barren residency – poetic spaces
Day 4
Bachelard and the poetics of space have hooked in corners, stairs and drawers for looking at the psyche and space (Bachelard.G, 1958) Outside the domestic environment we also have psychogeography (Self.W, 2007) wandering and the psyche, stemming from the dandy in Paris to the drift of urban art practices. I’m also reflecting on the state of standing and looking and how we use that to apply a particular gaze at horizons and landscapes. If we take the heroic gaze on landscape it is considered male, possessive and objectifying. If we take the feminine we conceptualise its nebulous areas. barren perhaps epitomizes outside/ in, near and far and looking with intention.
I started with a poem, ‘What life is this if we cannot stand and stare…’ (W.H.Davies ). Davies wrote this in the 50s, now we sanctify it in little green spaces and openings, put turf roofs on houses and look at how every possible inch can be a representation of the rural as a nostalgic nod. The rural is used for escape. We think of adventure, a walk, an activity there is an effort to go out into it. So how does the value of edge spaces, transition points on the outskirts offer potential for barren to occupy and present a culture that activates these edges; and indeed is barren as a collaborative turn confined to that, when we have already occupied abandoned fenced off car parks?
To make a distinction – my research presents the problem of the outskirts but barren is more liberal and offers the potential to occupy, transform and take edgelands in a broader term. It engages space in a poetic manner for pulling from the outside to inside, to value and instigate occupation and preservation of what is laid waste. We might not be literally wandering the streets or in mobile homes but roaming and back to base offers fetching of something valuable and letting it occupy the poetics of space inside.
We are not reliant on our physical roaming, we have discovered objects which have been abandoned including a slide screen revealing slides made by a family in the 1950s which Dave brought in one day along with maps used for particular sites. So we are encroaching on a durational wasteland not history because history is something that there is already fictionalised and set in a timeline. These are hidden histories and are futile in themselves, just interesting waste sites. The aspect of duration with space combined lends itself to understanding the objects reclaimed within barren. The chair that currently sits in the exhibition belonged to a very old lady in a Flosh cottage in Yorkshire. She lived in a flagstone lounge where puddles used to creep and hung her washing on a thin piece of string across a waste garden. When she finally left there was this chair and a stool painted white. The paint has not been entirely removed and the formulas that now occupy it are poetic in that they refer directly to the site of the subject and the subjective view.
So, what is poetic about a term that means ‘too poor to produce vegetation, barren tracts of land, fruitless, unproductive and infertile? It is this very futility that has its attraction. A playfulness with barren stretches that have no obvious value and certainly not capital unless to be converted into another vertical building. The only production is the action within the space and it pays heed to the futility of many things. It does represent what is poor and in that case represents more than space; it presents the potential for, but lies sterile. Briefly the space becomes something momentarily and draws attention to a restless navigation and occupation of lands.
Dave and I have inadvertently placed pieces of poetry on the table before barren evolved but now we’re questioning its place within the work. In working towards a body of work which captures these notions it now appears to us that poetry may be essentially the futile voice that is synonymous with barren.
