stephen eastaugh: ID (SOMEWAYS SEARCHING SOMEWHERE TO SOMEHOW SEE SOMETHING OR SOMEONE FOR SOMETIME) SERIES
22.04.22-14.05.22
Installation images, Stephen Eastaugh; ID (Someways Searching Somewhere to Somehow See Something or Someone for Sometime.) Series. Blockprojects, 2021. Photography: Simon Strong
ID = Identification. Any official document with your name and photograph or other information on it that you use to prove who you are.
ID = In psychoanalysis the ID is the deepest part of the unconscious mind that represents the most innate human needs and emotions such as hunger, joy, lust and anger.
ARTIST STATEMENT
This collection of documents documents a portion of my physical and conceptual passage of mostly safe conduct between the years 1982 and 2016. Eighty-four pages of expired Australian passports have been torn from the history of my extensive wander-lusting across seven continents and many oceans. A stray psycho-geographical flavour is found in this ID series as it playfully meanders over imagined and administered landscapes both urban and extremely remote in order to locate new vantage points.
I construct a visual travelogue with the visas, stamps, scribbles, dates and signatures of officialdom alongside my own organic vistas, marks, stitches, stains and attachments. A panoramic work connecting each scene via a single undulating horizon line which suggests a constant and steady drifting across longitudes and latitudes. Pages peppered with bureaucratic ink, topographical lumps, waves, clouds, pools, rocky terrains and a babble of foreign languages all paving the way to elsewhere.
An elongated wondering title, textured hills, watermarks, miniature but expansive views, human scribbles, exotic symbols and decades of my registered global pilgrimage clearly display an unsettled and unrelenting desire for travel. Humans have a basic need to move and that fact I have passionately embraced. I am hard-wired with a lust for a journey. All I need is a passport.
Passports are basically identification papers based on an ancient British document issued way back in 1414 so for over five hundred years fancy inscribed paper sheets have been in the luggage of lucky travellers. After the first world war the little blue, green or red passport booklet that we all recognise began to be used by anyone legally travelling internationally. I have managed to fill many passport pages with data and assorted official marks that have enabled me to cross hundreds of borders, to state where I have been and to prove that I am who I am.
These sheets of formal abstracted paperwork combined with my own informal physical legwork has made searching somewhere someway somehow to see something or someone for sometime very real, often surprising and the views have always been somewhat worthwhile.
