Review: Cambier’s Woman Waltzing in Time
A retelling of my experience visiting the opening night of ‘Women Waltzing in Time’ a multimedia installation by Anna Cambier.
I take a right from the seafront heading into Hove, a sign points down the stairs. Stepping down to basement level I arrive at the house of the Women Waltzing in Time. The space was romantic. Ahead of me a long corridor filled with people animated with delight. The walls were cracked and aged with wrinkles of their own. The passage of time is as rife in Cambier’s work as it is present in the crumbling building. There were three rooms attached to the artery of people coming in and out of the exhibition.
The first room was the living room. It hosted many objects. I was taken by the shoe creeping out of a cupboard door in the corner. I was no longer alone, one of the women waltzing through time was stepping out to see me. A spotlight shot up through the chair to my left casting a glow like the opening credits of a film. The film would have been a memoir. The exhibition was a homage to Cambier’s grandmother and by extension all the women she has worked with. This was a space for memory, chaotic and raw. The mixed media sculptures writhe around the room. Cogs, limbs and scattered pieces thread the walls, floor and table together. Like brain neurons everything is interconnected and steeped in nostalgia. This exhibition existed in a split reality, straddling the physical and metaphysical. The sculptures were a gateway into the collective conscience of all the women Cambier has encountered and interacted with.
Backing out of the living room and moving down the corridor I gazed into the second room. This space was long and tunnel-like. At the end of the room planks of wood rested against the back wall. Along the ceiling boarded ridges were coming down each side of the room like a ribcage. A moving image was projected on top of all this debris. The projection looked like onion skin under a microscope. The cellular pattern warped and waned across the ridges, jagged white lines cutting through the dark. The movement was disorientating. If you looked long enough you would get lost in space, lost in thought. Compared to the living room this tunnel represented a loss of memory. Thoughts moving in and out of focus as you struggle to retrieve what was once familiar. Cambier researched the involuntary movement, patterns, rhythm, and unconscious forms of expression of people living with dementia. This space felt like a visual suggestion of how interferences in thinking might be experienced.
The third room in the house was a mix of old and new. Naive looking sculptures stood in front of projections of old hands moving across the walls. The childlike nature of the objects offset the footage of aged movements affected by dementia. Cambier suggests that time is nonlinear. Instead of moving in one direction, memory is flexible. The mismatch of items found in the house of the Women Waltzing in Time is testimony to this. The experience of moving through each room disrupts the accepted truth that time is an irreversible line moving forward. There are similar sculptures in the first and third room, yet the setting is different. Even recent memories of the work I’d just seen were becoming spliced together to form an overall picture of the exhibition.
Between each room collages and short extracts of text adorned the walls of the main corridor. There were charming snippets of conversation between Cambier and her grandmother. One read as follows:
I am 84 years old
How old am I?
84. You have such a beautiful age.
Yes.
How old are you?
I am 22 years old.
You are so young.
Am I 54 years old?
You are 84 years old.
How old are you?
I am 22 years old.
Writing this I am 21, similar in age to Cambier. I lost my grandmother when I was 7. She passed away before I could meet her as an adult, but if Cambier is right and time is nonlinear, I have met my grandmother again at 21. This is not to say that I had a spiritual awakening but that this exhibition evoked memories from my past I had not connected with for a long time. It was this moment that made me grateful for art and Anna for inviting me to her exhibition. My grandmother's friend recently told me “everybody knew about the Penny boys,” one of which was my dad. I have longed to know more about my grandmother. Attending ‘Women Waltzing in Time’ was a meditative practice in honouring the connections we make through life, in particular those lost to the past.
As it was the opening night, family and friends of Cambier had come out in force. The occasion was joyful and emotional. We lined the walls of the corridor as Anna made a speech. Several people were brought to tears, I was moved despite holding no personal connection to Cambier herself. This exhibition was both personal and universal. I am from Essex where my grandmother lived. Anna is from Germany, yet we find ourselves in Brighton waltzing together in the same dance.
