The staple as fastener: temporary and hold

A staple is designed to disappear into function. It binds papers, fixes mesh, closes packaging and performs dozens of small tasks without inviting attention. In The Staple as Fastener: Temporary and Hold, Alexandra Mawimbi turns this humble piece of hardware into a lens for thinking about attachment, repair and loss. The apparently simple title contains a productive contradiction: what is temporary can still hold, and what holds can remain vulnerable to time.

Mawimbi approaches the staple as both material and proposition. Its bent geometry describes a decision to join one surface to another, yet its usefulness depends on pressure, friction and the resistance of whatever it pierces. Across sculpture, two-dimensional work, video, performance, sound and installation, the project makes such dependencies perceptible. It asks how images hold attention, how archives preserve traces and how an absent body can remain present through objects, gestures and acts of fastening.

An ordinary object made visible

The staple belongs to the infrastructure of daily life. It appears in offices, workshops, kitchens, studios and sheds, usually sold in packets alongside other consumable hardware. Because its use is familiar, its form can seem self-evident. Mawimbi interrupts that certainty by drawing attention to the decisions compressed into its shape: a flat length becomes a bridge, two pointed ends become an instrument, and a sheet of metal acquires the capacity to grip.

That transformation is never entirely innocent. A staple punctures the material it secures, leaving holes, scratches or a raised edge when removed. The fastening therefore produces both connection and damage. Mawimbi’s attention to the object reveals a parallel between binding loose material and constructing representation. A drawing fixes a view; an installation fixes a relationship between bodies, images and space; a record secures evidence while changing the conditions under which that evidence can be read.

Every fastening leaves a trace of the force required to make it. Even when the staple itself disappears into a document, the pressure remains legible. This residue gives mourning a physical form. The object no longer joins what it once joined, but the punctures and deformations register its passage. The work treats absence as something that can be material without pretending that damage and presence are interchangeable.

The pressure of holding

To hold is not simply to possess or remain. It is an action sustained over time, dependent on forces that may shift. Mawimbi presents fastening as a temporary condition rather than a completed state. The staple appears secure, but its security belongs to a temporary balance between pressure, tension and the changing capacity of the material beneath it.

This balance becomes especially important in performance and moving-image work, where gestures unfold in real time. A hand presses, aligns, closes or releases. The action may look decisive, yet it contains hesitation and adjustment. The performer becomes another surface that can yield, resist or reveal the mechanics of attachment. A fastening that succeeds can also leave a mark on the person making it.

Mawimbi uses repetition to make duration felt. A single action might pass as routine; repeated, it becomes reflective. The pause before compression, the sound of metal meeting paper and the moment after release introduce small intervals in which function opens onto meaning. These works do not depict fastening from a distance. They make viewers conscious of how an image catches, what keeps it in place and how long that arrangement can last.

Paper, skin and the language of attachment

Paper and skin form an immediate pairing in the work. Both can be pierced, folded, stretched and repaired, while both register contact as texture or colour. The comparison brings the administrative staple into contact with the vulnerable body. A staple can close a wound, secure a bandage or resemble a crude suture, but the same geometry can suggest restraint, confinement or the reduction of a person to paperwork.

This does not make every office fastening an instrument of violence. Its significance lies in the instability of the analogy and in the history of paper as a technology of classification. Documents attach people to addresses, transactions, borders and decisions. In a settler colonial context, bureaucratic records have helped determine whose presence counts, whose movement is controlled and whose history is preserved. Mawimbi’s fastening imagery holds these possibilities together without resolving them into a single symbolic code.

Mourning appears here as an impulse to keep without restoring. A spare staple can call up the missing thing it once held, but it cannot return what has been lost. Its smallness refuses the fantasy of complete recovery. Instead, it offers a residue: a mark, a scar, an attachment maintained at the edge of absence. Representation becomes a form of holding that remains alert to what cannot be recovered.

Repair as an act of care

Repair is central to Mawimbi’s work because it makes attachment visible as labour. A taped edge, a tightened clamp, a tied bundle or a newly inserted staple records a decision to preserve usefulness rather than discard a damaged thing. These gestures can be practical, but they are also ethical. They treat damage as a condition to work with rather than a flaw to conceal.

