Shuttering as Fact-Trap

Ann H. Kelly

1. Urban Malaria Control Programme, Dar es Salaam

2. Public Health Entomology Laboratories, Ifakara

3. Experimental Huts, Lupiro

R.A. Rapley’s Experimental Hut With Shuttering, Notes on Experimental Hut (1961)

Study After Velasquez, 1950

Perceiving the lack of something…inspires us to search for an approximating resemblance to fill its place…Analogy, born of the human desire to achieve union with that which one does not possess, is a passionate processes marked by fluid oscillations.

Barbara Stafford, Visual Analogy 2001: 133

“As an artist you have to, in a sense, set a trap by which you hope to trap this living fact alive. How well can you set the trap?”

Francis Bacon, 1975

Anchors

• Materiality

–Texture of the brushstroke

–Local materials, makeshift design

• The Room

–Objects and bodies are only given weight and identity in painting by being enclosed (T.J. Clarke 2013: 104)

The Trap

A trap is a lethal parody of the animal’s umwelt…it embodies a scenario, which is the nexus of intentionalities that binds these two protagonists together, and which aligns them in time and space. Alfred Gell 1996: 29

Haptic Accidents

“Take the subject as the bait...the texture of the painting unlocks the valves of feeling to return the onlooker to reality more violently.”

Study for crouching nude, 1952

Entomological Insights

Probabilistic Itinerary:

• A mosquito will fly into a house

• Encounter a host

• Be diverted by a bed net

• Enter another house

• Feed on a human• Feed on livestock

Interior Space

Objects and bodies are only given weight and identity in painting by being enclosed.

T.J. Clarke 2013: 104)

Study for a Self Portrait. Seated figure 1973

• Proximity without intimacy

• Interior imprinted by exterior

End of the Line 1953

Shuttering

1. Materiality – Accident renders vital forces visible – Makeshift as machine for surprise

2. The Room– Operational field that scales disease control– Introduces ambivalences