Murmuration*, by Gareth Evans

“As a child, I spent many hours lying on the top of a bunk bed I shared with my sister… I loved the view of painted swirls up on the ceiling. I remember thinking how odd some of the swirls looked: from a distance they all appeared the same, as they were repeated in imaginary rows and columns across the whole ceiling.

“Looking closely it was another story. Each one was different – no two were the same. One would differ with a twirl here and another there. I used to invent stories in the swirls, as abstract shapes became familiar things from everyday life. A little like looking up at the sky and watching clouds.”

- Suki Chan, Imagine Space Above Our Heads, residency & bookwork 2006.

It is all laid down there, in the earliest hours, months, years: the foundation, the abiding intention, the architecture of a being and its work. “Deep assignments run through all our lives, there are no coincidences”, declared J.G. Ballard.

What do we call this, the current that runs through us? Might we call it a pattern? And if its work is to celebrate the pattern, itself and others, to tease out what it tells us about how we might more fully be in the world, then might we call this, not a pattern theory, not something empirical, quantitative, but rather a pattern of belief?

Suki Chan seeks patterns in her making. It’s a clear aesthetic and thematic constant: to reveal and tell, to celebrate what cannot be done by other means. She was born there, in another place. She lives here and she works where it is necessary to work. That is, she is familiar with itineraries, transport networks, maps, the non-place spaces…

She appreciates such arrangements for their distinctive poetry but at the same time conjures others, other incarnations of the wish towards order, towards a system that, in its precision and its beauty, might be called either life or art.

However, through the telling detail, what we might now call the ‘ceiling revelation’, she reveals that all patterns are defined by what they fail to contain: the wayward human impulse, desire perhaps, to reach beyond containment, however benign. Their utopian impulse. The lure of the horizon, the edge of the pattern and its denial; its frame and its fragmentation.

What then are among Suki Chan’s patterns of intent?

They are:

The murmuration of starlings in a ruined pier at dusk

The deployments of rice and the vessels of neon

The textures and templates of fabric, of curtains, of windows and doors

The knowledge that rigorous assemblies of sound can tell us what our eyes cannot

The passage of people through some moments in the time of a metropolis

The passing down of the songs of the ancestors; the lilt in the voice of a grandmother

The wish to belong, however misled, of the translated heritage suburbs of outer Shanghai

The tiles and domed ceiling of a museum, once church and mosque

The transit of light across the phenomenal, marking the phenomenal

The overview… and then the inner view

Our place on earth, flawed and flailing and full of a fierce hope…

Our place, which might be the roundhouse dwellings; the circling, almost sacred space. Here is the house, the home, as expression of a unity, a sharing of the purpose. Its walls define the meaning first, broad-based and anchoring. And then there’s the equality of the interior, the rising tiers of being from the communal to the private. This is the house as a built solidarity, building as beautiful with its function and its need.

So it is that the pattern is a solace to the heart in exile - from the wellsprings of its faith, its will, its love. The heart will follow a starling or a seam, a rail-track or a shadow. Without a pattern it cannot find its way back, or forward into a return.

And for those of us who are not lost, or wandering, or casting out for home, we can follow the murmuration, or the arcades of light in the city at night, or the marvellous trail of flowers across the tiles of Istanbul, and be grateful that, for a beat, a pulse’s song, we can “remember all at once / the things (we) had forgotten to imagine.”**

Gareth Evans is a writer, editor and curator. He co-edits ‘Artesian’magazine and is currently co-curating ‘The Re-Enchantment,’ a year-long artists' project examining our relationships to place.

*the name given to a flock of starlings that gather towards evening

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