Forecasts (Collaboration November)

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Hello Alex,

hope you are well, how is brighton?

I spoke to the guy from west end arcade today, unfortunately he said that he wouldn’t be able to rent the space for a week or few days. He said that the shortest amount of time we could get it for would be a month – and for a month it would cost between £300 – £500 (depending on the space). Electricity will also be added on top.

so as I see it, we have these options

– we could get the space for a month, share it with other people, dividing it into four separate weeks of short performances or shows.

– we could look for other spaces – but I think that the large window that the arcade spaces have will be really useful for the audience to be able to watch but not interact (the whole public/private tension thing which I think will make this successful). So if we want to look for other spaces, I think we need to find a space which has a similar front window set up.

If we decide we are interested in the West End Arcade space then we need to book the space closer to the time.

Have a think about it, and let me know what you think.

—

I’ve also just had a first read over your writing, and I was thinking of some stuff to write down here in this email, I’m going to re – read,but I thought I’d write some initial thoughts/things that I connected with etc.
I’m going to just reel this off without too much editting so sorry if it doesn’t make sense or is way off mark.
I thought I’d just try and get some dialogue going, and try to be honest as possible.

– Reading your writing, especially the performance texts feels incredibly intimate, I feels like I was reading someone’s notebooks or diary, or perhaps a letter. It was as if I had intercepted a very personal conversation; eaves dropping on an argument or lover’s conversation. It becomes awkward and intimate at once, for a moment I’m caught up in the fantasy, and I believe this character/voice is talking to me, I start to remember something that never happened.

– The fear of forgetting, knowing there will never be enough time to get it all down, that there will always be something left unsaid or undone – this is something I connect with, and saw in your description of the keat’s poem. For me, I am terrified by the fact that everything I know and see (and all the things I do not know, and have not seen) will one day stop. That makes me kind of desperate to collect and hoard experience and memories knowing that the collection will never be complete.

– The structure of your writing, the way it is composed on the page – fragmented and interupted, broken at times and flowing at others, I enjoy this in a formal way. Ignoring the words and their meaning for a second, and just looking at the shapes as patterns, this interests me, and I feel that this connects with my sculptures.
Also with the play between the planned and the improvised; the tension between spontaneous and rehearsed memories.

– Romanticism – your writing centres around feelings and relationships – references to the external world seem romanticised, small moments of places and memories. The work is quite introverted and sometimes as a reader, I want to pull you or your character away from your thoughts, the points when I most feel this are the points at which the voice becomes self depreciating or when I feel a moment is being over analysed. – I think a good opposition in our works here is past and future, much of your material seems to be sourced from memory and I have been looking at predictability, essentially, looking at what comes next. I wonder if this is an area that we could talk about or make work about.

Anyway, I hope that makes some kind of start. As i say I’m going to have a re read of your stuff, this has been a pretty immediate response to your writing.

look forward to your reply,

Matt

ALEXANDRIA CLARK’S ARTIST STATEMENT

Art is a connection;

a pathway that connects the artist with their audience.

Through this idea, I aim to produce work that can reach the viewer on a personal level, by evoking personal memories, exposing my own, and taking them through an experience that connects us intimately.

I am mainly interested in recording myself and others around me;

It is the notion of watching people and exploring the boundaries or ‘crossover’ between innocent observation and actually becoming an intrusive voyeur that truly intrigues and excites me.

The people of our world seem to have an obsession with being noticed, sharing the worry that one day we will realise that our life has passed us by without us being recorded and thus not continuing to exist after our bodies have physically gone.

My work takes the form of text and typing within a performative context. Through live performances (typing on a laptop which is directly linked to a projection behind me), I have explored the act of writing, where time is overlapped, where the dimensions of memories in the past and the record of people in the present are merged. I write in such a way that makes the audience question whether I am writing about them which leaves them feeling uncomfortable. I play with rhythm and the alignment of the words upon the page to create pace and manipulate how the viewer reads it. I find this control that it gives me, a very important part of my practice.

Within my artwork there is a continual theme of the idea of playing games and ‘role-play’; during the performances, I take on the roles and perspectives of different people, both real and fictional. This encourages persistent questioning of whether it is fantasy, truth or a mixture which adds the discomfort the audience is already feeling.

When it comes to it….

it all really….

is just a game.