Florence Carr: Sentiment & Simmetry

Somewhere between pages 196 and 226 of the first volume of Freud’s Gesammelte Werke, one may come across the account of a patient—like in most of his clinical cases, a woman—who is said to have shifted from compulsively enumerating her erotic reveries to counting, with equal fixation, the tiles of her wooden floor. It may only be a rumor, spread by a footnote in a distant article. Unable to find a translation of the book, discouraged by my lack of German, I have been left with the anecdote alone. Yet I sometimes still wonder: what did those tiles look like?

Scratched out, a little damaged by time, by the passage of day, of footsteps. Some bear a different tone, a mild twist in color. They’re uneven, specific — uniform in size yet singular through cracks, their veins creaking through the wood. It seems like each stick bears its own story. Florence Carr’s parquet assemblages operate according to an internal logic that unravels tile after tile, breaking down and rebuilding their shape from recuperated flooring, later rearranged with geometrical nostalgia. They grow out of singular units, disrupting a common ground, dividing it into sections that scatter and echo one another — a striped patchwork operating through synecdoche, each segment pointing toward the elsewhere of a house, a home, a construction site that no longer exists and can only be traced through fragments. Something akin to Hanne Darboven’s formula of system-making seems to be at work (destruction—structure—construction)¹. An arithmetic of decomposing and creating anew; a transfiguration – wall pieces made of different floors, wooden tapestries conjugating time and space, balancing sentiment with symmetry. In doing so, Carr’s craft of safekeeping, resizing, and compiling echo the processes of memory itself. Reminiscence may also be technical.

These works speak both of and to our tendency to “fill in the gaps”, Florence tells me, and do so with a provocative explicitness. Her works are puzzled by missing pieces; a gap made ever more overt by a sameness in size that calls to be supplemented. Or else, to lean in further. Absences; entrances – they act as both, their contours delineating small windows as invitations to peep. Carr carves out shapes like devices for scrutiny; something to spy through that opens up in keyhole-like fashion [Spatterdock, 2024], alluding to scopophilic impulse through a visual grammar of repetition and withholding. Yet here, our view is blocked—obstructed by fabrics drawn down like blinds. The eye is caught in a pattern, “eye stuck in grid”², in floral motif or jacquard, peering through the outdoor armature into the soft architecture³ of domesticity. The interstices of wood and textile summon a material memory that is itself entwined in systemic nets – it is historical, and it is also gendered. This contrast in crafts speaks of a scaling in value, placing in its focal point, or centerfold, matters long considered minor because coded as “feminine”. Carr discreetly subverts this through a reversal operation: she strips the ornaments from the surface level to place them in depth, the decorative here serving as the backbone and structure of the piece, which itself dresses the room, embraces its contours, shielding the wall and its angles [Fall, 2023]. And this subtle enhancement of space again seems to echo the thickness of memory – for memory also accumulates in strata, layers of souvenirs and affects superimposed so as to protect.

An important part of Carr’s pieces thus borrows from the palimpsest, disclosing bits and pieces of a previous text hidden beneath the final surface. They’re private, somehow encoded; bearing an attitude that speaks to our taste for deciphering and intrigue. There’s a sense of play to these Kapla-looking canvases, “systems I can see but cannot analyze”⁴ whose hiatuses act as a riddle to solve, a secret to unlock. To “fill in the gaps” then stands out as a provocation; an incentive to stuff, to pad, to complete by way of examination or free association. Facing Carr’s assemblages, my mind returns to the Freudian patient and her parquet; I think of its curves, its scratches, its potential sensuousness. I start counting each tile the way she did her desires. I think of this sentence by poet Lisa Robertson: “Every seamstress will want to finger the inner expressions of seams.”⁵ Of women whose stories I once read but whose names I can’t quite place — spy-seamstresses knitting Morse messages to be read in between threads, using their feminine façade as camouflage.

Alongside images and quotes erupting in fragmented form, there exists this tension to make sense of them all — of knitting together the patient and the seamstress in the web of a text, through an explanatory logic that would leave no gap unfilled. It seems to me that Carr’s work engages with this urge to make sense; what the artist also refers to as “closure,” a concept from Gestalt theory that points to the brain’s tendency of perceiving a whole even when parts are missing. Carr’s work resonates as an exercise in syntax. An attempt at formalizing. For giving a form, her assemblages remind us, is an operation by which one molds and contours — and this is also how language operates: each word defining by way of limits, crafting a graphic and phonic architecture, a web into which what is blurry becomes tightened through a set of signs. Yet these pieces don’t give in to the appetite for narrative coherence. They rather work through the fragmentary — what is scissored, punctuated. The artist crafts an erotics of looking and remembering that works through its missing parts; that admits to being always parcellary, incomplete — interrupted. This perhaps also plays out in the way Carr conceives of the encounter with the artwork in the exhibition space.

There’s a temporal factor to her choice of materials; the artist selects according to what will absorb and register the passage of time, of light fracturing a space — a patina made of “traces left on objects and spaces and serving as a form of graphic information,” as she sends me in writing. Entering the exhibition space thus takes on the appearance of an irruption — a sudden intrusion into space, a plunge in medias res (to use another literary analogy) into the fractured life cycle of matter. Recent pieces further this engagement with language and text, isolating literary cues of interference with the narrative flow. Imprinted on leather, the word continu-um is ironically hyphenated in Continuum (day), while Continuum (night) seemingly portrays a constellation, that is also a dinkus or asterism, i.e typographic symbols made of three stars that signal a break or ellipsis within a text. Spelling this out directly within its title, __ stretches out, again on leather, a set of parenthesis beholding no content; and in this compositional closeness, this absence of interference, we might also recognize a couple of crescent moons, or the shape of an eye, discreetly winking back at us.

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1) Hanne Darboven quoted by Lucy R. Lippard, Hanne Darboven: deep in numbers, Artforum 12, no. 2 (October 1973). ↩︎
2) Joan Retallack, “Archimedes’ New Light” I’ll Drown My Book, Conceptual Writing by Women, Los Angeles, Les Figues Press, 2012, p. 189. ↩︎
3) borrow the expression “soft architecture” from poet Lisa Robertson, see Lisa Robertson, Occasional
Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture, Portland, Clear Cut, 2003. ↩︎
4) Lucy R. Lippard on Darboven’s work in Lucy R. Lippard, Hanne Darboven: deep in numbers, op. cit. ↩︎
5) Lisa Robertson, ‘Garments / Etruscans’, Liz Magor: The Blue One Comes in Black, Triangle France, Marseilles; Mousse Publishing, 2015. ↩︎

September 3, 2025