Photographer Paul Bevan’s images and quotes play with the notion of the encounter with the archive itself.

“We are dressed but at the same time naked under our clothes, with dress and photographs alike as keepers of secrets and fonts of suggestion. Thus, costume and photography present a kind of ‘simultaneous dilemma’ that can be framed within the realm of the metaphysical; an idea that is situated between the actual and the notional.

Similarly, in thinking around theatrical performance, and photographic images as capsules of performed time/space, an illusive appearance is dressed over the body or thing/referent itself. The theatre, or suspension of disbelief, sits in the ‘in-between’, neither one thing nor the ‘other’. This can be seen in terms of a liminal space, where liminality defines a ‘threshold’ between two different existential planes (such as conscious and unconscious); photography can present an order that is permanently liminal, and the theatre temporarily liminal (lasting only for the duration of the piece).

Such space exists at Blythe House. It exists in the content and context of much of the stored material (costumes and photographic images from the theatre). But as a repository of an archive of objects (and secrets) it becomes a kind of liminal space by virtue of the latency of the work that is lying dormant (like photography). But it is also an exhibition in the present, and I wanted to respond to this idea as a site-specific performing body using photography.”

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