Four ways to go from A to B, by Merryn Gates

Four ways to go from A to B
In 2005 Phoebe Porter relocated from Canberra to live and work in
Melbourne. That experience generated this body of work. It was an
experience she came to define as being about connectedness: about finding
her way in a new city, as well as staying in touch with the place she had left.
With map in hand we can find our way from A to B. But location is not only
about streets and pavements. It is about identity and our inner emotional life
as well. Relocating, one is transformed from a local to a stranger, from being
in the centre of a network of friends to being anonymous. The reassurance we
are given on maps as we enter a town, or emerge from a train station, that
‘You are here’ confirms a place and a time, but not the how or the why. It may
have an ironic cosmic ring to it at times, but the personal and emotional
element is necessarily absent.
Porter’s Location Devices offer a metaphysics of transit. To devise, she notes,
means both to plan or design and to dream or imagine. All are equally
pertinent to making a new city one’s home. What but dreams prompt such
moves? Harry Beck’s famous London Underground map of 1933, from which
her objects take their cue, came eventually to organise the very city it
mapped. It shaped the way people experienced the city. Porter builds on this
personalisation:
“I decided to use schematic maps as a metaphor for networks,
direction and belonging – for developing a personal route through
life.”
In cartographic style, let me propose a key to understanding these works.
Porter’s titles form the primary set of four reference points: Connected,
Transit, Express and Location Device. These are all resonant of physical
travel, by foot, road, rail or air.
Ingeniously, the jeweller’s devices from which the necklaces are constructed
enact these functions on the body. Porter comments that as she was making
these works she was aware that “…there is an interesting relationship
between the way we simplify geography to understand a transport network
and how we simplify ideas, memories, and information to understand our
place in the world.”
The linking mechanism – Connected – uses ball bearings and is
multidirectional. We are, I suggest, linked to such things as place, time, work
and friends. These ‘links’ are the kind of defining choices that shape our lives.
There is, however, some flexibility in the way we maintain these connections.
Consequently, the links allow the pieces to move with the body.
The linear elements – Transit – take us from one place to another. In Porter’s
neck pieces, these can be personalised by connecting them in a variety of
ways. In a similar fashion, our lines of transit are determined by ever changing

things such as favourite places, commitments, habit and efficiency of
movement.
Clarity of purpose – Express – is the hallmark of Beck’s schematic map. His
system has been adopted around the world, and not only for rail travel. The
circular nodes, which broadly speaking represent relay points, quantify
distance or progress. The movement through these nodes may be of blood, of
electricity, of trains or of a necklace around a body.
“I love the idea that the same drawing could represent any type of
network: an electrical circuit, a computer network, the
transportation system, a network of friends or colleagues”, says
Porter.
Ease of passage is often coded: for example the daily ticket, eligibility for
concession, priority status. We carry such ‘tickets’ on our person, ready to
declare our legitimacy. Colour is frequently a marker of these distinctions. The
colour blue, for instance – Location Device – refers to the process of creativity
for Porter. She explains:
“I was particularly moved by a scene from William Kentridge’s
Stereoscope, in which usually invisible lines of communication
(connections between people) are drawn in cobalt blue, shooting
from the telephone switchboard out in all directions across the city.”
Blue, used in Location Device, is therefore the colour of telecommunication
and is, with mobile technology, an exponentially growing, more intricate
network. Red remains the traditional, symbolic colour for denoting the blood
that courses within our bodies along that internal arterial network. Yellow is,
happily, the colour of London’s Circle Line, the closed circuit mirrored in
Melbourne. Colour has an additional role when working with aluminium or
titanium, because through anodising the metal’s surface hardness is
increased.
Porter’s clip-on Location Device is, for me, the opposite of the GPS systems
that locate you with unnerving, dogged accuracy anywhere on the globe. With
this jewellery – with adornment – you locate yourself in the network of your
own particular and individual life: your allegiances, achievements, status, and
predilections.
Merryn Gates
June 2008
Note: all quotes from the artist are from correspondence with the author, January – May 2008.
KEY
LINKS PATHWAYS SYSTEMS MEANING
place commitment adornment yellow
time habit electricity blue
work efficiency transport metal
friends favourites blood red

GENERAL ASSEMBLY_RE SPECIAL EDITION– IMAGE CAPTIONS
General Assembly Brooch RE01
Blanche Tilden and Phoebe Porter (Studio Hacienda) 2022
Aluminium, glass, stainless steel
85 x 30mm
Image: Andrew Sikorski

General Assembly Brooch RE02
Blanche Tilden and Phoebe Porter (Studio Hacienda) 2022
Aluminium, glass, stainless steel
85 x 30mm

General Assembly Brooch RE09
Blanche Tilden and Phoebe Porter (Studio Hacienda) 2022
Aluminium, glass, stainless steel
85 x 30mm
Image: Andrew Sikorski

General Assembly Brooch RE14
Blanche Tilden and Phoebe Porter (Studio Hacienda) 2022
Aluminium, titanium, glass, stainless steel
45 x 45mm
Image: Andrew Sikorski

General Assembly Brooch RE19
Blanche Tilden and Phoebe Porter (Studio Hacienda) 2022
Aluminium, titanium, glass, stainless steel
45 x 45mm
Image: Andrew Sikorski

General Assembly Brooches – RE Special Edition 2022
Blanche Tilden and Phoebe Porter (Studio Hacienda)
Aluminium, titanium, glass, stainless steel
Image: Andrew Sikorski