Monkey’s Fist
The throw has a start, it lands, it has an end but the space between, its momentum and arc is a liminal space. My shift is that in the sublime aspect of landscape voyeurism we use borders as an edge and the remote as a point of escape. We embark from fixed points, normally our abode, and leave for a time, temporarily to escape. Thus mythical and romantic relationships with our landscape is what keeps the distinction between urban and rural so delineated and one which I wish to breach. The monkey’s fist connects, pulls, intrudes, lands and marks out arcs in its velocity and weight. Only an idea orientated piece at this point, the arcs and throws are to be my drawing of reaching into space. A low key response an d in Lippard’s words ‘often resembling ruins, amalgams of past and future, remains of something ‘more’, vestiges of some unknown venture’ (Escape attempts;1997)
There is a ghost of content loosely embedded within the binds of the rope that forms the fist, reminding of past physical interaction with basic tools; reminders of heritage and sea now echoed on land; as a conquering device to board a vessel and the relationship with architecture of landscape. This is my start – ephemeral, unintimidating, reliant on performance and document the conceptual forms of contemporary art. In the vein of Adrian Piper and her series of mapping pieces and her interrogation of philosophical and spatial concepts I sit with this fist to punch a pocket of air at a random border.
Chunky Move first showed a piece called connected appropriating ropes as connectors, Kraus’s grid, wheels and knots. The stage set acting more as art installations but progresses with Gideon Orbarzanek’s Digital Moves. Both instances draw upon Reuben Margolin’s kinetic and geometric studies moving between technically engineered prop to digital moving visions connected to the movement of the body.
I once worked with Sophia Lycouris from Nottingham University improvising with a single white spot in order to respond to a kinetic robotic spine later animated in the space with me. This imaginative use of movement beyond the realms of dance or street performance occupies my practice but I have yet to resolve it in relation to the Monkey’s Fist. However the fist does offer a synergy of everyday, functional repetitive movement such as the rhythmic throb of producing our habitual lived experiences and distilling it to a moment.
In recently working with an artist’s group with Gustavo Ceirico at Yorkshire sculpture park on ‘Where The Horizon Moves’ we were working from Casper David Friederich and looked at the possibilities of locating and moving the horizon within the location of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. The works derived were moveable in terms of site whilst some were more specific to the architecture and infrastructure of the park. Expecting to mostly install I found myself returning to choreographic moments attuned to my research on the horizon looking at promenade and procession to everyday gestures locating a distant unreachable horizon.
The proposals offered varying perspectives from nomadic benches and comedy to processional gazing in regency /contemporary modes over to running up and down hillsides exchanging horizontal perspectives. These were experiments and a culmination of investigations to develop a body of work for the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. However clutching this monkeys fist I now see a wider possibility with this idea of drawing and sculpting space.
Recently I have become concerned with the torrent of concepts and ideas I have fumigating my research and blowing it to dust. They escape me and in my attempt to reach them I am employing my own device of monkey’s fist – proposals and sketches the artists blueprints except I am literally blueprinting them through the photopolymer process which stamps and embeds the glimpses of work standing on the edge of rationality and imagination. My primary concern combines the drawing potential of the fist in the thrust of the fist and the arcs of the rope and the catches with object and person. It rests on gesture, learnt movement and inhabited through function relating to its nautical heritage where edges between ships, land and sea exist.
