Image: inside Gillian Wearing’s installation at the University of Brighton
An intense week. Visitors, traveling, teaching. Some powerful experiences – good and bad, love and hate: The Encounter, This is How We Die.
Today, 30 minutes of time unaccounted for, so I can choose how to spend it. I am sitting in an oversized bean bag in Gillian Wearing’s A Room With Your Views installation.
Four other people are slumped in the dark beside me – engrossed, at ease, engaged. The level of engagement has surprised me. I am drawn in to this subtle work, with Wearing’s typically understated style.
I’m struck by the fact that more than 600 people have been inspired, have bothered, to take part in this work, following a simple set of guidelines instructing them to make a short video. These clips, each around 10 seconds long, have been carefully composed by Wearing into a the piece I’m now watching which in total will run on for more than 2 hours.
In each short clip, a video camera is positioned in front of a window while the curtains or blinds are drawn back or opened to unveil the world outside. Each clip begins with a caption telling us the location where it was filmed. There is a certain expectation that comes with each caption; a preconceived idea, perhaps subconscious, of what each place might be like. Each one brings its own surprises and a seemingly limitless variety of nature, weather, landscape and humanity:
snow in Stockholm and a howling wind
birdsong in Boston, USA – birdsong, a feature of so many of the clips
Tiassale, Ivory Coast – slowly opening louvred blinds and the sight and sounds of jungle
Kanof, Guinea – a dusty street, people calling and the chitter of cicadas in the background
London , UK – darkness… and light – a glittering spectacle (and a cat on the window sill)
Brooklyn, USA, more snow, deep and blowing
Stockholm again, this time a city street
Kabul, Afghanistan – the unexpected view of a beautiful garden and a reminder of a world populated by ordinary people who just want to make a nice life in a pleasant place.
