Maria Amidu looks at longing in new Eastbourne exhibition

She is showing her work as the third artist in iniva’s Future Collect Commission partnership programme, a three-year programme designed to “create a dynamic new model to transform the culture of commissioning and collecting within museums.”

Maria’s exhibition centres around the piece 26,778,780 minutes, a new paper and text-based installation and accompanying sound piece which explores the dialogue between paper and writing. Featuring more than 1,000 sheets of laser-etched handmade abaca fibre paper, the work evokes a sense of absence and longing, as Maria explains – a work which requests what Maria describes as a ‘soft performative role’ from the public once a day.

“The work is about memory and the title of the show is a reference to the length of time of a longing that I have experienced. The work is grappling with memories and trying to retrieve myself in them. I don't want to go into detail what they are but I was transposed from east London to East Sussex when I was six and I lived in a children's home. The work is very much about me grappling with bits of myself that, as I say, are not retrievable.”

The huge number is another way of saying 51 years, in other words 51 years expressed in minutes: “It feels that the minutes are much more powerful than the years. You think of longing as very ephemeral as a sensation, that it is something you can't grab hold of and that's the point of the title. It doesn't encapsulate it with the idea of years. The temporality of it is really clear when you look at it over that extended period of time. The number encourages people to think about time in a way that 51 doesn't. The longing is about absence and it's an absence of connectedness and an absence of being connected. It is about what is missing. The commission piece is really about what is not there.

“It is made from more than 1,000 sheets of handmade abaca fibre paper, a really, really lovely light paper made of banana leaf fibre. It has a very light quality about it and it also has a fragility but also a tenaciousness to it, and I wanted to use it because of those qualities in the paper. I made more than 1,000 sheets. Writing is also a big part of my artistic practice and I've written a piece and that piece has been laser-etched onto the paper in two halves. The work is installed in two parts separately, 500 prints on a plinth to the right and 500 prints on a plinth to the left. They are forever separated and that separation is about what can't be put back together again. The text is very mundane, a moment from my childhood but I have also reimagined it. I'm trying to fill in the gaps of this very acute memory and the work itself is in two halves to emphasise the impossibility of reconnecting.”

Part of the work is what Maria calls an activation, a moment when the public are requested to fulfill a ‘soft performative role’: “There is a moment of activation every day at 4pm and at that moment the sheets get moved by air and some of them fall to the ground. The request is for the public to take care of them and to put the sheets back.”

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