Conceptual artist 'Shard': Friends bewail that so little of her oeuvre is available to the general public

Life as we know it

Shard (Mark Long)

Several mysteries hang over the shaven and inscrutable head of “Shard”. The first is where she got her nom de plume and whether, in fact, it is her Christian name, her surname, a felicitous amalgam of the two or something else altogether. The second is her age, for, with her heavily made-up chalk-white face, protuberant, kohl-enhanced eyes and scalp on which a faintest bloom of turquoise-coloured hair is permitted to flourish, she could be anywhere between 25 and 50.

What is not in doubt is the nature of her calling. Introduced to anyone – a fellow-party-goer, a newly acquired sister-in-law, her bank manager – she announces herself with the words, “Hi, I'm Shard. I'm an artist.” But what sort of an artist? Here, an article she published some years ago in a journal called artslut may be of help. Not all of it is intelligible but there are some stirring lines about there not really being an “about” for art to be about any more, and a suggestion that “true art” is “liminal”.

As to what this might mean in practice, Shard's friends frequently bewail the fact that so little of her oeuvre is available for inspection by the general public. On the other hand, as she will occasionally explain, conceptual art is, of its very nature, of the moment, evanescent, an instant response to the issues of the day. Not even a photograph, alas, could convey the full complexity of Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight, an installation which ran for a fortnight in a gallery in Hoxton, comprising an empty room, its thermostat raised and lowered every 10 minutes to a degree corresponding to successive calculations of Pi and into which jets of cold air were intermittently directed.

Slightly more accessible, perhaps, is Syrian/Turkish Border Post, currently on display in a Shoreditch gallery. Here, on entering a semi-darkened room, its walls covered with random extracts from an English-Arabic dictionary, the viewer is invited to inspect a series of cardboard boxes, each containing a number of dead woodlice. Sadly, one broadsheet's art critic confessed himself “baffled” by the piece, and the accompanying press handout (“Shard: Metaphor Amid Flux”) turned up in the “Pseuds Corner” column of Private Eye.

But these are proud scars – evidence, if any were needed, that, as a handful of Islington gallery-goers continue to remind each other, the Establishment is “terrified”.