Someone Else's Storey
The Whisper Residency
The Centre for Contemporary Chinese Art Gallery,
Manchester UK 2014
Conceived as a period of critical expansion and reflection, Whisper provides selected former participants with the opportunity to re-examine and extend trajectories initiated during Breathe, enabling a deeper consolidation of conceptual and material concerns within their practice.The residency space at CFCCA was among the most compelling environments I have inhabited as an artist. It operated as a genuinely integrated live/work site: a combined studio, exhibition, and domestic space configured within a double-height volume of approximately 4.5–5 metres. At first-floor level, a doorway punctured one wall, accessible only via a steel ladder bolted directly to the surface, leading to a compact and functional sleeping area. This unusual vertical arrangement—domestic retreat suspended above a gallery-scale void—prompted the development of Someone Else’s Storey. The architectural condition itself became both subject and material.
The Whisper Residency
The Centre for Contemporary Chinese Art Gallery,
Manchester UK 2014
Conceived as a period of critical expansion and reflection, Whisper provides selected former participants with the opportunity to re-examine and extend trajectories initiated during Breathe, enabling a deeper consolidation of conceptual and material concerns within their practice.The residency space at CFCCA was among the most compelling environments I have inhabited as an artist. It operated as a genuinely integrated live/work site: a combined studio, exhibition, and domestic space configured within a double-height volume of approximately 4.5–5 metres. At first-floor level, a doorway punctured one wall, accessible only via a steel ladder bolted directly to the surface, leading to a compact and functional sleeping area. This unusual vertical arrangement—domestic retreat suspended above a gallery-scale void—prompted the development of Someone Else’s Storey. The architectural condition itself became both subject and material.
From the elevated vantage point at the top of the ladder, the spatial logic of the room became newly apparent. In a double-height interior, one might argue that a significant portion of the volume remains functionally inaccessible from ground level. Two notional rooms appear stacked vertically, yet the upper register cannot be directly occupied within the normative conventions of exhibition display. It seems to belong to an imagined other—to a “someone else”—who alone can inhabit or activate that elevated territory. The work emerged from this perceptual and functional disjunction.
My prior investigations during the Breathe residency had focused on the exposition of art, particularly the operational and symbolic role of the plinth within gallery contexts. The plinth, as a device, mediates between object and architecture, elevating the artwork physically and ideologically. Introducing standard-height plinths into this expansive vertical space initially served only to accentuate the disproportionate scale of the room. While this heightened awareness of volume was compelling, it did not adequately address the latent upper storey. Subsequent experiments involved stacking plinths upon plinths—a strategy I had previously employed in China. Although these accumulations did not achieve the necessary elevation, they confirmed that the conceptual solution lay in vertical extension.
The decisive gesture was the fabrication of a series of monumental plinths exceeding three metres in height. These structures effectively relocated the display plane upward, bringing the artwork into dialogue with the architectural threshold of Someone Else’s Storey. By concentrating the gallery’s lighting exclusively onto the elevated display surfaces, the viewer’s gaze was directed decisively upward. Illumination functioned not merely as a technical necessity but as a rhetorical device, reinforcing the reorientation of attention and redistributing spatial authority within the room.
In conclusion, Someone Else’s Storey sought to interrogate the hierarchies embedded within architectural volume and exhibition design. By monumentalising the plinth and displacing the site of display into the upper reaches of the gallery, the work reconfigured both the viewer’s bodily orientation and their expectations of where art “belongs.” The installation transformed an apparently redundant vertical expanse into an activated conceptual field, proposing that spatial excess is never neutral but always available for critical occupation. In doing so, it extended my ongoing investigation into the structures—physical and ideological—that frame the encounter between artwork, architecture, and observer.