The collaborative project that I am involved with is approaching its conclusion, but somehow this last stretch is proving difficult.
My poet collaborator’s poem has placed my ‘hoard’ of objects fashioned from goose bones as belonging to a water culture that lived by the sea.
Although I like the poem I am now finding it hard to relate it to my work.
I only realised how difficult when I found myself rethinking the presentation of the work. We had discussed it being presented in a museum case or on a museum exhibits tray, but the poem now seems to ‘float’ separately.
Is this disjunction ok? Does this mean the collaboration is in some way a failure?
This type of long distance collaboration with both partners committed to both the collaboration and other projects was always going to be fraught with problems. Doubtless both will bring unspoken and maybe even subconscious expectations, and doubtless both will disappoint the other in some way. Without the trust and intimate knowledge of the other that is forged with, say, a studio partnership how to overcome the politeness of acquaintance communication/interaction to ask the other for more or different or less?
We have decided to exhibit the work in a large modern fish tank, neatly sorting many of the problems inherent in our venue and I am presently hunting acrylic boxes and blocks for the interior.
This has also necessitated the manufacture of another work to manage the space and a search for a solution that would anchor the poem to the work.
The poet has responded to my work and I find that I am now responding to the poem in the presentation. Interesting and unexpected.
Today I spent the day with net and fish bones but I am pleased with the resultant work.
Without the poem conundrum this ‘net’ work would never have come into being……….yet again being in an uncomfortable place has pushed my work into an unexpected outcome.
