Yesterday I was cutting up doors. On the face of it, I’ve spent better Saturday mornings, but after beating decades of hard-set gloss paint from secret screws, and jigsawing my way around come convoluted silhouettes, it wasn’t been that bad after all.
I’ve split residency at the Clovelly centre into three related projects, which I hope will integrate successfully.
Not knowing who I was going to be working with, it seemed best to distil the project down to some more generic essentials. Being an amputee, and having lived in India for a year or so, I’ve had some experience of being one of the disabled minority that Ossie Stuart’s quote is addressing. The project participants would all have their own experiences, quite possibly not involving discrimination, disability or marginalisation. It therefore became sensible to make an inductive shift, and explore what happens to an individual in a situation of any type of oppression.
So three projects will explore ideas of powerlessness, frustration, and control.
The first is aimed to act as a general reflection of the attitudes and frustrations that result from discriminatory practices, allowing the participants to draw upon any personal experience where they have felt a lack of control, a feeling of futility, or sense of powerlessness. Taking their inspiration from those famously tormented guys Tantalus and Sisyphus, they will each make a short, simple, and looped video.
Next, each week one of the participants will be the designated documenter. They will not be taking part in any other activity. Stuck in a small room, with a bunch of people making art stuff, I’m hoping they get bored soon. This should get them to push further what they see as worth capturing. If they use the camera’s memory card to its full limit each week, we could have over two thousand images to work with in the final installation. Given the limited scope of subject matter, it’s interesting to see that each person’s documentation session already has its own clear distinction.
The results on that front have been, perhaps predictably, other than I expected. Without exception, they all struggled to keep up the snapping. Late in the first session, we had a walk-out. 20 minutes later they came back with a memory card full of next doors cake-baking and the dead plants in the garden. This trend has continued. It would appear rotting vegetation is more interesting than my workshop.
I’m finding it difficult condense the last few weeks in to something brief and coherent. Another lesson learned: stay on top of things. Write it up as it happens. The work opportunities appear to be picking up quite considerably of late, and I find I’m having to change my organisational habits. The “I’ll catch it up later” strategy has breathed its last gasp. Anyway, the Sunday morning cafetiere is drained, and I need to go to Oxfam to collect some books for another exhibition I’m preparing for.
