Ella S. Mills
Attempting to write about Monica-Shanta’s ‘Death is a Place’ in a formal manner as installation, performance, and film loop is a slippery task.
Speaking with the artist, she reminds me that focusing on the materiality of the piece invites a viewer experience that encourages a distance – an experience that is in relation to the object – both observer and object maintaining their boundaries. The artist, however, explains how the work is ‘an interaction that is both open and induces an experience of falling boundaries, inviting experiential immersion and merging’.[1] Monica-Shanta asks us to take an imaginative leap and collapse our familiar approach of looking at into a being with. Conceptually she describes the work as contemplating ‘the universal transcendent nature of death, culturally specific traditions and historical instances of genocide’.[2] The circular installation on the gallery floor, consisting of approximately half a kilometre of jet-black synthetic hair, is 3.5 metres in diameter once constructed. When ‘performing plaiting’, the artist explains the event as both a ritual and an endurance, being equally meditative and physically painful, being seated for hours as her hands endlessly repeat the intertwining and unravelling of lengths of hair. In its static, installed form on the gallery floor, this long stretch of braid curled into a heap transforms into a different object – a dark mass. From a distance, the circular form appears as a deep pit or a black hole. When, as audiences, we first lay eyes on it, there is an anxiety about what this blackness might be. And yet, at the same time, as printmaker and creative producer Lorna Rose suggests, the large scale of the object makes it ‘alluring’.[3]
Hair has deep cultural significance and can symbolise a range of traditions and concepts. Hair thins and transforms as we age. We may lose our hair completely, from illness or treatments, and yet hair is one of the things that survives our death and continues to grow for a short period after we die. Rose again describes how ‘touching hair is also a really intimate act – that is not always welcome’.[4] The soft caressing of the hair via Monica-Shanta’s touch is countered by the pain the act induces. The ritualistic act of plaiting reflects life itself as something that’s woven and rewoven. Monica-Shanta integrates her whole self into the installation as an embodiment of perpetual presence. For her, death has no location; it is not the end, it is transformative. The looping of the film signifies the endless process of life and death.
In the exhibition Ritual Touch curated by myself and Lorna Rose, ‘Death is a Place’ was installed in conversation with works by the artists Gladys Paulus and Ingrid Pollard. Thematically, the exhibition focused on materiality of touch and the significance of time and rhythm in rituals of creating. All three artists’ repetitive and slow creative practices can be thought of as ritual – an act of making shifts from a doing to a being with, where touch transcends the material and also exists as an energy. Monica-Shanta’s work calls on rhythmic traditions rooting human presence and interaction in the natural world. Her installation collapses historical and personal pasts, bringing to the fore a resonance of being imbued in the objects through touch.
Monica-Shanta is a multi-disciplinary visual artist who weaves together digital image and film, interactive performance, drawing and installation, through a practice that is informed by both Western and Asian cultural traditions. Her work is the impulse of an artist embodying a space of cultural instability, engaging with universal human experiences as portals to ontological and philosophical questions. She has been based in the south-west of England for over a decade, sharing her practice as an artist and educator.
June 2024
‘Death is a Place’ was installed as a part of the group exhibition Ritual Touch at MIRROR, Arts University Plymouth from 27 January 2023 to 11 March 2023, guest curated by talking on corners.
Title quote is taken from Monica-Shanta, ‘Death is a Place’, Monica-Shanta, https://www.monica-shanta.net/death-is-a-place/.
[1] Monica-Shanta, email discussion with author, May 2024.
[2] Monica-Shanta, ‘Death is a Place’.
[3] Lorna Rose in ‘Ritual Touch: Monica-Shanta, Gladys Paulus and Ingrid Pollard’, MIRROR SHORTS Ritual Touch V2, 11 May 2023, video, https://mirrorplymouth.com/shorts/ritual-touch.
[4] Rose, ‘MIRROR SHORTS Ritual Touch V2’.
