Monday, 28 December 2009
Saturday, 26 December 2009
Thursday, 24 December 2009
Monday, 21 December 2009
Resting
I have been trying not to work for the past week, as it is Christmas and I am seeing family who this past year I haven't seen much of due to work. Not thinking about work, not relating every article, image or film back in some way to where your mind is focused is near impossible. For example I went for a coastal walk in France yesterday, it was a beautiful day, the sun was shining and there was snow on the mountains. I took my Camera with me to gather holiday photos I'd promised to show my Dad on my return to Norwich. Granted I was next to the sea, so my mind can't help but think of the show. I ended up taking over 500 photographs of the waves coming in and going out over the dark, grandious rock face. Flicking through the images I had made a little stilted film, captured in frames and began to wonder whether I might use some of this material in the show. This I can accept as work that was somewhat inevitable in a non working period, I did have my camera at hand and I was right on the edge of the cliff by the crashing sea... I was going to take some photos.
However my failure in not working started much earlier. I brought away with me only one book, a graphic novel I have wanted to read for a while, no theory books, only escapism hopefully. The illustrations reminded me of the images and tone of images I want to create in Silica, and there were a few chapters about the ocean but that is all, and goes back to what I was saying that when your mind is on something, everything you experience becomes linked back to that. I felt I succeeded here in reading to relax, the majority of the book is completely different to my work topics.
When your head is in something, it becomes a real strain to not bore your friends and family with all that you find exciting, mainly because they are never as fully absorbed in it as you, and I hear myself become repetitive and talking in abstracts that I can only understand because I know what I am thinking. I am determined, with this time of rest, to not talk too much about work, if at all. Whilst I believe talking things through is a fantastic way of broadening ideas, I also think they become tired; what excited me last week now seems like a relatively mundane idea. Resting the work seems important.
Going back to france, walking along the Port, there was the most beautiful chiming sound coming from the ropes of the Yachts, clanging against the boom of the boat. I'd toyed with the idea of putting a flag or boy, or big warning light into the design of the show. I wanted another sea sculpture object at the front near to the audience, one that was imposing yet dislocated from its real form. Seeing the booms and hearing them, I definately want to put in a sound sculpture of the boom: a very tall pole, with the rope attached and make a mechanism so that the rope moves as if it were being hit by the wind, making the sound in parts of the piece. I like the scale of the boom, and the fact it is only part of a boat, a suggestion of the water. Its shape is also powerful, towering above the audience, I also feel its absence from the boat suggests a sense of destruction, of danger perhaps. I am thinking that perhaps my warning light can be at the top of this mast, glowing and fading in parts of the piece... exciting thoughts for me! So once again, trying not to work I was working. I am having so much trouble shutting off, I can never relax, as if working on a project makes me feel like there is more of a purpose to things. This i s a slightly depressing realisation, but I see it around me a lot, in others working in Theatre and in my friends. Work is a funny thing, especially in the world of self employment. I would love to be able to settle into a week of not working, not thinking about it all, and then perhaps discover new ideas, fresh ones outside the realm of my current fixation with the sea and memory. And I will continue to try to relax, perhaps it just takes more time, it has been a hectic year.
However my failure in not working started much earlier. I brought away with me only one book, a graphic novel I have wanted to read for a while, no theory books, only escapism hopefully. The illustrations reminded me of the images and tone of images I want to create in Silica, and there were a few chapters about the ocean but that is all, and goes back to what I was saying that when your mind is on something, everything you experience becomes linked back to that. I felt I succeeded here in reading to relax, the majority of the book is completely different to my work topics.
When your head is in something, it becomes a real strain to not bore your friends and family with all that you find exciting, mainly because they are never as fully absorbed in it as you, and I hear myself become repetitive and talking in abstracts that I can only understand because I know what I am thinking. I am determined, with this time of rest, to not talk too much about work, if at all. Whilst I believe talking things through is a fantastic way of broadening ideas, I also think they become tired; what excited me last week now seems like a relatively mundane idea. Resting the work seems important.
