Interrogating Identity 12………..Melanie Banajo

Prior to the lecture in which she was referenced I’d already seen some shots from Banajo’s ‘Furniture Bondage’ series….

Banajo says:

“When I was a child, I was very restless and never wanted to sleep. To have a little rest my parents would tie me to the bed, but I was able to escape running around with a mattress and half the bed tied to me…As an adult my life goal is all about preserving my stuff, bringing it from A to B and back again and dropping some of the things in C in between. If I look at the objects maintaining my life as a condensation of material energy, I often wonder how long I could live free and happy from the gain I get out of that pure energy…I don’t actually own so much stuff, but often I dream of burning everything I have.”

I’d found the idea of being shackled/tied to our belongings interesting. As a metaphor of such, the images are amusing and disturbing in varying degrees of balance. I’d found them to be curiously mismatched, some appearing to be shot from a totally different headspace to others. For example the shot above along side the shot below.

However after looking at more of Banajos work, she seems willfully to engage in the practice of approaching the same/similar ideas from widely varying points of view, and vastly differing methods in a very capricious way. This could make her work seem untidy and ill-conceived, but if you can get past her non adherence to technique and consistency of approach much of her work is striking and fascinating. From the point of view of identity, the idea of our belongings defining/confining us is a well trodden path, but Banajo brings something new and visually very striking to the table.

The work referenced in the lecture ‘Thank You For Hurting Me, I Really Needed That’ was, however, completely new to me, and almost enough to make me go no further in looking at her extended work. Boanajo, during the course of a relationship break-up, tells us that she reached for a camera every time she felt tears welling up and shot a self portrait. In isolation, or even in a small grouping, these images did have a certain power, but as an extended body of work I found them to some how trivialise the situation, (which may well of course have been the point), and that viewing them was in itself a miserable exercise. Reminded of the Brotherus series of daily self portraits during a period of illness, this triggered another attack of one of the regular bees in my bonnet. I really struggle with this method of extended series examining a single phenomenon in a formulaic way. The Banajo approach is admittedly less formulaic, the poses,(albeit fairly unposed poses), and environment change in a limited way, but like the Brotherus work, we are presented with a work where most of the power is due to the repetition, or sense of scale of the overall work. In some cases this seems to be a bit like making a mountain of a molehill, taking a small and relatively inconsequential idea and aggrandising it purely by making it physically big. There are of course many exceptions to this, Donovan Wylies series of the Maze prison, Ruffs portraits, but it is a mechanic, to my mind, much over-used and something to be nervous of.

I’m glad I did investigate Banajo further however as I have rarely come across such an incredibly varied and individual vision. A lot of it completely goes over/under/around my head, but there is a sense of playfulness and absolute abandon about much of her work that is very exciting.

Masks and costumes, play acting, theatricality, sheer lunacy…..With such a varied catalogue of images, it would be impossible for some not to feel mannered and trying a little too hard, but there are so many of her images which literally stop you in your tracks that a further examination is more than warranted.