A Barefoot Residency..

Women are sweeping today. I sweep too, and collect church dust, plaster dust, and one flower head.

I sit on the edge, ledge, and bind my foot, begin to wind..

‘like swaddling, or death wraps’ someone says in passing, and I note the looping, and pulling…something to explore further..

and someone else flags up Mona Hatoum’s performance ‘Roadworks’, 1985.

No such thing as a simple journey.

Workman, chains, scaffolding, churning up the space and stillness. I sit and watch poles and planks come down, to reveal again the stone skin.

I cannot hide today. I absorb myself in cutting. Long strips of paper, a ritual, like swimming lengths of a pool. Space opening up through the rhythm of the scissors. I attempt to re tune, from above to ground level. My breath plays with motion of cutting too.

A gathering, and so I walk through piles of paper strips, searching. The sound is like walking through long dry grass..white fields..

I record the sounds, it gives me another space, ambiguous shifting.

Public/private/elsewhere

I play back these fragments. I read this.

‘Life is rife with fogetting, and sound is ripe with todays’

En abime – Daniella Cascella,London 2013

Cooler air. The right hand side of the building now muffled by a large black plastic sheet. The building has a cupped hand over one ear..

Thinking about the order of remembering and sound loops..

A circle, a metal bowl. A circular walk, and a decision to remove my shoes, feel the floor. Somehow pure and illicit at the same time.

I look up and see that I am surrounded by women of stained glass,with elongated feet and almond shaped toes.

Movement has entered the frame, as has rituals ( I light a candle on arrival) circles, paper, and I am..barefoot.

My walk is interrupted.

Workman; ‘morning’,

Me; ‘morning’..

I have naked feet.

And now I am no longer alone. 3 window restorers, 3 volunteers, 1 child, 3 brooms, a hoover, and the hissing of a microphone left on..

Swimming and slipping

The order of remembering. I recall being in a church, of watching the dust particles swim and slip in the light..somehow mesmerising ..particles and chords..

A resonating space, a listening space..

Inspired through my discovery of ORA, a ‘Voyage into Listening’ by Salome Voegelin and Daniela Cascella (Resonance FM), and prompted by self initiated ideas from a Dutch persepctive as part of a Transnational Symposium- ‘Ici et La’, I contacted the Deacon of the church, Jill Hartman, who is also an artist. One email and two very positive conversations later, I find myself standing in the middle of St John’s Church, St leonards on Sea, at the beginning of a 6 month self intiated artist residency.

I have become particle in this cathedral like space..

swimming and slipping..

In order to pass hesitation, to allow for slippage, for new things to come into view, I listen, attempt to listen. A soundscape that is creating a circle.

Wind-gulls-cars-no sound buffer of green or distance. Rise and fall with a middle ground of gravel.

It gives me the feeling of being on an island, like being a hostage, being able to hear the outside space whilst being cut off. Someone tells me that the original building was round.

My breath is not yet at ease, like lowering oneself into a cool pool..insertion of particles into the space

I start to walk in circles, echoeing and tracing an imagined footprint of the first building on this site. I do not yet know its actual location, so there is a fiction here. The circular walking is grounding.

I take many photos documenting light, shadow, text, paper, and paper strips/nests that I bring with me.