Robinson
Octavio Paz, Single Words, Left Aligned, 1957-1987
Originally created during the final year of a Masters Degree in 2009, and first exhibited in the crypt of a deconsecrated chapel often used for art exhibitions in Bristol, Octavio Paz, Single Words, Left Aligned, 1957-1987 is a digital projection of an approximately two-hundred word text generated by applying a simple rule to The Collected Works of Octavio Paz. I decided that I would list every word the poet had chosen to place alone on a line, aligned to the left-hand side of the page, over the course of thirty years. The resulting text was projected one word at a time directly onto the wall of the crypt.
I exhibited this piece a second time as part of the Still Points;Moving World exhibition, held from May 23rd to June 8th 2014 in Bath, during Bath's Fringe Festival. I was given a space which used to be the changing rooms in the Old Officer’s Club department store on Stall Street, and I discovered that, when projected onto the mirrors of the changing rooms, the piece is utterly transformed and made anew, proving the original premise of the piece that the work and the meaning of the words change depending on the context in which it is shown.
A third version was developed for the exhibition Autopoeisis, held during the Buxton Festival Fringe from 6th to 15th July 2018 in a friend's basement. This time the piece was projected through several pieces of clear plastic which split and repeated the image across a horizontal plane around the exhibition space. Once again the piece was transformed to fit the venue. Feedback from viewers strengthened the theory that meaning changes depending on place and the viewer's experience of the work in that place.
