Mysteries and play-states: meet the artist behind Diagrammatica, at Fed Square for RISING

ST: Can you tell us a little bit about what visitors will experience in Diagrammatica?

JM: Visitors are going to experience two states. The first one is occurring in a shop space inside the Atrium at Fed Square. Once you enter this room, you are in a different world already. This is the entry point into the project. Inside that room you’re experiencing a fluid, moving collision of sound and images.

What you don’t know when you go into that room, is that those sounds and images are live, and they’re being generated from beneath the ground of that shop space, in a bunker that you can’t see.

You’re then invited to join a group to adventure down into a cavern beneath that room.

The hosts of the project guide people every hour, a new group, that goes down and replaces the group that’s already down there, so the people in the room upstairs are seeing the work of the people currently in the bunker.

The whole project is, in a sense, a sensory device. An instrument or a system that is constantly moving and constantly changing and recalibrating itself, to try to register what is not seen.

ST: What is the work each part of the system is doing, and how does that work together with the audience to create a sensory experience?

JM: It’s probably best to start with the title. Diagrammatica obviously implies diagrams. We think of diagrams as, in a way, drawings or a way of notating or reaching or explaining things that we don’t understand or we’re trying to understand.

This project isn’t a diagram that is showing something, it is a diagram as a ‘thing’.

Imagine that you took a mashup of fragments of everything that we understand, and we got to play with them in the way that we do poetry or music or abstract art.

We get to, not seek answers, but just see what emerges if we play with all these possible knowledges and different perspectives.

ST: You’re known for your work in performance, live art, participatory art, but you started life as a painter. Can you tell us how that background has led to this work?

JM: Training as a painter, I learned that drawing is a way of thinking, and that is what I return to in the studio, again and again.

This work is in a way, a return to drawing as a central element, but also what does drawing mean? What does it mean to invite people into the play or the performance of drawing?

ST: You’re collaborating with sound artists Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey, and Rhian Hinkley, who is a filmmaker, among others. Can you tell us about how you work together?

JM: Tim and Maddie and Rhian are both makers in the same mould that I am, their work is an amalgamation of interesting parts from different disciplines – it’s exciting to work with people who get the project on that level.

I’m working with a fabulous team, costume designer, Andrew Treloar, Katie Sfetkidis is doing lighting. Chantal Marks is working on spatial design. There is a wonderful hosting team of Charlie Lee and Torie Nimmervoll. Everyone is exceptional at being able to register if somebody needs a little prompt, how to keep things moving, and how to create a space which feels like it unfolds in a way which is useful and interesting for people.

There’s also a series of guest musicians who will perform on different days.

All these great people – some of whom I’ve worked with before, are helping it come together.

ST: What are the artists and collaborators doing as part of Diagrammatica?

JM: Everybody working on the project is performing, in the sense that they are responding live to each other.

Rhian is filming what is changing, as the fragments and sculptural components of the project are remade by the public.

That film is then processed through a time-based distortion, and that is sent to Tim and Maddie and that information affects which set of sounds are being heard and how they’re heard in the room.

ST: What’s the role of improvisation in that?

JM: It’s improvisation in a play state. Essentially, it’s wide open; you can do absolutely anything down there, within the limits of the system, but you have to work your way through it. It is an intuitive system, the objects, images and sounds guide you.

It’s very much about putting people into a space where they have to trust not knowing.

ST: What do you want people to take away from it?

JM: That there can be moments in our world that are sacred, mysterious anomalies, and how important it is to create spaces for those moments in our highly segmented, understood, compartmentalised experience of our lives. And how rich and meaningful it is to be in that state.

Imagine for instance the CERN Hadron Collider, and how that exists in the public imagination, or the James Webb telescope or the Voyager probe. There are moments and things that exist in our world, which are reaching for something which we can’t quite understand.

Sometimes we can’t grapple with those things inside frames, or contexts that we already know, we need to reach for new forms of doing and understanding.

If I was to put this project in a gallery, people already have expectations about what galleries do, how they behave and what they might experience there.

It’s exciting to explore a challenging space that has a bit of mystery and atmosphere to it.

ST: How does the Slot 9 space create that mystery?

When we were in there, initially I was like, this is going to be really tricky, but it feels so vibey to go down into this subterranean world – we have to do the project here. 

It’s long, it’s almost 50 metres long, it has two levels and you are constantly moving.

It has meant that we’ve had to shift a few things, about how we thought it was going to happen, but I feel we’re adding so much by being in there, because the experience of going from the Atrium, being escorted down into this spaceship, or submarine underneath the ground, is amazing. It’s going to be great. 

ST: Are there any easter eggs in the experience? 

Oh, many, but I’m not going to give them away. Depending on whether your world is art or science or science fiction, you may pick up on them. But there is no privileging of one state or another within the experience. It is beautifully, satisfyingly, endlessly reaching for meaning.