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It can be difficult not to be seduced by the networks of metaphor that surround Nina Canell’s works and work titles; titles that often read like chapters from a book, or like recorded fragments from a conversation relaying a narrative as potentially compelling as it is elusive.
Brief Syllable (Weak) and Brief Syllable (Saturated) were two truncated pieces of cable, one an offcut from a subsea power cable that ran along the coast of Scotland and capable of transmitting high voltages, the other a section of cable that was found in a field in Sweden. Both were suspended/embalmed in small crisp cubes of acrylic that sat on top of slim, meter-high cast concrete ‘plinths’ that in turn made a delicate surface-contrast with the brushed concrete finish of the gallery floor. These physically similar plinth pieces sat at either end of the L-shaped gallery space projecting, along their axes, an imaginary right-angled meeting point toward the entrance of the gallery itself. Such was the texture and the shiny pale-grey colour of the slice of cable in Brief Syllable (Weak) that for a moment one might have been fooled into thinking it a small trout, held, stilled, and abstracted from its school.
The truncated cylindrical form was rehearsed again at the front window of the gallery where Dimensions Withheld comprised two unopened rolls of carpet (one lime-green, the other lilac) lying side by side. The direction of potential flow here was perpendicular to their axes. The area of carpet that might potentially be rolled out to cover a floor area was left to be envisaged by the viewer, and with it any future, random lines of travel that might be traced by