Ghosts of the ordinary: Kerry-Leigh Cawrse

Kerry-Leigh Cawrse
Ghosts of the ordinary
Black and White photography
TLC Student Collection
(South Africa, 2020)

Overview: A triptych of three black and white photographs of abandoned building in Johannesburg, South Africa, Left and middle images both show interiors wall meeting; right image shows a tower jutting up in the sky. (There are other images in the series, not shown here).

Artist's Statement: “Ghost of the ordinary” I feel as if this series resonates with the notions of isolation and the tribulations we as a society face today. Each photograph depicts the ghost of the people who previously lived there, their particular taste and lifestyle. As we move out of lockdown, I notice a society craving human interaction. We have adapted to a new normal. Touching, embracing
and gathering is a thing of the past, a mere ghost of the pasts ordinary. I feel as if these

images provide a new outlook on isolation and of what once was. 

Pam Allara: The life cycle of a building has parallels with the human life cycle. When it is being constructed, it is exciting to see not only its form but also its function take shape. Of course, the final product, just like that of offspring, does not always meet expectations, and can be disappointing. Nonetheless, any  new addition to the cultural landscape finds is uses over time, and by association these functions can also elicit fondness for the structure. However, the building will inevitably grow old, outliving its function and likely losing its structural stability in the process. At that point, it will be dismantled, and its ‘body parts’ trucked off to a  landfill.

The black and white photographs in Kerry-Leigh Cawrse’s “Ghost of the Ordinary” series captures buildings around Johannesburg in the last stage of the process: the dismantling. It is unclear whether this is purposeful, or if the buildings have simply been abandoned and are crumbling on their own. As abstract compositions, they are handsome. We look up from ‘street level’ at an interesting interplay of vertical and horizontal lines and rectangles. Her care with the composition honors what once was: that they were once well-designed and functioning edifices. Cawrse’s choice of black and white rather than color photography is further indication that we are looking at the building’s past life.

The enjoyment of these well-made images is soon replaced by the recognition that the structures themselves are in poor condition. Clearly abandoned, they will not be renovated or rebuilt; their future is to collapse, either intentionally or through neglect. In this suspended state between ‘life and death’ it is inevitable to look at the architectural elements and wonder about their previous functions. A kitchen in one, a tall tower in another provide  hints of  former functions. For the artist, they evoke “the ghosts of people who previously lived there.” Isolated and derelict, the vulnerable buildings are thus a metaphor for the deaths caused by the coronavirus pandemic, which has certainly led in some cases to former homes being abandoned. Structures don’t immediately return to some neutral state once their occupants have left. There is an aura that remains, even though we have no way of knowing “what once was.” These images speak to loss and death, and so become monuments to mourning.

 Mark Auslander:In an intriguing corrective to Pierre Bourdieu's  characterizations of body-house-cultue formal homologies, anthropologist Thomas Beidelman observed that it is through our houses and our bodies that we come to know, or at least glimpse, the most elusive aspects of our social and cultural world. As our world moves into a a puzzling successor state, still in the midst of becoming something beyond the pandemic, abandoned homes may be the fitting 'royal road' into glimpsing our elusive present and almost future moment.

In the initial triptych of the series, the artist photographs abandoned houses in stark black and white, spaces haunted by those who once dwelled within them, silent monuments to a lost world of social proximity that has not quite yet been replaced by a new order of things. Each of the three images is centered on prominent diagonal forms, a shadow in the left, and jutting beams in the center and right frames. One senses the distant traces of an arm held out, seeking another, alas without any hope of a reciprocated gesture of acknowledgement. Cowrie’s ghosts, one suspects, are not only the former inhabitants of these decaying structures, but the specters of our recent selves, who hold the body memories of touch and closeness which now must discipline ourselves every day to avoid. It is up to all of us to rebuild a new social world on the ruins of the old, balancing the need for health with the imperatives of retaining and refashioning that which makes us human.