2013
altered piano stool, bedside table, seat/bed, prepared piano, recorded sound, c-type print, 8” Nails, moving image, subtitle text, drawings
A video and sculptural installation that draws from the histories of the willow pattern appropriated by English potters Milton and / or Turner (17th C). Conflating disparate narratives with a personal engagement and anecdote around an object in transition.
Notes for Milton, Turner was made in 2013 during a pause in packing up my stuff to move house. I'd rediscovered some old notebooks that I thought were lost, and sat on my bed frame reading them. The camera was trained on the lip of a willow pattern cup on my desk, the handle of which I had broken at work. The noise of the DV camcorder motor whirs, and gives way to the sound of improvised piano.
Succulents and Concrete
Notes for Milton, Turner was first exhibited at Audio Foundation in the group show Succulents and Concrete.
Succulents and Concrete was a group show with Joe Prisk, Ammon Ngakuru, Ziggy Lever and Charlotte Drayton from Thurday Feb 7 until Saturday March 2 2013.
Consider an action: a compulsive scratching. This movement, rich in implications of sound and texture, is a familiar one. A structure relapses into original whispers of dust. A wearing of a skeletal membrane so thin that your nails almost certainly corrode any information held below the surface. Material carelessly sought. A satisfaction which reverberates, thought to motion, motion to sensation, as an interminable echo. Inevitably this action is met with a sense of loss, but not discontent. You carry on. Perhaps just to get a taste, an indication of the space behind. A part of you knew from the onset that a tool as clumsy as a fingernail could never be used reveal the nature of this marginal interval, but you told yourself otherwise. This is an excuse to justify the process. As so often happens, the silence of the in-between is overruled by the urge to articulate, a subtle component is bypassed in order to map a more facile and tangible whole.
“There is something intriguing about the silence of the incomplete, the waiting to or the given up on. A trace of some prior action is held; at the same time further action is provoked. Either way it is happening right before you, the past and the future are irrelevant.”
– Susie Hunt/Joe Prisk
Succulents and Concrete, AF link.
Parlour's Last Show
A single channel version was included in Parlour's Last Show, Rebbeca Hobbs, Leilani & Andre Kake and Kahu Tuwhare, Otahuhu in 2013.
"Ziggy Lever presented a piece that in its silence and stillness was perhaps the most reserved of the work on view. In Untited, 2013, a close shot sits evenly on a piece of china; the willow pattern that decorates it is visible but not totally revealed, and the extended, motionless focus on the cup forces an encounter with an object that is not quite declaring itself. But delving deeper into Lever’s work, his interest in the china extends into the histories of the Chinese willow pattern. Appropriated in the 18th Century from the decorative patterns on Chinese ceramics, the design has been in use ever since, and has become ubiquitous in china collections in homes in New Zealand and beyond. The protracted gaze on the teacup suggests a different kind of ghosting, a historical palimpsest of references, language and activity in the domestic setting that Lever reconsiders in this work."
— Julia Lomas
© Copyright Ziggy Lever
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