Going back to france, walking along the Port, there was the most beautiful chiming sound coming from the ropes of the Yachts, clanging against the boom of the boat. I'd toyed with the idea of putting a flag or boy, or big warning light into the design of the show. I wanted another sea sculpture object at the front near to the audience, one that was imposing yet dislocated from its real form. Seeing the booms and hearing them, I definately want to put in a sound sculpture of the boom: a very tall pole, with the rope attached and make a mechanism so that the rope moves as if it were being hit by the wind, making the sound in parts of the piece. I like the scale of the boom, and the fact it is only part of a boat, a suggestion of the water. Its shape is also powerful, towering above the audience, I also feel its absence from the boat suggests a sense of destruction, of danger perhaps. I am thinking that perhaps my warning light can be at the top of this mast, glowing and fading in parts of the piece... exciting thoughts for me! So once again, trying not to work I was working. I am having so much trouble shutting off, I can never relax, as if working on a project makes me feel like there is more of a purpose to things. This i s a slightly depressing realisation, but I see it around me a lot, in others working in Theatre and in my friends. Work is a funny thing, especially in the world of self employment. I would love to be able to settle into a week of not working, not thinking about it all, and then perhaps discover new ideas, fresh ones outside the realm of my current fixation with the sea and memory. And I will continue to try to relax, perhaps it just takes more time, it has been a hectic year.
Wednesday, 9 December 2009
The first one
This project stemmed from an article I read in the guardian about a year ago stating that in 50 years parts of the Norfolk coast will be completely underwater. Thinking about this now I am reminded of when I was 18 and my best friends parents uprooted from Great Yarmouth to inland Devon, because they predicted the value of their house would fast depreciate due to the rising sea levels.
In 50 years I will be in my 70’s (if I make it that far anyway) so there is a very real possibility that in my life time the land where I grew up will have disappeared. I realise this is not something unique and that natural disaster and war have devastated landscapes all over the world. The wreckage of a landscape by the sea is not something new either. What is interesting about the rising sea is our ability to predict it and inability to totally prevent it. The whole world needs to stop making Co2 on an enormous scale to prevent climate change. The sea will rise and we will watch it happen.
It is not just co2 made from our homes and cars, like they tell us on the government adverts, but the phenomenal amount made in industry to maintain society as we know it. As always it all comes back to money, why for example aren’t the hybrid cars sold at an affordable price? Why are there not more laws against how often people travel? I ask these questions without having an answer and I admit to not doing enough to help the environment myself, but if things are really serious then surely the government needs to go to bigger extremes than adverts that tell us off for leaving the TV on standby.
Anyway I digress, what I want to outline is where my thinking started. And it started with the loss of home, and things, out of our control, that change over time. Inevitability.
When discussing this project before I have been asked about the privilege of my upbringing. The original incarnation of this project presupposed the loss of my homeland. Because it quite clearly did not speak from real experience I think the content came across as less worthy, and the landscapes and memories I shared, privileged. The land I explore in the piece is beautiful and rural, a privileged place to have been brought up. What I hoped to explore in the piece was not simply a presupposed mourning of my home but to draw a comparison between the possible loss of this landscape and the always inevitable loss of ones home and past through the unreliability of memory and through growing old. It looks at the memories that last, what they look like and how they define who we are. I believe that the memories I selected to present in the piece were very privileged ( but here I would argue that all happy memories are) I selected only memories that remained distinctive and vivid to me and all related to place in some way.
