boxes as material for work, I wanted to make a system that was inherently unstable.

It has felt important to develop a different way of making—closer to waiting and playing. The photographs inside the boxes have been gathered by me over a few years but chosen here based on associative links between boxes, between me and the boxes, between the boxes and what is happening in the world. The objects are what came easily to hand, everyday things from my life selected according to my private relationship to them. The method is a form of collage, but a slow one, based on observation and allowing gradual accumulation over time.

References to beds recur, and with different meanings. They point to my previous group of sculptures, Where You Lie, made from dismembered pieces of the bed from my former marriage, in which a piece of furniture I had slept in for years became properly observed through a surgical action. Other depictions of beds in the exhibition refer to years I spent bedridden due to illness. A horizontal position tends to make a person feel less in charge, more receptive and prone to associative drift, anxieties, daydreams. There is enormous potential here.

To cut is to make an incision. A vitrine is a kind of cut in that it isolates contents away from the rest of the world and attempts to hold them outside of time, protected from dust and decay. In one vitrine, there’s a reproduction of a painting by Artemisia Gentileschi that imagines the moment before Lucretia’s hands plunge a dagger into her own breast, a drastic response to having been raped by the king’s son. Somehow, paradoxically, its subject is not victimhood, but what a woman can do with her hands—as a painter (Gentilleschi), and as a woman whose suicide will bring the Roman monarchy down.

When speaking of time or narrative, a cut brings an end. The first house move I made using these boxes was during a major split in my life: I was in the process of divorcing and I moved from New York to London. A sudden separation was necessary between myself and what was familiar to me. Cuts are also used to deface, such as when the suffragette Mary Richardson attacked The Rokeby Venus with a meat cleaver in protest at Emmeline Pankhurst’s imprisonment.

Each time I put the boxes away I cut the tape, and each time I re-use them I apply more.

at Heidi, Berlin
until April 17, 2024