In A Thousand Plateau’s Deleuze and Guattari use the term ‘plane of immanence’ to signal a turn away from notions of transcendence, pre-existing forms and original genesis.
In her new body of work Sayal-Bennett’s presents drawings, sculptures, and one projection, the latter two can be understood as drawings in an expanded sense. Manifesting as a series of invitations, Sayal-Bennett is concerned with what the viewer ‘does’ or ‘makes’ with the drawings. As their significance is nothing more than their connection, they have no discrete or closed identity. Associations, memories and specific visual literacies are brought to the drawings by the viewer, and the ‘work of art’: the set of connecting relationships between the viewer and the drawings, therefore constantly changes.
The drawings appropriate the vernaculars of common diagrammatic systems such as architecture and design, without prior referents. By making simulacral drawings, drawings which simulate a signified or appear to refer to real objects, she explores how, through the interpretive process, a referent is created. The referent is not a physical object to which the drawing supposedly refers, but the viewer’s experience of the perceived referent. This is instated through their operation of use or ‘reading’ of the work. The referent, or the experience of it, which are one and the same thing, is created resulting from the encounter of the viewer and the drawing and exists only after this relation is formed. In her work Sayal-Bennett aims to productively exploit this temporal distinction, the way in which the referent exists only after it is created by the interpretive process. She is interested in how new ‘signifieds’ are created through such operations of use, and how this reverses the chronology of normative referencing.
