Jill Martin Boualaxai

Artist Statement

Working across various media, my work is led by  an attraction to experimentation and a curiosity of adaptability across extremes of scale, often through modular construction. Creating puzzles of the past from fictional futures, my practice explores our sense of space and imagined archaeologies.

The focus of my Postgraduate study has been to research the role art plays in presenting an alternative archaeology of the recent past, referencing modern subcultures such as Rave. For contemporary archaeologists, ancient cultures and their worldly rituals leave little trace and have historically been shrouded in mystery; existing in the present, we can only eavesdrop on the past. If we fast forward a few thousand years, we may consider what ‘The Archaeology of Rave’ may become, and how this rave phenomena may be interpreted by future generations. The snippets of rave era footage could be mistaken for collective tribalistic movements and euphoric behaviour, and could be viewed in the future as comparative to religion, with the frenzied dance often associated with religious rituals.

Using glass, bronze, and clay, I have begun to depict a mythology of rave; these materials themselves have a dense history that stretches back through archaeological contexts. Taking the aesthetic of traffic control signage, my most recent work incorporates iconography of dancing figures and the smiley face of acid house into ritualistic totems. These sculptural forms delineate a sacred space for rave and echo the form of neolithic henge monuments. The appropriation of road signage is a nod to the London M25 orbital, which was newly completed in 1986 and carved out new routes into the English countryside; facilitating the early rave scene. Pilgrims seeking out the location of a Rave would often gather at motorway service stations, where cryptic messages were left in telephone boxes; or they could be found circling the M25 merry-go-round to intercept pirate radio transmissions.

In taking something as iconic as the smiley face of acid house and creating a ‘religion’ around this, my work highlights the difficulties of interpreting the ancient past. Our present day archives are destined to be viewed by a future society through the context in which they live; we cannot predict which elements may become incorporated into a narrative which misinterprets these artefacts, as is the case with present day archaeologists and the artefacts left by ancient civilisations.