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ARTSDESK 700 LITRES OF DAMP Her last exhibition h
ad her creating cheese from mould found in apartments, now Avril Corroon is investigating damp and, yet again, entwining her work with the on-going housing crisis. Avril Corroon is a socially conscious artist, whose work falls within a category that is sometimes referred to as ‘political art’, ‘protest art’ or ‘artivism’: her latest project is the culmination of a 2-year research period into the living conditions of 55 households in London and Dublin. In the course of the last two years, Corroon investigated the problem of dampness in residential buildings. “I was invited to come up with a research project that would lead to an exhibition with TACO!, an artist-led space in London. Between then and now, the development phase involved a radio show, a film screening and my own version of a poster campaign. During this time I was also in talks with Sara Greavu, the curator at Project Arts Centre, about creating a work that spoke to the context of the housing crisis in Ireland. We launched DAMP TANK, and after receiving Arts Council support I was able to expand the project.” As part of her preparation for this undertaking, the artist reached out to members of the tenants’ union CATU and the general public, and organised it so that everyone who consented to participate would receive an “energy-efficient and high-quality” dehumidifier. In return, each household contributed their stories, their ideas, and crucially, they collected their damp for the artist to use as material in her work. In Dublin alone, over 700 litres of damp have been collected and are now on display in the exhibition at Project Arts. “What I was most surprised and privileged to experience over the course of this project was people’s belief in the work. Participants took the process on with careful consideration. Some wrote about the process, prioritising the activity of dropping off the damp to pick-up locations or to Project Arts Centre in their routine. Others reported on the effect the dehumidifying has had on their breathing and general comfort in their home. Some are even making drawings mixing the water with ink on paper.” 48 Corroon’s installation is fascinating to the extent that it foregrounds the concept of dampness; what it is and what it means, its semantic and symbolic connotations. Dampness, of course, is merely the presence of water, and water, as essential to life as air, has long held a fundamental place in the mythologies, metaphysics and allegories of human civilisation. In ancient Greece, for instance, early philosophers like Thales of Miletus, a preSocratic thinker, held the view that water was the original substance of the universe, creating all matter from its depths and reabsorbing all matter at the end of its cycle. According to Aristotle, Thales’ speculative position derived from the fact that “(i) the nutriment of everything, and (ii) the seed of everything, is moist.” This argument was rejected by Aristotle and his master Plato: although both remained advocates of the elemental importance of water, they held that it is only one of the four cosmological building-blocks, along with earth, air and fire. As antiquated as the ancient Greeks’ ideas may appear to us today, the constitutive relationship that is articulated between water and flourishing life is nonetheless familiar: oceans cover our planet, rainfall supports and maintains our plant-life, and the composition of our very bodies, as we often hear quoted, is 60% water. These statements about water’s role in our ecosystem bear a tangible similarity to the ancient Greeks’ conception of the world,