day one: A big/light space, working alongside builders makes it a busy noisy place with silent interludes. The scale of the building combined with the light and the marble/stained glass/dark wood/layers of meaning make it quite difficult to see the possiblities for something new.
Worked on a similar scale a couple of times but the spaces were dark – here the difficulty and challenge will be to make something that doesn’t vanish into the architecture or is an obvious response to a churchy space.
Hung up 20m of calico to break up the space – looked weedy ! shadows, light are ever changing.
Recollections of Fabrica the building – dark smooth woodiness, glassy squares of light, repetition, dark mottled marble planes, sharply etched text, mid-winter afternoon light, small blobs of intense red & blue, repetition, order, flakey remnants of pew rows, quiet closeness, geometry and calm.
Boxes of equipment and objects are piling up to be driven over next week. Having to cater for the generation of different ideas and approaches. Gathered so far – data projectors, leads, lights, gels, camera, tripod, speakers and amp, lists and plans !
Reading about Schwitter’s Merzbau – ‘A new thing made out of fragments.’
A few days to go until I set foot in Fabrica with a jumble of equipment, tools and thoughts. Five days of exploration and experimentation. Five days of thinking and being material in space and place.
Tried not to plan too much as the panic/thrill/expectation of being alone in a space and not knowing what’s going to happen next is compelling.
Fabrica is housed in a church; a sense of history is already embedded in the structure. Imposing an art gallery onto this churchyness creates an interesting and complex range of surfaces, concepts and difficulties to investigate.
