A crucial radiator has broken. It’s cold.
Today I did not work on Sunday’s talk. I interviewed florists. Florists shouldn’t officially appear on this blog, they’re part of a separate project. But I can’t help it.
I’m making no attempt at all to think about what the florists might have to do with ‘Keeping Time’ and the ideas that surround it. The florists are for an unrelated commission by an independent London publisher called LemonMelon. In the past commissions have been known to take me far off track and I’ve gradually learned to turn down those that are completely unsuitable for me, and to interpret possibly relevant invitations in ways that allow my practice to develop through (not despite) them. This is one such commission. I was very happy to take it on because it seemed obliquely relevant from the outset, though I didn’t know what direction the work would eventually take.
And the work I’m finally developing from the LemonMelon commission—a book entitled ‘was’—doesn’t evolve from any strands of ideas I’m knowingly working with at the moment (there are no florists in the ‘cloud’ I described in my previous post, for instance). So this is one of those works I feel very much in the dark about, even as I create it. Some pieces of work seem quite clear as I make them; some are completely unknown to me; some balance in between.
I knew largely what interested me about ‘Keeping Time’ before the residency began: it draws upon work I’ve been developing for many years. There have been many unexpected elements along the way, and I couldn’t have predicted the final outcome in advance, but because of the public nature of the residency and the exhibition immediately afterwards, I made sure I had a good sense of the work before I set foot in the Project Space at MAO. The risks came before the residency; the residency itself was more to perfect the form of the work.
But I’m developing the ‘was’ book in the dark, taking the risks along with me as I go. I’m doing the work as it makes sense to me now, and once it’s a finished thing I will look at it as an outsider and see what I can find. I wouldn’t exactly call it ‘intuitive’, but I’m certainly not seeking to tie up loose ends, or even to spot which ends are loose.
It’s helpful to contrast the strategies of ‘Keeping Time’ and ‘was’. It reminds me that however prepared I was before the residency began, and however carefully I honed the visual form of the work, I will still return to ‘Keeping Time’ as an outsider now it’s complete, find loose ends I never knew were there, and see what I can find among them.
