Terence Koh - These Decades That We Never Sleep (Black Drums), 2004

I was hesitant to include this work as I’ve previously referenced it in other research files, however, this is the big one: this is where the years-long goal to use masses of black rope in my work original came from, and to exclude it would be to remove the initial reference point that started it all.

I first saw Terence Koh’s These Decades That We Never Sleep (Black Drums) (Koh, 2004) in 2008, when I bought Francesca Gavin’s New Gothic Art (2008) from the bookshop in Tate Modern. I found most of the artists included in the book to be exciting and interesting, but I couldn’t stop going back to this one particular sculpture of Koh’s showing the charred, broken drumkit with its mass of gnarled, rotted ropes spewing out of it, as though it were a visible scream from the destroyed instrument. My brain immediately saw these ropes as trauma, as grief, and as rage; a visual representation of what I felt inside after decades of violence and abuse, and I’ve been tied to this idea ever since.

But it wasn’t just the physical work that spoke to me so strongly: the materials list itself was an extension of the work, expanding on the grim romanticism of the piece with descriptions that were both poetic one moment and jarringly blunt the next.

“Drum kit, paint, ropes from a ship found after midnight, black wax, plaster, vegetable matter, crushed insect parts, artist`s blood and cum[…]” (Saatchi Gallery: Terence Koh, no date).

The ropes I use were neither gathered from a shipwreck nor are they gnarled and tangled, but this has become a choice on my part that distinguishes them from Koh’s decaying mass. My ropes are clean, contained, and cut with precision so that they won’t fray, which is a closer representation of my own drive to contain, control, and mask my own trauma from the outside world.