Location Devices by Phoebe Porter

Artist list

Phoebe Porter

In 2005 Phoebe Porter relocated from Canberra to live and work in Melbourne. That experience generated this new body of work. It was an experience she came to define as being about connectedness: about finding her way in a new city, as well as staying in touch with the place she had left.

With map in hand we can find our way from A to B. But location is not only about streets and pavements. It is about identity and our inner emotional life as well. Relocating, one is transformed from a local to a stranger, from being in the centre of a network of friends to being anonymous. The reassurance we are given on maps as we enter a town, or emerge from a train station, that ‘You are here’ confirms a place and a time, but not the how or the why. It may have an ironic cosmic ring to it at times, but the personal and emotional element is necessarily absent.

Porter’s Location Devices offer a metaphysics of transit. To devise, she notes, means both to plan or design and to dream or imagine. All are equally pertinent to making a new city one’s home. What but dreams prompt such moves? Harry Beck’s famous London Underground map of 1933, from which her objects take their cue, came eventually to organize the very city it mapped. It shaped the way people experienced the city. Porter builds on this personalization:

“I decided to use schematic maps as a metaphor for networks, direction and belonging – for developing a personal route through life.”

The exhibition includes necklaces of aluminium, steel, gold and titanium balls. Its centrepiece is a 4 metre long schematic Network map cut from coloured sheet metal. Locations are marked by a series of wearable metal clips designed to adorn clothing.

Visitors to the exhibition are encouraged to purchase a clip from the Network and wear it as a tiny personal Location Device.

Porter’s clip-on Location Device is, for me, the opposite of the GPS systems that locate you with unnerving, dogged accuracy anywhere on the globe. With this jewellery – with adornment – you locate yourself in the network of your own particular and individual life: your allegiances, achievements, status, and predilections.

Extracts from the catalogue essay by Merryn Gates, 2008