In and out, rolling and peaking, peaking and crawling. Do they have a specific time pattern? Like a sigh, like how we breathe, in and out, peaking then exhaling, only to peak again.
Is this what it’s like? A slow steady crawl, to a topping out and a gradual unravelling, crashing to my face leaving a thin film of water that finally seeps into the ground.
Sometimes we leave things behind.
The pattern of a wave, reminds me I am living, of the short time I am living, like a breath in and out.
It can touch me. Or, I can submerge my whole body in to its gut, into its breathing, living body and it carries my weight, back and forward, in and out.
It would swallow me, if it could, if it so desires.
But it doesn’t for the moment. Instead it rocks me to sleep. And it deposits my steady, resting body on the sand, on a bed of sand. And it watches over me and in my dreams I hear it breathing, in and out.
My head sinks down slowly, as I softly, slip from its limp salty fingers. and it is ok, down and down.
You see ,inside it I can gurgle all my secrets. Don’t you have something you can’t say out loud, or that you can’t admit to yourself or anyone else, that is... counterproductive.
The murky water doesn’t speak a word, it simply breaths it’s knowing breath and carries it for me, like algae, like air bubbles.
I wait, but at any moment I can inhale. I can.
And I feel my eyes crease a little as I smile, one, two, in and out.
I take the water in my mouth, and it fills my throat and quickly slides down into my lungs, filling me.
We’re the same, breathing the same way, crawling and peaking.
In and in.
I drift into a seabed sleep, not sure if I will wake, but completely careless. Full and bloated.
Then I open my eyes and I am 12 years old, holding my breath in the bath. Beside me in a puddle lies a dead woodlouse. I wonder of its small, shrivelled body. It disgusts me and I don’t like looking at it. The water is tepid and I want to leave but it’s cold outside the tub. My time left here is short, my hands shrivelled, like the woodlouse.
Saturday, 30 January 2010
Wednesday, 20 January 2010
Friday, 15 January 2010
Working out the essential
What is essential is quite a useful question in life really. The past few days I have been trying to analyse what is essential to the work and if there are elements that are lingering that don’t add to the work (yet) or stand out as anomalies. It has become clear to me that parts of the original piece have remained in this incarnation simply because I am a hoarder and terrible at throwing things out, in all aspects of my life.
So looking a design and script with hundreds of scrawlings over it and looking at my house covered in bits of the show, books and too many note books, it is definitely time to ask myself this question. What can the work exist without?
The show is built in layers, or in waves (I shall explain this in more detail later on). When discussing the piece there seems to be a lot, and I am hoping not too much. There is a need to fish out anything that might crowd or confuse it.
All the materials of the show are organic, they are `made’ yes in that I have chosen their positions and dimensions but each remain as they exist in `real’ time: the trees are still trees outside the theatre, as is the water, the mast, the projectors. The only thing that is obviously `made’, at present, are the Jellyfish; they are more like puppets or fancy lights. I had neglected to see this and it was pointed out to me recently. I had been neglecting finishing their design, for no specific reason, I just wasn’t excited by doing so; perhaps this was because at the moment they are just not working.
My aim is that the piece will be powerful on a subconscious, subliminal level. My desire is that not that each fragment of the work pieces comfortably together forming a structure, narractive and political message for the audience to behold. What I want to create is an experience that sits uncomfortably at the bottom of the gut, or causes a slight pulsing pain in the eye. My hope is that it is experiential in a cloudy sort of way, like the effect particular notes in music can have on you. I want it to linger and ring in the audiences ears for a while after.
I am not implying that there are no clear themes in the work, because I think that themes of erosion and memory impairment are quite obvious, my hope is that the form in which they are presented is not presumptuous and expecting of the audience. Unlike my past work which has dealt closely with an immediate delicate and present relationship between performer and audience, this piece I think asks of them to be in the space and let the elements almost flow over them, reading in it what they will, zoning out if they choose. It is more about choice of engagement. My hope is that the memory or replaying of the work is most powerful and significant, that the politic becomes prominent after, upon reflection.
Below is something I have recently written, part of a larger piece I am developing called `When I die at sea’ and I it sort of illustrates what I am trying to explain:
`I drift into a seabed sleep, not sure if I will wake, but completely careless. Full and bloated. Floating. Airless.
