All corners are haunted, if not inhabited, wrote Gaston Bachelard. Strangely, it seems it is this emptying out of space that makes room for ghosts.
So it is that the abandoned armchair at the end of an empty hotel corridor whispers of empty spaces hollowed out by country farmers and their wives come in to town, travelling salesmen and honeymooners long since disappeared.
A second floor alleyway façade escapes the greasepaint of shop front facelifts. Too high for graffiti, it holds its memory of changing fortunes and cycles of inner city decay and rejuvenation. These are the flats and skies that have remained, unnoticed by the actors who strut and weep their entrances and exits on the street below.
The weight of every day human stories remains, abraded on the thresholds of inner city offices and public buildings.
Quiet voices call to us from these unnoticed spaces, through which we pass on our way somewhere else.
It was afternoon light, filtered through leadlight and glancing off the door visitors pass as they enter the Pah Homestead, that first captured my imagination. I began to notice the special quality a building of this age takes on when it becomes a space in which to experience art.
Mercifully cleared of the historical bric-a-brac that in so many Heritage Buildings suffocates these silent voices in reconstituted visions of the past, these corridors and corners become Transitional Spaces. Stripped back and quieted they provide space for experiences that can variously be poignant, beautiful, confronting or humorous and perhaps, the artist hopes, at least in some small way transformative.
Worn timber floors, skirting and architraves hold the memories of generations of craftsmen and inhabitants.
Furniture is sparse, at times taking on an ecclesiastical quality and underlining the special nature of the activities that happen here - the occasional red couch, a beautiful antique chair, cabinet or table, all of which seem to hold their own stories.
At times even the particularity of the art encountered becomes secondary to the experience just of being in such places of nostalgia and hope; where new ways of seeing the world might be discovered, of envisioning the future and re-visioning the past.
Here I become aware, within myself, of Other Voices in Other Rooms.