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'A Poetry of Objects’, by Nigel Warburton

‘I have more memories than if I had lived a thousand years.’
Charles-Pierre Baudelaire

Objects that have passed through different hands, perhaps over generations, metamorphose into symbols. The everyday paraphernalia that surrounded us in childhood becomes antique and quaint over time, yet takes on a mythical significance in the stories we tell ourselves about where we have come from. Long-forgotten memories and feelings re-invoke scenarios buried deep in our psyches. Like dream symbols, such objects carry multiple meanings and have a powerful emotional resonance. Technology has become disposable and un-inheritable, but the structure of our relationship to objects that once held such significance for us remains.

Abstracted, enlarged, and isolated from context we see an old telephone, a pair of dress-maker’s shears, a few flowers in a makeshift vase. All acquire an aura and presence both as objects of aesthetic attention and as catalysts for re-imagining the past – our own, or that of a previous generation. In Stephen Inggs’ museum of memory equivalents, each relic invites a poetic reverie of personal associations. A neat diary entry written by a farmer’s wife more than a century ago in the semi-desert Karoo in the Western Cape displays a stoic equanimity about the events recorded. Nothing disturbs the controlled rhythm of the copperplate script, which weighs everything equally. The diary has been re-used, with the previous year’s dates crossed out – a mark of practical frugality that suggests in a single detail an entire philosophy of living. Many images in Inggs’ repertoire similarly imply a particular relation to land, history, and a way of life, deeply rooted in South African history. Simultaneously they represent universal concerns about the evolving nature of our relationship to the place we find ourselves in, and to the everyday items around us.

These are not objective re-presentations, but expressive and painterly invocations of an attitude to existence that is no longer available. Each object is imbued with a sense of loss as well as beauty; a calm nostalgia, but also a sense of respect and simple dignity. Imperfect flowers have an individuality and fragility lost in an age of mass-cultivated hybrids. A hand-stitched rugby ball, with its dark-pored leather panels, has an organic quality its acrylic descendants can never achieve. The edges of each image itself are blurred, revealing both the brushstrokes that form the surface and the texture of the paper beneath; there is no illusion of a mirror here, no transparent picture of what was in front of the lens. Inggs has coaxed and crafted these remarkable images into existence from his own unconscious rather than found them in the world. They are re-discoveries that while personal and particular have become universal. The passing of time has changed everything.