Animating the Interior By Nikē Baneberry

Closeted - Spatial Etymologies - Squirreled Away - Scales of Meaning - Scaled Drawing

From left to right there are 5 drawings, getting bigger and bigger in size - from a closet to a cloister. This colourful drawing was created with pencil crayon and pen on trace.
I didn’t always hate the closet.
The closet isn’t just a place to come out of - sometimes we run for the closet, we run to our sacred spaces. Like Narnia, the closet opens onto something so expansive and wild it can’t be contained in our capitalist limitations. A closed space - it’s a safe space, it’s a necessity, it’s a space of resistance. You cannot contain me.
*Klau the History of the Closet

There lies a secret meaning in the root word [*klau] that generates a wide number of words we use today. [*Klau] is the proto-indo-european word describing a forked or hooked branch that was used to bolt closed a primitive structure. In this series, the words/spaces derived from [*Klau]: [closet], [cloister], and [cloinsular] are spatial tracing of the concept of being hidden away. In fact the word [claustrum] which shares this same root, describes the thin layer of grey matter - often called the wall of the brain - which is secreted away between the inner layer of the neocortex: It seems even the area where we process information is concealed. The secret inner affairs of our lives are vulnerable and raw but also spiritual; passageways into the great mysteries. From [closet] to [cloister] - being closed away can be reverential. I follow these branched words to a single trunk using their shared origin as a way to cross time and space: traversing different spaces in search of what they share in common. Along the way I generate notion-static - the energetic exchange of two or more ideas rubbing up against one another. When the [closet] of Queer Theory collides with the Monastic typology of the [cloister], one might call into question the need to define “enclosed” as it relates the sky: do we need a ceiling to be enclosed, or might having access to the sky lead to deeper internal reflections. Does enclosure makes us feel safe or trapped?

These drawings are spatial etymologies,I look up in the cloister towards the stars asking why. I look up definitions. I look up into this drawing from below.

In these drawings I am moving laterally between the [*klau], [closet], [cloister], and [cloinsular], nesting them inside each other, sliding one image athwart another just as a forked bolt used in these early structures is thrown across a closed door. I am packing ideas together to generate contiguity, just as the steamy bodies in a closet connect. We’re pressed tight together in the hushed silence, exchanging desires and longings.

The Closet The Cloister The Cloinsular