Invisible City – New work in Schiedam

The benefits of working away on a residency or exhibition;

New places to respond to
New people to work with
New work to be influenced by
Time to dedicate to just producing new work
Space to think and reflect about how this fits in with my wider practice

The problem with coming home again;

Day-to-day distractions
Other work (although I shouldn’t complain)
Loss of continuity (like not updating this blog for a fortnight)

The benefits of being home again after a residency of exhibition;

An opportunity to put research and reflection into practice in the form of new applications
Seeing new opportunities for my work
A feeling of ambition to improve on what i’ve started.

When is a piece of work a piece of work?

This is especially relevant in the case of this series of works i’ve developed in Schiedam (but also throughout much of my practice).

When my work involves an intervention, where is the artwork – is it:

– the performance – me being behind the screen and actively following images of the audience
– the interaction – the audience taking part, adapting their movements, being aware that they can contribute
– the installation – the physical presence of the objects in the space, in this case the video camera, projection and paper screen
– the drawing – the document that something happened, the ‘picture’ that is left

to be considered and continued…

On making instructions – overlaps between dance and performance art/interventions

I visited the John Cage exhibition when it was at Baltic this time last year, and i’ve been experimenting with drawings lately that are led by processes, mathematics, order rather than aesthetic judgement. Before I left for Schiedam, I expressed my concern that some of my drawings had become less about the movement and more about the context. I wanted to get back to the work being more reliant on interaction and documentation of movement. To give myself some rigour in this aspect I wrote some instructions to myself in my sketchbook before I started each drawing – sometimes I broke them, but in the main I followed the instructions I had set.

I felt that this kept me on track while I was making the drawings – I was less inclined to just stop following someone, or be distracted by another more visually interesting movement while I was thinking about these.

I shared my working process with some of the dancers working on Invisible City and had an interesting conversation with Francesca Bracelli (http://francescabracelli.com) who was performing Adam Nillissen’s piece. I showed her the instructions that I had written for myself and she felt that this could be a way that she would start working as a dancer – improvising from this set of instructions to create movement. There’s two things from our conversation that I will look further into – her comments about Laban (which I thought was a dance company here in the UK, but also refers to ‘a way and language for interpreting, describing, visualizing and notating all ways of human movement’) and her idea that I should attend an improvisation class to develop my ideas in my own work and on ways that I could work with dancers or performers in future.

I’ve just reviewed and edited together some clips from one of my performances over the weekend – Interesting to see how it looks from the other side of the canvas…

Performance drawing at Invisible City, Ruimte in Beweging, Schiedam, Netherlands, 4 September 2011 Artist: Claire Weetman This work was supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council Englan

I’ve been home from Schiedam for nearly two days and the momentum for writing the blog has slipped, so to come back to the things that I promised myself I’d write about (and I think that it is useful to do this for personal reflection, but also as a resource to return to when I write my Grants for the Arts Report) here is my account of Day 3 of Invisible City:

Sunday 4th September 2011
Invisible City day 3.

I felt that yesterday’s technical set up was really successful for what I wanted to achieve – i.e. the interaction with the public. The barrier that the screen provides combined with the video projection, the lines I draw and the shadow that my own body casts created a situation where people interacted with the piece.

I had originally planned to hang the stretched cotton panel that I will use today on the back wall – but I realised that it will fit in the doorway and will take a back projection in the same way as the rice paper. I had also intended to move the camera to an overhead position to capture people more as dots on the floor – but I think that this would limit people’s interactions with the work, as it is less apparent that the audience are involved. The camera in it’s current position mirrors the space and catches people’s eyes.

So in order to make today’s drawing a bit different from Saturday’s I’ve decided to include a piece of street furniture. This time it’s a lamppost drawn from my observations in Schiedam. Like Friday, I’ve had to place the image on the drawing in proportion to the size of people on the projected image and my hopes were that people may also interact with this new object that appears to be in this interior space when you look at the surface. on reflection though, I don’t think anyone interacted with it.

I’ve kept the instructions from Saturday’s performance as I think that it worked well: 3 30 minute sessions over the course of the afternoon.

When I start drawing my lines onto the cotton, it becomes apparent that this material isn’t as nice to work on with a brush as the rice paper. The cotton absorbs the ink faster and leaves me with less visible lines, with bleed spots where I start drawing which quickly trail off into dry brush marks. I think that this hinders the drawing a little as I need to keep dipping the brush back in the ink. When I use the calligraphy pen it provides a more consistent line, and I don’t have to make an aesthetic judgement on when to reload with ink – I can concentrate on the interaction with the public. The cotton is also thinner than the rice paper, so the light source from the projector is more visible from the outside.

Today I got some really good interactions with the public – quite a few people really stretching their legs when I ‘m following feet, and someone who made shadow puppets that tried to catch the shadow of my paintbrush. I also latched onto the movements of some of the dancers who were performing in the main space for Adam Nillissen’s work.

I realised that the marks in this piece of work look very much like the drawings I created in my Investigations works in 2004 – horizontal lines, screens, public interaction, these 3 drawings have pulled out themes from nearly all of my past works – maybe it’s just because i’m putting words to it that I’ve noticed, or it could be because the week here has been so intense and interesting.

Today I also took part in the round table discussion about Invisible Cities, but i’m going to write about that and it’s outcomes for me separately.