Then I awake, and I am 12 years old, holding my breath in the bath. Beside me in a little pool of water lies a dead woodlouse, and I wonder of its small, shrivelled body. It disgusts me and I don’t like looking at it. The water is tepid, I want to leave but it’s cold outside the tub. My time left here is short, my hands shrivelled, like the woodlouse.’
The woodlouse is an image that leaves me with a strange unsettling feeling which I find quite difficult to explain. It seems to signify some distant other; of the dark, the uncertain. Perhaps in it I see my own face, my future self, old and shrivelled.
This image is perhaps quite an obvious one, in the sense that it is a dead animal, but there are many other natural sculptural objects that unsettle me. These organic objects are perhaps more successful signifiers in art, less manipulative than `made’ objects. Below is a picture of a tree in the woods behind my house that has this same, unsettling effect on me. It makes me think of a tumour.
I recently saw a sculpture by Lucy Skaer, at the Tate Britain as part of the turner prize nominee’s exhibition. She displayed a borrowed a whale skull through a constructed wall in the corner of the gallery. The wall had specific gaps (or view finders) in which you could observe the skull, controlling ad limiting your perspective. You were able to view it as a split image from a distant or in detailed small parts from up close. This was my favourite piece in the exhibition; I was strangely drawn and repelled to this sculpture at the same time. The way it was framed (to me) made the piece less about the ore and grand scale of this dead creature, but more about the detail and texture and realness of it. It became less historical to me and more present in the context of the gallery space. It left a curious and lasting impression on me and I have since pondered on it.
I want to go back to thinking about the `made’ aspects of a show. Is this appropriate in a piece that wants to discuss the real, the beautiful, surreal and brutal in nature?
There are places in the text where I haven’t written any notes I think means one of two things: either it’s so essential, it stands alone as a single and powerful element, or it has become set, background and something pretty I just couldn’t throw out. Throw out, is too harsh, I think I just need to file better. Somewhere I can go back to, but less clutter.
The jelly fish had become this, a pretty picture with not to carefully a thought through meaning. To work out if they are essential, or what about them, the qualities of them is more essential I took the extract of text they appear in and circled the parts I thought of importance, what I really want to explore in this section, what they represent, if anything.
I came up with the following words:
Wood, sand, bone, graveyard, ancient, devouring, digested, death, plastic (x2)
Face, hands, hair, eyes (also appear more than once.)
These words are very organic, natural, old, almost degraded, there is a sense of erosion, of aging of the body. The natural world here is something monstrous and consuming and very real, existing for eons, absorbing us with little importance to what it takes, my grandfathers eyes or no more poignancy to the natural world than a plastic bag or a beer can. Nature is not cruel; it just reminds us of how small we are, that we too are just another living thing.
So I think that the material used to make the jellyfish is important. The plastic bags that so closely resemble a living organism. Plastic bags that make me think about the environment, of waste and pollution, of the clinical, of hospital beds, a material that is hard to get rid of, that doesn’t easily degrade. I think I am interested in the displacement of an object/material from its normal reading. I want to make the plastic a thing of interest that appears living, a material so like a jellyfish. I am interested in ink as a material also for the same reasons. It makes me think of a leaking, an oozing, of dark deep sea creatures. I want to explore these kind of everyday materials that when framed a certain way can come to life and take the mind somewhere else.
So looking a design and script with hundreds of scrawlings over it and looking at my house covered in bits of the show, books and too many note books, it is definitely time to ask myself this question. What can the work exist without?
The show is built in layers, or in waves (I shall explain this in more detail later on). When discussing the piece there seems to be a lot, and I am hoping not too much. There is a need to fish out anything that might crowd or confuse it.
All the materials of the show are organic, they are `made’ yes in that I have chosen their positions and dimensions but each remain as they exist in `real’ time: the trees are still trees outside the theatre, as is the water, the mast, the projectors. The only thing that is obviously `made’, at present, are the Jellyfish; they are more like puppets or fancy lights. I had neglected to see this and it was pointed out to me recently. I had been neglecting finishing their design, for no specific reason, I just wasn’t excited by doing so; perhaps this was because at the moment they are just not working.