Where the piece failed was that the retelling of the memories (and landscape acquainted to them) became more focal to the work than the failure to revisit or recreate them truthfully. It is interesting what the mind selects to remember and how unreliable these vivid images in our minds are. I wanted to show the impossibility of recreating memory, or to truly revisit a place as we remember it, as both these elements are always altered with time. I wanted to explore that if the images we hold onto in our minds are not real, physical places, is art a therapeutic medium in which recreate them, in art can we go back to those moments? I argue not, as most art and certainly theatre is ephemeral. If memories, connect us to a place, a landscape and from that landscape we attain a sense of home, a part of what makes us who we are in the present, the only place that recognition of self can survive is in our minds. We age, people around us change or depart, the land we once called home looks different to how we recorded it in our heads, but memory can be sustained, can be more poetic, we can create a better version of our pasts.
Revisiting the places I fondly link to a sense of home and self, there is a sense of nostalgia but also a sadness, a feeling of absence and loss. Alongside memories, one is constantly reminded of what has changed. One is reminded of the people that no longer occupy those spaces, of moments and memories swallowed up in history. Where do memories end up if not recorded? This recording can never be accurate, no words, art or digital media can perfectly preserve the past. But I believe the closest we get to preserving memories lies in our relationship to landscape. A place I can touch that is from my past, that reminds me to remember and recall.
In 50 years I will be in my 70’s (if I make it that far anyway) so there is a very real possibility that in my life time the land where I grew up will have disappeared. I realise this is not something unique and that natural disaster and war have devastated landscapes all over the world. The wreckage of a landscape by the sea is not something new either. What is interesting about the rising sea is our ability to predict it and inability to totally prevent it. The whole world needs to stop making Co2 on an enormous scale to prevent climate change. The sea will rise and we will watch it happen.
It is not just co2 made from our homes and cars, like they tell us on the government adverts, but the phenomenal amount made in industry to maintain society as we know it. As always it all comes back to money, why for example aren’t the hybrid cars sold at an affordable price? Why are there not more laws against how often people travel? I ask these questions without having an answer and I admit to not doing enough to help the environment myself, but if things are really serious then surely the government needs to go to bigger extremes than adverts that tell us off for leaving the TV on standby.
Anyway I digress, what I want to outline is where my thinking started. And it started with the loss of home, and things, out of our control, that change over time. Inevitability.
When discussing this project before I have been asked about the privilege of my upbringing. The original incarnation of this project presupposed the loss of my homeland. Because it quite clearly did not speak from real experience I think the content came across as less worthy, and the landscapes and memories I shared, privileged. The land I explore in the piece is beautiful and rural, a privileged place to have been brought up. What I hoped to explore in the piece was not simply a presupposed mourning of my home but to draw a comparison between the possible loss of this landscape and the always inevitable loss of ones home and past through the unreliability of memory and through growing old. It looks at the memories that last, what they look like and how they define who we are. I believe that the memories I selected to present in the piece were very privileged ( but here I would argue that all happy memories are) I selected only memories that remained distinctive and vivid to me and all related to place in some way.
Where the piece failed was that the retelling of the memories (and landscape acquainted to them) became more focal to the work than the failure to revisit or recreate them truthfully. It is interesting what the mind selects to remember and how unreliable these vivid images in our minds are. I wanted to show the impossibility of recreating memory, or to truly revisit a place as we remember it, as both these elements are always altered with time. I wanted to explore that if the images we hold onto in our minds are not real, physical places, is art a therapeutic medium in which recreate them, in art can we go back to those moments? I argue not, as most art and certainly theatre is ephemeral. If memories, connect us to a place, a landscape and from that landscape we attain a sense of home, a part of what makes us who we are in the present, the only place that recognition of self can survive is in our minds. We age, people around us change or depart, the land we once called home looks different to how we recorded it in our heads, but memory can be sustained, can be more poetic, we can create a better version of our pasts.
Revisiting the places I fondly link to a sense of home and self, there is a sense of nostalgia but also a sadness, a feeling of absence and loss. Alongside memories, one is constantly reminded of what has changed. One is reminded of the people that no longer occupy those spaces, of moments and memories swallowed up in history. Where do memories end up if not recorded? This recording can never be accurate, no words, art or digital media can perfectly preserve the past. But I believe the closest we get to preserving memories lies in our relationship to landscape. A place I can touch that is from my past, that reminds me to remember and recall.
