P.D.F.* Exchange 
  *Portable Demonstration Facility
by Anna Dunnill

GET
SQUEEZE
SPIN
PINCH
HOLD
PULL
HOLD
PULL
CHOOSE
NOTICE
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P.D.F.* Exchange *Portable Demonstration Facility in action during Radiant Pavilion 2017. ​Photo by Sarah Lay

Roseanne reads this list of directives aloud. “Is ‘notice’ one?” she interrupts herself, putting down the stencilled sheet. “I don’t know if it is one, now that I look back on it.”

I think about what it means to notice; what it means to instruct another person to notice. It’s a softer word than ‘squeeze’ or ‘pull’ and connotes not an action, exactly, but more a frame of mind, the giving of attention. I’m not sure whether it’s a directive or not, but it’s undoubtedly a necessary instruction in the business of making art.

I’m in the car park of Jewell Station, squeezed comfortably into the back of a converted ice-cream van with artists Lynda Roberts, Ceri Hann, and Roseanne Bartley. Lynda and Ceri (who collaborate as Public Assembly) work between social engagement, jewellery/sculpture and design; Roseanne trained in jewellery but describes her experimental practice as “facilimaking.”

The van, Daisy, is Public Assembly’s studio: she’s quite beautiful, her outside painted white with wide silver stripes on the sides like vertical blinds. On the inside, she’s a versatile beast, fitted out with perforated MDF for hanging tools, a folding table, bench seats that double as storage. An A-frame with matching silver stripes is ready to be chalked with the next project.

Inside the van, P.D.F.* Exchange *Portable Demonstration Facility in action during Radiant Pavilion 2017. ​ Photo by Sarah Lay

Every Sunday fortnight Daisy is driven to the Camberwell Markets, where Lynda and Ceri unpack their collection of tools and sit inside, making jewellery out of collected market finds. People are invited to step in and join them at the table, conversations blooming while wearable objects emerge from cast-offs.

At other times, the van has held intimate curated sound works for a blindfolded audience (Sonic Imaginarium, 2017); on New Year’s Eve last year it became what Ceri calls “an oracular device - a space for divining the future and interpreting mystical texts.” I’ll admit right now that I’m in love with this mobile studio. It has the cosy air of a portable cubby, where rich ideas are passed back and forth across a table like a pair of pliers.

Inside the van, left to right, Ceri Hann, Roseanne Bartley and Lynda Roberts. 
​Photo by Fred Kroh

For 2017’s Radiant Pavilion, this was the travelling site of P.D.F. Exchange - the acronym stands, in this case, for ‘Portable Demonstration Facility’ - which was a live exploration of teaching and learning, jewellery-making and language. I was drawn to this event as soon as I read about it. Its appearances were unlisted, however: the artists ‘parasited’ off other events, deliberately secretive about where they might show up next. To my chagrin, I didn’t manage to experience it in operation.
​
Over the course of the 10-day festival, P.D.F. Exchange appeared at five openings (including one at Jewell Station, where we’re currently parked). Joining the longstanding tradition of artists interrogating pedagogical methods, the project’s modest premise involved one task, one student and multiple teachers - “the polar opposite to what it normally is,” as Lynda says.

Lynda was the Novice Maker; Roseanne the Dedicated Scribe. Ceri, the Concierge, roamed each exhibition opening to identify potential teachers - the VIPs - and invite them one by one into the van. Here they were tasked with instructing Lynda, the Novice, in the particular art of making an earring hook or hoop.

Banned from demonstrating, the VIPs were obliged to rely on a language-based transfer of knowledge, talking Lynda through the fiddly task. Each time the VIP spoke an instructional word - get, hold, pull, twist - Lynda repeated it aloud, echoed by Roseanne, who wrote down each word and stencilled them out. This text became a written record of the verbal instructions.

“The instructors would start to tune into their own languaging of making,” Roseanne explains. “So Lynda was learning something; but they were learning something about their own tacit language.”

The artists describe these stencilled lists with their chains of words as a kind of jewellery in itself, another method of ‘adornment.’ I’m captivated by this idea; it makes sense to me. Don’t words attach themselves to our skins and bodies, shifting with us through the world?

“Is language itself a technology?” Ceri says rhetorically, elbows on the folding table. He suggests, with growing animation, that the conversations we’re having are “actually part of this mechanic assembly of bodies in space, that can coexist - find significance in things - as a result of these strange sounds we’re able to make with our larynxes.”

This makes sense to me, too: language the first technology, before flint axes or fire. (Find a rock. Notice its shape and colour. Hold it this way. Strike it hard.) Language the looped wire between each of us, as well as the plier that bends and twists us.

The interview, left to right, Ceri Hann, Roseanne Bartley, Lynda Roberts and Anna Dunnill. Photo by Fred Kroh

Left to right, Roseanne Bartley, Lynda Roberts, Anna Dunnill and Ceri Hann. Photo by Fred Kroh

In P.D.F Exchange, then, language is the pivot point: both tool and outcome, means and end. Transferred initially between two people, it stretches out to a third, is captured: written down and ordered, transformed into its own piece of jewellery. These blocky stencil letters are an archive, and also a poem, and also an object.

Inside Daisy the ice-cream van some kind of magic happens. Talking to Lynda, Ceri and Roseanne I felt this in action; the power and safety of being in a contained space, around a table, hands busy making. The words emerging from each of us to hover above the table, spin themselves into new forms.

Ceri Hann during Radiant Pavilion 2017, P.D.F.* Exchange *Portable Demonstration Facility. ​Photo by Sarah Lay