I had a good meeting with Lynn the other day and we discussed the visits we made to Greenham Common and the sound edit I had forwarded recently to Lynn. we talked about how the images (or darkness on the screen) might relate to the sounds in the longer edit (it’s on soundcloud, see the link eventually loaded into the previous blog). Sometimes the sounds will be in a fairly obvious relationship to the images, sometimes less obvious, and sometimes there will apparently be no relation at all apart from in the mind and sense of the viewer and listener. Things are moving on and I feel, towards the end of the project, that we really have taken a big step forward, not least because Lynn has agreed to have a meeting with Lucy, even though she was so reluctant to show any of her footage to Lucy before she was totally happy with it. So this is great.
I’m going to think carefully about what is the best way we can all get something out of the meeting and draw up a little agenda, without making things too formal. ….and also a list of problems and issues that have come up over the period of months we have been involved in the project. It has certainly been a collaboration, though as I am at the centre of it, I got the most out of things. I want to make sure the other two people get something out of it for their own practice as well, which they can take away from this project and hopefully apply to their own individual practices.
The link above is to a short sound piece I made using a small amount of the material I recorded and performed at Greenham Common. I had to make a 3 min piece of work to accompany an application for a Royal Scottish Academy Residency, and there is an arts centre in the Western Isles that is interested in hosting an artist whose work is relevant to one of their themes for next year ie. Archaeology , so I thought I would also put a link to this work on soundcloud and include it in my a-n blog. I hope the link works! Now, so far the sound work doesn’t really show much evidence of collaboration. Lynn and I had a discussion about when we should meet with Lucy and we had differing opinions about this so I am to make some notes about what such a meeting could/might achieve and we are to discuss it again. We also discussed what kind of piece we would make from the sound I have recorded at Greenham and the films that Lynn has shot so far. We have decided to make a film lasting about 15 mins which will try to convey some of the layers of history and archaeology of the Common, and see how the sound and images can play off against oneanother in a kind of dialogue. Maybe the two of us as collaborators can’t always agree verbally but strangely, the work usually brings the best out of both of us. Maybe collaboration is not always about words, but about communicating through the artistic material that we have made up till the point of editing, and then the dialogue comes when the editing really starts and the material takes over from the two individual people…even though they previously thought they were collaborating!
Lucy has become rather sidelined in this I feel, unfortunately. I meet with her but so far we three haven’t met together at all. I will work out how to tackle this for the best.
The sound piece is made up of speaking, singing, “playing” as instruments some of the remains of the airbase fuel station known as Pol21, recordings of the sounds of the Common (lots of planes fly overhead), and an attempt to convey the depths beneath the surface..a stone is dropped into the rusty mouth of a metal fixture shown in the last couple of posts. There is no added reverb or anything, all the sounds are just as recorded on Greenham Common and all were recorded on site. More soon. I will start a bigger sound edit very soon.