Australian vernacular culture offers a familiar context for this kind of improvised maintenance. A broken fence, torn bag or loose shelf may be addressed with the reassuring phrase “she’ll be right”, accompanied by tape, wire or a spare fastener. The phrase can minimise a problem, yet it also names a practical culture of making do. Mawimbi shifts that resourcefulness into an art context, where provisional construction challenges the demand for seamless finish, technical polish or timeless appearance.

Care does not guarantee permanence. In fact, repair often makes vulnerability more apparent because it shows where something failed. The repaired area draws the eye and begins a new account of the object’s history. Mawimbi’s works have no interest in disguising this history. Their joins, patches and supports become evidence of continuing attention, an ongoing negotiation between material intention and material condition.

Brisbane’s humid subtropical climate gives these concerns a particular urgency. Paper can buckle, adhesives can soften and metal can develop surface changes as work moves between warm storerooms, air-conditioned galleries and outdoor venues. Conservation therefore becomes part of the artwork’s meaning rather than an invisible service applied after the fact. Every support alters the object, and every transfer tests the limits of its holding.

Gesture, sound and living presence

The staple produces a modest but distinctive sound: a click, a scrape, a brief metallic compression. Within Mawimbi’s wider practice of sound and performance, such noises can carry more than descriptive force. They register labour at close range and make the distance between an object and the body handling it audible. A quiet fastening becomes a small event of contact.

This acoustic detail reinforces the work’s interest in living presence. A recorded or performed gesture is not a static representation of action; it preserves duration, resistance and the specific temporality of a body. The work can retain the fact of an event without making it repeatable in the same way. Repetition changes the gesture into evidence, but evidence can still carry the pressure of the moment from which it came.

Sound also makes room for silence. The space after a fastening can feel charged, as though an action has completed itself but its consequences continue. In works concerned with representation and mourning, presence need not depend on a visible figure. It can emerge through breath, handling, resonance, recorded movement and the material memory of an object. Absence becomes audible through the traces of activity that remain.

The result is an ethics of attention based on duration rather than possession. Viewers are asked to stay with small actions long enough for their ordinary meanings to loosen. The fastener becomes a companion for contemplating the unstable bond between people, images and memory. Its precariousness is not a spectacle of failure; it is a condition through which attachment becomes imaginable.

Fastening within an Australian art market

Australian speakers frequently use “staple” to describe something dependable or regularly expected: a staple of the local music scene, a staple on a menu, a familiar presence at the community show. The colloquial sense establishes the object as a stable feature. Mawimbi’s title complicates that assumption by asking what happens when a supposed constant proves provisional. An object sold as a reliable fixture can still be displaced, repurposed or read differently in a new setting.

Brisbane’s material culture reinforces this tension. Staples can be found in an Officeworks stationery aisle, a Bunnings or Mitre 10 hardware section, an artist’s studio or a suburban repair box. These locations connect the art object to systems of purchase, use and replacement familiar across Australia. The low cost of the staple encourages repetition, while its industrial supply chain connects domestic repair to larger networks of production, transport and disposal.

The Australian art market operates through artist-run spaces, independent galleries, public institutions, direct commissions, fairs and private collections. Small or vulnerable works often depend on relationships between these sectors as much as on conventional retail sales. A work centred on fastening asks how value accumulates around an object whose material circumstances appear minor. Its worth resides in concept, provenance, documentation and the histories of making and handling, not in the intrinsic price of its components.

Climate and distance further complicate the notion of a secure holding. Moving work between Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide or regional venues exposes it to heat, humidity, vibration and changing display conditions. Online documentation extends access beyond physical exhibitions, but it also creates another mediated form of preservation. The work appears held through an image while remaining physically absent. Mawimbi’s project makes this familiar digital condition newly unstable, reminding viewers that circulation and attachment are never the same.

Explore The Staple as Fastener: Temporary and Hold alongside Mawimbi’s selected works, exhibition history and visual documentation to encounter the project across its material and recorded forms.

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