After a time thinking about the materials, and how they relate to each other, and how it affects my making, I find myself again thinking about concept, and metaphor.
I found this paragraph in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 2004 edition p343). Long time readers of this blog will know that I and not a great reader of these difficult texts. But someone mentioned something to me, and I thought “I’ve got that book, I’ll look it up!” So I did. I blew the dust off and discovered a faded post-it note about half way through. This must have been put there about twelve years ago at least, possibly longer. I opened the page and this is what I found:
(And then never did look up the bit that led me here)
“A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients himself with his little song as best he can. The song is like a rough sketch of a calming and stabilising, calm and stable, centre in the heart of chaos.Perhaps the child skips as he sings, hastens or slows his pace. But the song itself is already a skip: it jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos and is in danger of breaking apart at any moment.”
Now I come to type this out, I realise that the child is not in the woods. There is no mention of the woods in the text. The woods are in my head. They were conjured up from childhood memories of fear and chaos, and my own recollections of humming and singing to comfort myself as I walked in the woods.
It is curious how a piece of text can do this. I once read of someone who wanted to buy a red coat, the same colour red coat as Lucy’s in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. The red was never mentioned in the text, was purely in the reader’s head, as clear as any visual memory. The woods are not mentioned in Deleuze’s paragraph, nor the one after, or the one after that. I checked. The woods are exclusively in my head.
I am currently making a new piece of work: 37 of the wrapped twigs will soon have roots. These roots give a little hope to the work, and in amongst a world currently full of despair, I’m finding it comforting.
I also had a chat with Bill Laybourne this morning about the possibility of collaborating on a sound piece. This text, alongside the hopeful twigs will guide us. There will definitely be humming, and there will also be a trip to the woods… the same woods that I played in as a child. I’m not sure how mobile I will be, how much skipping in the woods I am capable of, but I can walk a little and I can hum.
The children that my twigs signify are growing, they have potential, and the twigs are no longer signifying the stark statistics of child poverty. They are fighting back, they are resilient…
These two pieces of work will then head to Aarhus, Denmark, for the Juxtapose art fair in June, with Stuart Mayes’ Glitter Ball Showroom. Sadly I will not be able to go with the work, but I trust that Stuart will install them thoughtfully, especially after our time working together last year on the Correspondence Residency in Uppsala.
