Georgia Saxelby is a Sydney-born, US-based installation artist and is currently an Artist-in-Residence at the art and social change incubator Halcyon Arts Lab in Washington, DC. Her interdisciplinary practice explores ritual and sacred space and their role in re-imagining and re-forming our cultural identities and value systems. Saxelby creates installations that are rooted in participatory and feminist practices and traverse sculpture, performance and architecture. While in Washington, DC, Saxelby is also a Visiting Scholar at the Sacred Space Concentration of the School of Architecture at Catholic University of America. In 2016-17, Saxelby worked with the renowned architecture studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and was awarded three prominent artist grants to undertake a series of international sacred space mentorships and residencies. Saxelby was chosen to speak at the ninth International Architecture, Culture and Spirituality Symposium in 2017 on her practice.
Why did you decide to embark on this project?
My art practice plays at the intersection of art, architecture and performance and is primarily concerned with investigating the role and importance of ritual behavior. I’m interested in the way we perform and embody our cultural value systems through ritual gestures, as well as the material and visual cultures that result from our collective symbolic activities. This project developed out of a particular line of questioning: in what ways can ritual become a powerful and unique vehicle for social change? What are women-driven methods of passing down cultural knowledge and skills? How can I, as an artist, contribute to a new kind of cultural heritage for tomorrow?
A central tenet of my practice is the acknowledgement that what we mark as special and significant reveals and defines who we are. Knowing that I would be in Washington, DC for the one year anniversary of the Women’s March, I wanted to create a work that would mark this occasion as significant. I wanted to do this through the platform of art because I’m interested in transforming artistic contexts into meaningful sites of symbolic action—platforms for rituals to take place that can ripple out to affect how we think and feel in our everyday lives.
History has a tendency of forgetting the contributions of women, and I wanted to make sure our stories were told by us—by anyone that has been impacted by the Women’s March and #MeToo movements or by anyone who wants to take part in this conversation. I wanted to re-activate cultural institutions and spaces that were used during the Women’s March, and invite them to play a role in guarding our stories for us.
One intention of this artwork was to shift the focus of the conversation for a moment on who we want to become as a culture in regards to our relationship to women. I think imagining futures is a very powerful exercise. By asking you what you want to say to future women, and what changes you would like to have taken place for the woman reading your letter, you must envision and articulate what that change actually looks like for you. Only then can we start to reverse engineer those possibilities and understand our role now in taking continuous steps towards making them a reality.
Photo: Kate Warren
Your work often engages with women’s issues and feminism. Where does this interest stem from?
I’ve always had an urge to support women’s agency, self-determination and self-representation.
Through research, constant reflection and conversation, as well as Art Theory and Cultural Studies at university, I learned to better see the cultural structures at play which work to disempower or exclude women from decision-making at every level, and one cannot go back to unseeing. As a young woman brought up to see the world as my oyster, and then growing to observe and understand the limits the world would in fact place on me because I am a woman, I have a vested interest in transforming the way women are represented, perceived by others and by themselves. Women have been persistently represented as passive objects rather than transformative subjects in our culture and history. I am trying to exercise my own ability to transform my environment, as well as contribute to women being understood and treated as connected, active and unstoppable agents of change.
Have you written a letter yourself? Are you able to share some of what you wrote?
As the orchestrator of the experience, I’m always conscious of my involvement becoming didactic for others so tend to see my role as first and foremost holding space for other people’s engagement until the last moment or a private moment at the end of the piece. So, I will be writing my letter in July before the Washington archive is sealed and becomes a time capsule.
It must be surreal knowing that women – some of whom aren’t even born yet – will be reading these letters in twenty years time. What do you hope that these women will gain from this?
I hope that in reading our letters future women may be able to understand not just the significant events occurring at this time but our feelings and internal thought processes in reaction to them. I hope our archive reveals the intimacies of history. Change comes slowly and is not a given or a linear progression. I hope these women will understand how desperately we want things to be different for them, and are reaping some of the rewards of the vows we have made to make that a reality for them.
Right now it feels more possible than ever to speak loudly about gender issues in mainstream platforms, but it hasn’t always been like that and it might not be again. So to capture our sentiments now, when we feel able to speak more openly, is important. I want the generation of women that will come after us to know that we were thinking of them, so that they may never doubt their place and role in this world.
Photo: Kate Warren
Why did you decide to do this via traditional letter writing and not a digital format?
There’s a specialness to letter writing. I wanted to elevate the experience of writing to future women to have a ritual significance, so that people took the time to unravel their thoughts and understand their reflections. I wanted to provide a platform of expression that was long-form, slow, in contrast to the abridged immediacy and crispness of social media in a digital information age.
The materiality of pen or pencil to paper, the rhythmic flow of capturing thoughts as we write—sometimes things come out of our pens that we didn’t even know we felt. There’s a privacy to the experience of writing a letter and a logic to the way someone approaches the page—they draw, underline or write larger or harder to emphasise a point. And there’s something so intimate about seeing someone else’s handwriting. There’s so much personality to it—you feel like you get a glimpse into someone.
Letters are so personal. They are messages sent from one person to another about a common concern. They are cross-cultural and ancient forms of communication, and they have a tradition of revealing alternative and intimate perspectives in history.
In 20 years time the screen will play an even larger role in our lives and cultural landscape, it will affect the way we process and understand the world, as it is already beginning to do. Museums, too, will play a different role. I think it will be so interesting in 2037 to experience these letters as physical artifacts, like relics.
The work champions the power of generational storytelling. Do you think that Western society has in some ways lost its methods of generational storytelling? i.e. indigenous cultures often use storytelling as a way to instil moral values, but this seems to be lacking in western culture.
Absolutely. I was recently reflecting on how as I grow older—or maybe because of everything that’s been happening—I feel increasingly drawn to seeking out and listening to the stories of older women. There have been times I was at The Phillips Collection checking on the installation and would wind up in conversations with visitors who would talk to me about their reaction to the piece or their experience of the Women’s March. I was lucky enough to have some incredibly personal conversations with older women who had so much wisdom to share, who have been through what I’m going through as a young woman contending with my culture.
The letters I’ve read from older women, and men, passing on advice, connecting their experiences from marches and movements in the ’60s and ’70s to what’s currently occurring, revealing what their hopes were then and analysing what has comes to pass, has been so touching, powerful and informative.
Certainly I think oral histories and intergenerational exchange are woefully undervalued in Western contemporary culture. Stories are intimate histories performed and relived. The act of sharing generational stories is crucial to processing and understanding where we’ve been, in order to know where we’re going.
Do you think that part of the value of the project is the cathartic process of actually writing the letter and what that means for each person? How so?
Yes of course. Seeing people in deep concentration as they’re writing their letters, in some cases being lucky enough to listen to them talk to me about everything it brought up for them afterwards, it can be an emotional and sometimes confronting process. The act of self-expression is powerful. The #MeToo movement, and the Women’s March, allowed for the expression of things previously inexpressible in a public setting with the knowledge that your expression would be supported and backed. This is the same thing – people know they can write freely in this setting, that its a safe space, that their letter – and therefore their act of expression, their point of view – will be respected and cared for for a very long time.
