TAKING a touring production across the Channel many years ago to the European continent, the director of theatre company Stan’s Cafe was immediately struck by the magnitude of what lay ahead of him – the countless individuals living over unfamiliar borders.
The numbers were difficult for James Yarker to get his head around, and that’s where the idea for a new exhibition came from.
“If you grew up in an island of 60 million people, it’s hard to get a sense of how big the world is,” he said, as he recalled the genesis of “Of All The People In All The World”, now open at ArtHouse Jersey’s Capital House gallery following an impressive 21-year run.
Returning home after the tour, he applied himself to the challenge of giving meaning to what otherwise might be barren statistics, conceiving of the idea of representing numbers of human beings using grains of rice.
Until 6 October, ArtHouse Jersey’s gallery will be filled with labelled sheets of paper occupied by piles of those grains carefully counted – or weighed – to represent information about the world around us.
The “performance installation” comprises different arrangements of these piles to represent, for example, population figures in the Channel Islands, or numbers of people living alone, or the very wealthy. Local data helps anchor the installation, wherever it is, in the community now experiencing it.
But other piles represent statistics of international significance – the number of deaths in the Holocaust, or the number of individuals who have walked on the moon compared with the teams that helped put them there, for example.
From time to time, a trio of performer-installers reorganises the grains so that visitors to the gallery from one day to the next will be confronted with different information in what Mr Yarker describes as “a playful exploration of the world around us”.
“The key thing is that while we research the numbers, the grains of rice stand in for those numbers so that it becomes a quite physically and emotionally engaged experience,” he explained.
To represent the entire world in grains of rice would be impractical, but conveying snapshots of that world, or different obsessions – as he puts it – becomes entirely realistic and, in the process, generates often surprising reactions from those present. The statistics are arranged in labelled piles creating an ever-changing landscape of rice in juxtapositions that can be moving, shocking, celebratory, witty and thought provoking.
“Even young children respond to finding a grain of rice on the floor and, like a lost person, asking where it belongs,” Mr Yarker said.
