The Newpaper, March 2007
Everyday another human interest story replaces that of the day before. They are often stories of defiance or survival against quite adverse situations. How do these tales from strange places enter the public’s consciousness? Sitting at a kitchen table each turn of the page reveals extraordinary events happening to ordinary people in alien places. These imaginary landscapes are passively consumed and are sometimes remembered but often forgotten, replaced by the current headline.
Melanie Jackson’s work questions, How can we make sense of these people and places? She has found that the discovery of a news story can catalyse an investigation that using just the limited facts embarks on a journey into the imagination. Scouring international papers she is able to explore how far she can travel with these stories without leaving the city.
‘I am interested in the sheer quantity of news from elsewhere that is available to us without leaving home. When I collected foreign language newspapers in London I found 250 just in the newsagents and vendors around my work and home. I’m interested in how much people have to filter, how they make sense of what comes into their lives through the TV and through newspapers.”
The first newspaper story to appear in her work was inspired by an article in a Norwegian newspaper. It was story about a fishing trawler that when it tried to haul in the nets, the herring all turned simultaneously causing the ship to capsize. Inspired by the how the small collective act of turning had caused such devastation Jackson made a miniature of the vessel capsized as a ship in a bottle. She exhibited this with a film edited with footage of the north Atlantic that she had acquired after writing letters detailing her project to the coastal local newspapers in the UK. “ A fantastic woman sent me 40 years worth of the footage her merchant seaman husband had documented. She also sent me his wartime diary of what it was like to be capsized on a boat.”
For her exhibition ‘Some Things You Are Not Allowed To Send Around The World at Matt’s Gallery in London, Jackson constructed an installation of small-scale sculpture and video that had grown out of her ongoing interest in found stories and news media.
Imaginary landscapes of minutely detailed architectural models were laboriously hand crafted out of newsprint into cranes, water towers, satellite receivers, refugee and holiday camps which were dotted throughout the gallery. Jackson describes these as wanting to make physical landscapes out of words and paper.
“The way that the landscapes and structures sited the video screens reminded me of the way that words and text boxes accommodate photographs. I also wanted to explore what I love about newspapers; their storytelling, temporality, low grade materiality, and what I hate about them; urgency, faux authoritarianism and objectivity, discontinuity, – and ultimately their entropy. I wanted to make something intricate and time consuming in defiance of their single day of currency.”
The films collated stories investigating migrant labour forces and their movements in a local and international context. Contrary to news reporting, the authenticity, linear and logical conclusion of a story was unimportant. Jackson collected the stories from word of mouth and news channels and was aware that the physical journey to the source of the story may be fruitless in authenticating it so instead tried to make sense of it other ways.
‘Some Things was oriented around a central story, the tale of a Filipino maid working in Hong Kong whose “bedroom” is a kitchen cupboard. At night she removes its contents and climbs inside to sleep; in the morning on rising, she refills it and starts her work. Jackson re-told the woman’s story via a brief, simply-drawn, looped video animation screened on a partition at the installation’s entrance: a hand stacking plates; a person disappearing into a tiny cupboard; a window darkening and growing light again. It is a commonplace in Hong Kong for domestic workers to occupy marginal spaces in its tiny flats – but this is an extraordinary scenario. Jackson has a long standing interest in the newspaper cartoon and its ability to simultaneously accommodate gravitas and the comedic.
A later animated work, Made in China retells the story of a young Chinese girl labourer forced to work in an eyelash factory in Hong Kong who escapes from the confines of an overcrowded workers dormitory by making a leap for freedom via the window using her woven bed sheets. This modern day fairytale spotted by Jackson in the South China Post had been circulated round the globe by the media. Continuing the Chinese whisper Jackson interlaced the themes of work and migration with another story of a young musician who took the journey from China to London to study the traditional Chinese string instrument the ‘erhu’ under English tutorage. ‘The work wasn’t about authenticity in the end’ notes Jackson, “ but about an impression of space and the resonance of the tale.”