Interior archaeologies: knots, viewpoints and entanglements

The paper records conversations between an artist, archaeologist and interior designer as they map the material landscape of an artwork and make present their experience of the work through making and interpreting drawings, photographs and narrative. The work explores differences in ontology and experience, whilst making marks and sharing knowledge that moves between disciplinary and human experience. The project uses an interior landscape, an artwork set up by a visual artist with a background in weaving, as a site for exchange and interdisciplinary discourse. The readings of the artwork, make explicit methods of practice and the different entanglements of past experience creating tension between words, ways of representing, mapping and navigating space. The initial collection of objects, drawings and installations form a meshwork of relationships that are materialized in the discourse to form a new fabric of experience. The actions of the loom are used as a tool to think through the discourse within the paper. A loom is a tool that is used to weave cloth, it holds the warp under tension allowing for the interweaving of the weft threads, the weft is, that which is thrown across, with the transverse threads. The work opens up practice based methods through the to and fro of conversations to rethink methods of representation in interior space, through different viewpoints, knots and entanglements. The paper explores and thinks about the use of metaphor and practice based research, with art making and its relationship to interior research and the reinvention of interior space. The project was used to model thinking behind a larger event, Map, Plot, Plunder, [1] an interactive theatre event that invited people to enter the backstage of a theatre to become part of the performance. The discourse questioned how the interior might be re-imagined using archaeological processes as a model for thinking and metaphor to work with. The Harris matrix, an archaeological tool, emerged through the process as a way of thinking through space and time, the mapping of interlocking events offers an exciting potential when thinking through past, present and future.