Group Show at Forde

The Chair Bryony Dawson

It’s a Sunday when you picture it and getting dark, but the house lights aren’t on yet. A man is walking away from the house. He is carrying a chair: a length of teak, a rib-like arc, woven paper-cord greying a little where years of hands have handled. And apparently Danish, somewhat collectible. It is one in a set of six. The man is a father. He is one in a family of four. It’s the stale hours before supper time, and everyone is home, but the house feels empty. Only the mother has witnessed the abduction of the chair. Picture the recently deserted kitchen in fading light, the gap at the dining table where the chair had been. Describe the cupboards, the wallpaper, the fridge with its magnets and postcards, the patterned tea towels. These surfaces as faces feigning ignorance. Blank, but guilty-looking, like neighbours just caught spying. Walking to the end of the garden, away from sight, he. Why the chair? Because it was near to hand. Because a series of familial frictions had reached a limit and sometimes a father needs to be emphatic. Four stiff legs like prongs, swung quick through the open door. An animal to the slaughter. Clench and thud of the door behind him. The father and his rage go down the gravel path. At the end of the garden is a small furtive space under the trees. Nearby is a swampy drainage pond coated with unmoving spirals of dust and dead leaves. The trees above are quiet. He stops here, you imagine, chair in hand. His movements are precise and his face is a mask, though this performance is not intended to be seen. A father’s dignity is a complex thing. Sound is a vacuum, a wince. Maybe a blackbird leaps as he raises the chair above him. Then splintering, like bones could? Honey shards in black mulch. His face unchanged as he stoops to collect them, the force still ringing in his arms. Or no crash, no shatter? More likely a sorry give of the limbs, nudged out of shape, a simpering. What then? The absurdity of himself surrounds him like a sudden silence in a crowded room. He turns back towards the house. The lights have come on, yellow squares across the blue garden. The daughter will be in her bedroom, absorbed by her magazines, potions, strange regimes. The son stretched out in the bathtub, flat and pale as a filet of cod. And the mother will be laying the dinner table, all silence and pride, her rehearsed indifference. Write how it is for him now to look around for a place to set down the crumpled frame. How it is for him to go back up the gravel path towards the house. How it is to re-enter this house, which is still, after all, the very same house, just one chair short.

Banality as a site of friction

Ambiguities buried within automatic gestures. The everyday becomes a space where absurdity and critique merge, where what seems self-evident is called into question. The subversion of collective tropes reveals hidden facets of reality.