click for more images
These photographs were taken during a period of living and working in Thailand, of participation in Thai street culture and immersion in a not-yet post consumer society. This is a place where small-scale, informal micro-economies co-exist with global, corporate entities: a woman sells banana leaf packages of sticky rice on the doorstep of 7 Eleven; someone else sells the local sausage from a stall outside McDonald’s; old Levi jeans are made into Birkenstock-style shoes; KFC plastic buckets are reused as plant containers. This reflects the ability of the Thai (a people never colonized) to accept and hybridise that which is alien to their culture – they truly excel at what Michel de Certeau calls “the art of making do” or bricolage.
The ability of the Thai to recycle and subvert the detritus of consumer culture, and colonise the spaces of mass consumerism, makes for everyday objects and events to have unexpected parallels with contemporary art practice. Many of these activities involve the impromptu supply of services to the body, namely massage stalls, mobile tailors, and food vendors occupying unexpected places. My own work attempts uncannily similar strategies to create micro-economies and models of sociability in constructed social spaces. Quite simply, the Thai often make work better than what I could aspire to, and this series of photographic documents is an attempt to resolve myself with this, with these “things I wish I made as artworks”.
1 KFC plantbucket
2 Mazda Eatery
3 Tyre pond
4 Motorbike cloth
5 Bank/ noodle shop
6 Oil drum washing up
7 Carboot shoe sale
8 ‘Levi’s Birkenstock’s’
9 Ricebag Cart
10 Mitsubishi Massage.
artist project for CIRCA, issue 113, autumn 2005.
This work has been supported by a Travel and Mobility Award from the Arts Council of Ireland.
