Long after the day has gone, there is light. It has been a tough week for the residency but, hopefully, I am in a new phase. Am also managing some studio practice as well. The determination that the residency should not be an extension of my normal (what is normal?) studio work has created a few complications. Think now that they can run side by side, not parallel but as linked areas of practice. Should I have posted at the lowest point of the week? Well, probably but….
Just another day! The gallery is beginning to like something is happening. The slow process of building an installation in response to the space and its environs takes place not just when you are there but when you aren’t there. Relating to everyday occurrences, emotions, meetings, there are nuances that are not seen as well as the overt. It is good to take time as well as space.
Dark space has a special quality to it, velvety and warm. Beginning my first collaboration, we used this quality to experiment with sound using materials that were lying around. Underpinned by someone’s clock ticking, by the buzz of the fridge and by the creaks and groans that were created in the old building by the wind, there appeared endless possibilities.
Beginning to engage with the space, creating an ongoing dialogue rather than just putting or building separate pieces of work in it. This is an important step forward and contributes also to my research into the nature of exhibition space as well as to the site-specific.
I have been very much occupied with a particular corner, where one side of the gallery meets what is almost a very wide corridor that also serves as an entrance. The fact that much of the space cannot be seen on entering and shadows are continually created and changing throughout the day lends itself to a continuing discourse.
The intention of the first residency collaboration is to create a sound scape for the space with musician Michael Hobson. Whilst these ideas are, as yet, a little undeveloped, we have been thinking in terms of something akin to the way a film sound track works, a composition that reflects the way the space feels, especially at night which is when it will be done. This will begin early next week for as long as it takes.
Having a couple of days away due to other commitments has given me some time to think of what I have done and what I will do. Think the collaborations will keep the residency invigorated, a Skype collaboration is planned for the last week in January with Chinese artist Chen Yizhong.
Through installation, expanded sculpture, photography and film and sometimes pseudo-scientific experiments, I am trying to create a dialogue between space and place using interventions and interruptions as part of a site-specificity that explores in-between spaces, inside and outside, nowhere and somewhere. I use temporary, ephemeral and provisional interruptions, to locate, re-locate and re-contextualise territory referencing what has been, what is or what could be, the past, the present and the future and where it intersects with the human relationship. They often refer to incidental happenings that create a transformation of objects. The notion of absence, as possibility rather than lack, is an underlying theme within the concepts of territory, whether historical, political, geographical, cultural as well as how it is colonized, altered, used and navigated and, relating to this, place and placelessness.Â
