Player’s metalwork is nailed up on the white corridor walls of the ECA
sculpture court. Tucked into a windowless corner of the grand cloister,
pressed in on all sides by the saturated and rather shrieking artistic efforts
of her classmates, this work might easily be glanced over if one were
passing through the exhibition simply as a matter of course. But I kept
returning to these particular sculptures, for some reason, during my
strictly cursory attendance at the ECA graduate show. Perhaps initially it
felt like a relief to see work this understated, amongst much else that was
demanding so loudly to be seen. The longer I attended to these curious
metal symbols, however, the more I came to believe that there was
nothing modest or bashful about them. I looked, and I looked, and before
me these artefacts gradually transformed into a great, seething whisper. A
whisper might not be heard above the roar of a crowd, but it may
nevertheless contain an incantation or a prayer.

The apparent delicacy of these items is somewhat deceiving – with a little
imagination one can feel their leaden weight in one’s hands, the cold
inflexibility of the metal, it’s unforgiving gravity. And yet each piece
expresses an irrefutable sense of motion: their sketch-like curvatures, the
small, warping imperfections, and a certain directionality governing each
item and their relation to one another. This tension between the
unbending rigidity of the material and the fluidity in each design is most
remarkably dissolved in one large, emblematic centrepiece of Player’s
exhibit. This particular item takes on a multivalent character – a spider’s
web, a whirlpool, the human eye – something very precisely structured
that simultaneously emanates a living dynamism. The manner of
presentation further contributes to this synthesis of fixity and movement.
Stepping back, one perceives these symbols somehow hanging in
breathless suspension within pure space, defying the world’s downwards
pull, in a dimension of their own.

Upstairs, virtually hidden in an alley of black curtains within a darkened
seminar room, is the other part of Player’s exhibit. There are several more
sculptures, these welded onto tall and very thin metal columns, each with
a square base. They are placed on the floor along this narrow corridor of
black curtain, at the end of which is a glowing projection.

The technicalities of this mode of presentation I couldn’t hope to explain.
I cannot tell how Player has recorded the dark, floating shadows of her
sculptures. It seems like a projection of a recording of a projection. But
the symbols, stark black against a pale, parchment-textured background,
take on an illustrative quality. They are transfigured. No longer the heavy
metal artefacts presented downstairs, here they appear much more like
thin outlines in drawn ink, trembling but playful doodles. Instead of seeing
these symbols sketched out, however, an imposing black hand disrupts
these compositions from time to time, relocating each item. The hand
tests out new arrangements and relationships, and each time it withdraws
it leaves behind a new abstract imagery.

Strangely, my first thought was about the hand. I assume, perhaps naively,
that it would have been a simple matter to create a stop-motion recording
whereby the symbols travelled across the papery canvas of their own
accord, floating in and out of contact with one another, soaring or
plunging into different positions, rotating or overlapping. As a visual
effect this might have been entertaining. So why the overt manipulation?
These considerations led me on to other, more fundamental questions.
What does this imagery depict? And if these are meant to be symbols,
what is it they represent?

I watched this curious performance, which took on an almost gothic
character in the dusty darkness of the room. As each composition was
reorganised, I saw number become letter, letter become number. I even
saw number become the lettering of sound – the musical scale.

Shifting spatial and directional relationships. Particular elements coming
in and out of centrality, periphery, focus. Some compositions symmetrical
and balanced, others off-kilter. Superimposed pitch black onto a
translucent emptiness, pushed and pulled around by the dark hand.

On my own terms, I cannot describe Player’s work more accurately than
as the sculpture of psychic life. Depicted in that shadowy display was a
certain geometry of thought: a finite number of axioms and models, the
infinitely variable application and combination of which makes possible
the conceptualisation of an entire world of experience. In this sense,
Player’s symbols hint at something like Kant’s categories of the
understanding (Quanitity/Quality/Relation/Modality), the mental
infrastructure through which the entirety of experience is funnelled (or
perhaps more aptly, through which the mind ‘projects’ itself upon
experience). However, Player’s own sculptures do not so much represent
Kant’s transcendental, pre-given conditions of experience as such, but are
rather precisely artefacts – that is, things that are made, forged in the always-
cooling heat of experience itself. Hence the hand: abstract thought has no
life of its own, and neither are its forms universal. It does not emerge from
blank nothingness but always leaves traces of a discrete subject-of-
experience (the artist). Thought is apperception – it always contains a
certain orientation towards oneself. Thus understood, that dark hand
ceases to appear despotic, since to portray the mind without in this way
acknowledging the presence and particularity of the subject (artist) would
be to adopt the naïve universality of Kant’s own transcendental idealism.
Player concedes, by making herself ‘present in the projection’, that she may be
speaking only for herself.

And perhaps it is partly this sober self-awareness that disarms my usual cynicism,
and allows me to be so unusually receptive to what she is trying to convey.
I do not believe that thought can be so straightforwardly codified. But
why shouldn’t certain opaque features of the mind and its motions be
hinted at through artistic expression? Dynamism and the rigidity of
conceptual routine. Cycles, patterns and dualities. Aimless wandering and
delineated boundaries. Intentionality and focus. Projection and reflection.
And of course, always and ever the possibility of new directions,
relationships and insight.

Written by Samuel Rafanell-Williams

2022