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The Second Mad Artists’ Tea Party took place on a glorious sunny Saturday afternoon in the slightly strange, slightly smelly upstairs room of Bedford’s Mount Zion Pentecostal Church. With its chandelier-style lighting and seedy faded grandeur, it made a suitably surreal backdrop for some of the live art shown by East Region artists during the afternoon.
It was all great fun, apart from the find-a-partner-and-devise-an-improvisation piece during which I’m afraid Trevor and I both instinctively went and hid. I felt as if I were back at school again, hiding in the toilets during tennis lessons! But I enjoyed the presentations, and the cakes – impressively, all made by Caroline who had organised the event – were delicious. Also it was a lovely opportunity to meet others working in live/performance art, including Guest Artist Tania Harrison who is the curator of the arts stages at the Latitude festival and Richard Dedomenici who has performed at each Latitude so far and gave a very entertaining talk on his experiences.
I had been allocated ten minutes, and it was useful to have a time frame already laid down and then devise something to fit! I named the performance Howe: Echo and presented three ‘echoes’. The first was an extract from The Elfin Hill by Hans Christian Anderson, who, as I pointed out was a Danish collector of fairytales. I said that I had made a translation of this tale into the ‘Norfolk tongue’ in honour of the Danish Anglo-Saxons and Vikings who had spread their stories through this land. On the wall I projected the text which I read with as authentic a Norfolk accent as I could muster (I’ve always lived in Norfolk but don’t have any discernable accent for some reason).
Next, against an OHP of Tulip Hill, I read a ‘poem’ made up of lines, each consisting of four hill names. These had been juxtaposed both for meaning and sound, including such groups as ‘Rising; Anguish; Hungry; Crow’ and ‘Gramborough; Muckleborough; Inkleborough; Warborough’. It was an interesting experience to read this aloud as I could feel the words building in intensity and Trevor, who was in the audience, said he could feel people responding to this.
The image of Tulip Hill, covered in pine trees, remained for the final ‘echo’. This hill was chosen as a focus as it’s so very hill-shaped as well as having plenty of stick-gathering potential. As mentioned in my last post, Trevor and I had previously gathered armfuls of sticks, mainly pine and elder with one or two pieces of hazel. Back home, I had sawed both ends off 30 of these sticks and made double sided ‘pennants’ from white cotton sheeting, representing the Anglo-Saxon/Viking Wynn rune that forms the ‘flag’ on the top of my Howe logo. I suppose it wasn’t surprising that I had underestimated how long it would take to get all this ready. Not only am I slow with a saw but I then had to prepare the fabric – and drawing, pinning, cutting out, sewing, turning, pressing and stapling 30 times takes ages (well, took me ages anyway).
So there I was with my 30 wynn-runes, instruction sheets and individual hill names on folded strips of paper. Participants were invited to take a pennant and a hill name, and to paint, write or draw something on one or both sides of the fabric representing an ‘echo’ of the word they had chosen. The example I gave was Lemon Hill, where you might think of a hill that resembles a lemon; of a hill that smells mysteriously of elfin lemon curd; of lemmings; or even of Lemmy from Motorhead!! I wonder if these chinese-whispers are akin to the way that some of the hills originally acquired their names? The idea now is for people to take their ‘echo’ to a high place, whether an actual hill or somewhere like a multi-storey car park, and to take a photo of it to email to me. If this works out, I’ll be able to post the resulting images on the Howe website. Lots of people took kits, so I’m looking forward to seeing what happens!
