Artist Residency – Scottish Crannog Centre (2019)

Areas of Interest

• Challenge – How to ‘connect’ the old and present communities by exploring the trace of the past.
• The role of re-enactment; how much is done, what form does it take, what community involvement is there; is it factual; does it refer to time? This has links with artists’ performance practice.
• Site-specific performance as an outcome.
• Use of language-based interpretation, performance and digital sound.

Thematic Concept

The confrontation with the object

• This confrontation can highlight the eerie, weird, the strange, among other things
• That confrontation is the way that we (humans) trace our understanding of the object, its use and meaning, age and material qualities.
• The juxtaposition of erasure and creation; the meeting point of these two opposites is where transformation and creativity takes place.

Per-formative Action

In re-enactments, you are transported completely to another place and time. There is no trace of the present there. Art practice can explore this trace; essentially discussing the passage of time to create a new interpretation of this period of transformation.

Goals

• NOT to transport you to another time or place through literal re-enactment.
• Thinking about how an object changes over time.
• Thinking about how an object gets erased/transformed.

Aims/Objectives

• To ‘connect’ the ancient and post-modern communities by exploring the traces of the past through the Scottish Crannog Centre’s collection, landscape, buildings and people.
• To highlight a trace/transformation of an object from one state to another state.
• To discuss why we are confronting this object.
• Process of how/why the object is now here, in its current state.
• To enable audience to experience time and temporality through a durational performance artwork.

Outcomes

• To develop a creative methodology that traces the changes of an object over time, that staff can repeat / apply to other objects (eg. compare & contrast); literally leaving a trace.
• To develop a creative methodology that investigates the traces of the ancient community, and that staff can use to ‘connect’ past and present communities in the future.
• A set of instructions for a performance that can be repeated.
• Creation of a professional performance piece to be performed in a gallery/theatre (durational piece)
• Creation of a performance piece to be performed at the Scottish Crannog Centre (30 mins max).
• A digital sound work.

My research focuses on how artists’ create and construct communicative contexts within practice. Focusing on sound, my work observes human interaction and activates spoken-word, with original narratives being questioned and new, quasi-fictional narrative constructed/composed.

Exploring ‘erasing’ as a methodology, my experimental approach takes the form of digital recordings where much of the content is deleted, leaving digital fragments or ‘traces’. These traces are then used to create and compose meanings.

Sound can exist in isolation, separate from other sensory experiences. My interest is in this lack/trace of visual material and I see this assisting listeners to form their own meaning and interpretations as they listen – essentially they ‘become’ part of the work generating meaning from the ‘gaps’ I have left, based on their own personal experiences.

How Does This Relate to The Scottish Crannog Centre?

I’ve learned a few fascinating things so far during my time at the crannog centre.

The first is that many of the objects that have been discovered at the Oakbank Crannog site are remnants or parts of objects that have either been discarded (thrown over the side of the crannog) or lost (dropped through the floor of the crannog). All of these objects collected on the lochbed and were preserved in the clay and debris of the loch.

I see my use of ‘erasing as a creative method’ and ‘creating traces’ of language and/or sound as a way to further link my work with the above discovery at the Crannog. I also see this as a conceptual method that I can explore in the piece I will outline below.

Performance Piece

Narrative/Drawing Performance work (Title TBC)

Narrative discusses object in question in the first person (I am) (eg. size, colour, texture, material, age, location, use or speculated use).

Object is one from the Crannog Centre’s collection of discarded and lost objects.

Narrative is repeated, with each repetition ‘deleting’ a word/words.

Narrative is repeated until there is no spoken word/text left, silence.

During narrative, performer is creating a visual representation of the object being discussed. Once drawing is complete, performer begins to erase drawing until there is nothing of the visual representation left.

Performance is documented through digital sound, video and still photography.