My aim is that the piece will be powerful on a subconscious, subliminal level. My desire is that not that each fragment of the work pieces comfortably together forming a structure, narractive and political message for the audience to behold. What I want to create is an experience that sits uncomfortably at the bottom of the gut, or causes a slight pulsing pain in the eye. My hope is that it is experiential in a cloudy sort of way, like the effect particular notes in music can have on you. I want it to linger and ring in the audiences ears for a while after.
I am not implying that there are no clear themes in the work, because I think that themes of erosion and memory impairment are quite obvious, my hope is that the form in which they are presented is not presumptuous and expecting of the audience. Unlike my past work which has dealt closely with an immediate delicate and present relationship between performer and audience, this piece I think asks of them to be in the space and let the elements almost flow over them, reading in it what they will, zoning out if they choose. It is more about choice of engagement. My hope is that the memory or replaying of the work is most powerful and significant, that the politic becomes prominent after, upon reflection.
Below is something I have recently written, part of a larger piece I am developing called `When I die at sea’ and I it sort of illustrates what I am trying to explain:
`I drift into a seabed sleep, not sure if I will wake, but completely careless. Full and bloated. Floating. Airless.
Then I awake, and I am 12 years old, holding my breath in the bath. Beside me in a little pool of water lies a dead woodlouse, and I wonder of its small, shrivelled body. It disgusts me and I don’t like looking at it. The water is tepid, I want to leave but it’s cold outside the tub. My time left here is short, my hands shrivelled, like the woodlouse.’
The woodlouse is an image that leaves me with a strange unsettling feeling which I find quite difficult to explain. It seems to signify some distant other; of the dark, the uncertain. Perhaps in it I see my own face, my future self, old and shrivelled.
This image is perhaps quite an obvious one, in the sense that it is a dead animal, but there are many other natural sculptural objects that unsettle me. These organic objects are perhaps more successful signifiers in art, less manipulative than `made’ objects. Below is a picture of a tree in the woods behind my house that has this same, unsettling effect on me. It makes me think of a tumour.
I recently saw a sculpture by Lucy Skaer, at the Tate Britain as part of the turner prize nominee’s exhibition. She displayed a borrowed a whale skull through a constructed wall in the corner of the gallery. The wall had specific gaps (or view finders) in which you could observe the skull, controlling ad limiting your perspective. You were able to view it as a split image from a distant or in detailed small parts from up close. This was my favourite piece in the exhibition; I was strangely drawn and repelled to this sculpture at the same time. The way it was framed (to me) made the piece less about the ore and grand scale of this dead creature, but more about the detail and texture and realness of it. It became less historical to me and more present in the context of the gallery space. It left a curious and lasting impression on me and I have since pondered on it.
I want to go back to thinking about the `made’ aspects of a show. Is this appropriate in a piece that wants to discuss the real, the beautiful, surreal and brutal in nature?
There are places in the text where I haven’t written any notes I think means one of two things: either it’s so essential, it stands alone as a single and powerful element, or it has become set, background and something pretty I just couldn’t throw out. Throw out, is too harsh, I think I just need to file better. Somewhere I can go back to, but less clutter.
The jelly fish had become this, a pretty picture with not to carefully a thought through meaning. To work out if they are essential, or what about them, the qualities of them is more essential I took the extract of text they appear in and circled the parts I thought of importance, what I really want to explore in this section, what they represent, if anything.
I came up with the following words:
Wood, sand, bone, graveyard, ancient, devouring, digested, death, plastic (x2)
Face, hands, hair, eyes (also appear more than once.)
These words are very organic, natural, old, almost degraded, there is a sense of erosion, of aging of the body. The natural world here is something monstrous and consuming and very real, existing for eons, absorbing us with little importance to what it takes, my grandfathers eyes or no more poignancy to the natural world than a plastic bag or a beer can. Nature is not cruel; it just reminds us of how small we are, that we too are just another living thing.
So I think that the material used to make the jellyfish is important. The plastic bags that so closely resemble a living organism. Plastic bags that make me think about the environment, of waste and pollution, of the clinical, of hospital beds, a material that is hard to get rid of, that doesn’t easily degrade. I think I am interested in the displacement of an object/material from its normal reading. I want to make the plastic a thing of interest that appears living, a material so like a jellyfish. I am interested in ink as a material also for the same reasons. It makes me think of a leaking, an oozing, of dark deep sea creatures. I want to explore these kind of everyday materials that when framed a certain way can come to life and take the mind somewhere else.
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