Tuesday, 1 December 2009
I’ve been procrastinating some time now about how to start this blog, and I am finding it pretty stressful, scrutinizing every sentence, when in reality I need this to be a place where I can simply spill my thoughts. Where, without apology, I can misspell, misquote and be wrong. This is easier said than done, I’ve been writing this introduction for three days now! The reason I decided to keep and online project journal was to have a place where I, and hopefully my collaborators also, can work through ideas, problems and developments of the project over the next six months. So here I go, definitely not over thinking…
I’ve been thinking about time
When I am away from home ( and by home I refer to where I grew up) for a extended period of time I get a very real, physical ache in my gut to return there. It is not missing the house I grew up in, nor missing my parents that troubles me (sorry parents), It is the landscapes of my childhood that I crave. I think this is to do with time.
Landscape exists on a different time frame to humanity. Where people age quickly and noticeably, a landscape, unless damaged in extreme conditions, regenerates itself, lasting centuries. I think the reason I find the places where I grew up comforting is that they make me feel like little has changed. Landscape, unlike human relationships, seems permanent. When I stare at the landscape I do not see its face ageing and I do not think of its death, quite the opposite. I feel comfort in the fact it will remain there long after I have gone, it reminds me of the importance of time, and of living.
When I visit my parents, I notice if they have aged, and this is something that perhaps makes me feel more estranged from a sense of home than safe within it. Looking at them grow older, I am sure in the same way for them to see me grow older, I am filled with insecurity. My family made me, raised me and shaped who I have become, when that disappears, am I still the same or from that point does my identity become something different entirely. In many ways this is the same when you end a long term relationship, when you can’t think what your life is without your `other half‘, you feel displaced, ungrounded. Standing in a familiar landscape, where I have before, where many things have passed and changed, I recall all the different versions of myself and I feel grounded.
My grandparent’s house is still within the family, although they have both passed away, and I can still visit it and the coastline right by it. The landscape hasn’t let me down, the way that I irrationally feel they have. There is security in a belief that I will always be able to return to it, put my two feet, exactly where I did years ago, and feel like nothing has changed. It is something from my past that I can touch, I can transcend time, I can go back.
I’ve been thinking about time
When I am away from home ( and by home I refer to where I grew up) for a extended period of time I get a very real, physical ache in my gut to return there. It is not missing the house I grew up in, nor missing my parents that troubles me (sorry parents), It is the landscapes of my childhood that I crave. I think this is to do with time.
Landscape exists on a different time frame to humanity. Where people age quickly and noticeably, a landscape, unless damaged in extreme conditions, regenerates itself, lasting centuries. I think the reason I find the places where I grew up comforting is that they make me feel like little has changed. Landscape, unlike human relationships, seems permanent. When I stare at the landscape I do not see its face ageing and I do not think of its death, quite the opposite. I feel comfort in the fact it will remain there long after I have gone, it reminds me of the importance of time, and of living.
When I visit my parents, I notice if they have aged, and this is something that perhaps makes me feel more estranged from a sense of home than safe within it. Looking at them grow older, I am sure in the same way for them to see me grow older, I am filled with insecurity. My family made me, raised me and shaped who I have become, when that disappears, am I still the same or from that point does my identity become something different entirely. In many ways this is the same when you end a long term relationship, when you can’t think what your life is without your `other half‘, you feel displaced, ungrounded. Standing in a familiar landscape, where I have before, where many things have passed and changed, I recall all the different versions of myself and I feel grounded.
My grandparent’s house is still within the family, although they have both passed away, and I can still visit it and the coastline right by it. The landscape hasn’t let me down, the way that I irrationally feel they have. There is security in a belief that I will always be able to return to it, put my two feet, exactly where I did years ago, and feel like nothing has changed. It is something from my past that I can touch, I can transcend time, I can go back.
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