SLUMP

BOWL

HOLE

Orissa Keane

07.05.26 - 30.05.26

The floor of Orissa’s grandmother’s house in Bangkok has been sinking over several years due to unknown structural damage below. The works in Slump bowl hole have been developed in response. Moving by necessity through this central room daily, physically moving her body to walk the perimeter around this unsound dip in the floor, Orissa began to imagine the recess as an entity. The slump became a presence that she and her cousins live with rather than any kind of absence, walking around it as with an obstacle rather than through as with a cavity, a hole. Taking pictures of what she began to refer to as ‘the hole in the floor’ to show people, she found these photos would never convey the contour of the slump truly; too much reflection on the dark varnished hardwood, always the wrong angle and position of her body with the camera. Then she tried many other ways to document the floor. Slump bowl hole reveals a selection of her attempts at this.

The floor is a two-channel video accompanied by a two-channel sound composition. All four channels loop at different times, bringing new pairings of images and sound together over the course of a day. The work features Orissa’s cousin Prana dancing and playing in the room with the slumped floor. At regular intervals a 3D animation of the slump, modelled from memory, comes into the loop. Ambient bird chatter recorded in the garden is the base onto which a composition has been laid. The music is derived from the sound of a Thai instrument called a saw-u (ซออู้) which usually hangs on the wall of the dining room in the Bangkok house. Orissa uses her voice and another saw-u in her home in Ōtautahi to respond to the original recordings. 

Over the time Orissa spent living in the house, there was talk of the problem of how to re-level the floor. It appeared that the surrounding walls were at risk of pulling towards the slump, and so it was more than just cosmetic. Car jacks were proposed to be positioned in the crawl space under the floor during the dry season to jack it up. Supports has car jacks with one of them holding a small photograph of the house. Grid step is a series of two photographs mounted on ceramic tiles which show an experiment in depicting and measuring the depth of the ‘hole’. At its deepest, the grid which is flush and level with the floor’s perimeter sits 25 centimeters above the slump. 

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Orissa is an artist and writer who has recently returned to Ōtautahi after living in her family home in Bangkok for some months. Her time there learning Thai has spurred on several projects orbiting family histories, lore and archives. She is interested in pulling at the absurdities in language, sound and architecture and how they can be representative of our relationships with surrounding objects and space. Orissa studied sculpture at University of Canterbury Ilam School of Fine Arts and graduated in 2019.

Poster design by Harris Wilson

Sponsored by Parrotdog beer 

With support from Creative New Zealand

Photography by Belinda Whitta