‘WITHOUT’, Sint Annazal Gallery, Beguinage of Sint Elisabeth, Kortrijk, Belgium.

In the book ‘Inside the Visible - ‘An Elliptical Traverse of Twentieth Centry Art in, of, & from the Feminine’ (1996) by M. Catherine De Zegher (author) is a catalogue review of women artists arranged by historical period from the 1930’s to the 1990’s where famous women artists are discussed alongside the relatively unknown or ‘invisible’. In the introductory text De Zegher writes of the Beguinage of Sint Elisabeth, or Begijnhof (built between 1873 and 1874) Beguines took no religious vows but had to live by the rules of obedience, chastity and austerity.

In the summer of 1998, I visited the Beguinage of Sint Elisabeth, to plan for an exhibition. The silence of the space was broken only by the sound of swallows flying freely both within the beguinage and without into the city. On entering the upstairs space of the gallery, I saw a swallow flying endlessly around and around trapped in this silent space.  I opened the windows and set the swallow free. In the centre of the beguinage was a lawn with a huge tree giving shade in the heat of the day. I took a leaf from the tree - an Acer Saccarinum witte esdoom (a sugar maple with thorns) and pressed it in one of my books as a memento. On my return home I decided to use this leaf as the template for the ‘catalogue’ of the exhibition ‘WITHOUT’

In the autumn of 1999 I returned to the Sint Annazal gallery at the Beguinage of Sint Elisabeth install my exhibition WITHOUT. In the upper gallery I suspended a mechanical swallow from the roof that flew endlessly round and round in the space and opened all the windows as I had done for the live swallow The sound from the live swallows that had been outside on my visit in 1998 was now absent as they had already flown south for the winter. (See also exhibition Permission to Speak, The Freud Museum, London (2002/2003); Return Flight, ‘Orchestra of Strings’, Crypt Gallery, London (2010); Flight, ‘Ghandi Group’, El Farol Gallery, Valparaiso, Chile (2007).

In the lower gallery I installed two handmade looseleaf tables. One had the centre cut out leaving an absence. I had made 100 WITHOUT catalogues using the outline of the leaf from the Acer tree which was then laser cut out – leaving an absence, literally ‘taking the leaves out of my book I suspended them from the ceiling over the absence in the table. This piece was entitled Catch me if I fall (reference to falling leaves in the autumn). The second table was made from the cutout section of the first table, reattached with hinges to make a ‘dropped leaf’ table and a copy of WITHOUT was secured with a clamps.

The remaining 99 publication/catalogues WITHOUT, intended as a souveneir or memento mori, were placed on shelves in a cupboard in the gallery space for visitors to take away. On the inside of the open cupboard door was a slide projection of the outside space of the beguinage.