McM presents L.I.F.T.

This week I have been trying to work out how to make the costumes wearer friendly and easily changeable.. Thanks to my Unkle Roy who popped by on Friday with Auntie June and suggested 'Elastic" doh! never thought of it, was fixated with velcro . We now have costumes that we can take off and put on easily with the minimum fuss. Thanks Uncle Roy.

I was reading about the other events on Leeds Light night this year they look really interesting its one of my favourite nights out….and I'll miss it! because we are an event at Leeds Light Night, wish I could do both.

We tried on our costumes and did a photo shoot this week. Its a really useful process a photo session it allows me to see the costumes at a distance, and on a body, not flat on a wall or table. There were some changes came out of this process with Eva's costume. The first time we realised that polo necks, although they allowed our real life physicallity to be seperate,they actually made it look as if Eva's head was floating seperatly above …a bit disturbing. So we have gone with crew necks which works much better. She also needed a necklace, and the blue frill wasnt working. So now Beryl is born in full her full and rounded character Its been an interesting process whatching the personalities and character traits evolve as we developed the costumes.

I think Cheryl needs a necklace as she has a large expanse of flesh which I think could do with breaking up.

Arthur we decided came straight from school worked his way up to commissionaire. I think he quite likes the girls flirting with them he likes his uniform its smart and he feels important wearing it. He prides himself in being able to spot an important VIP in a crowd

Cyril probaby went to tech college to learn about projection and film he's a bit techy probably smokes a pipe wears cords and well worn brogues a tweedy green tie and a soft check farmer type shirt He likes Beryl and Cheryl but I think they worry him I don't think he'd feel safe in a confined space with either, he strikes me as more interested in his projectors and cameras

I was thinking about our project and how I use venn diagrams when I am trying to understand the concepts we are working with. Initially the venn diagram was about the roles we were to play, or as I thought of it the spaces we were to occupy. The artists, the public and the technicians involved, plus the physical space of the goods lift the theater/cinema and how these overlapped.

It was always going to occupy or hopefully span the space between theater and Art. We were calling it performance installation but is it? was it, as it was first envisaged, overlapping theatrical traditions and fine art equally as I hoped?

Initially we were to make a space using painted plywood that would be reminiscent of cinemas through the ages not specifically re-creating an era but definitely not of today a time out of time 'fantasy'. We wanted to evoke childhood memories of trips to the cinema, I was thinking of making the painted cinema have a child's eye perspective, we discussed using photographs of Hyde park Cinema in Leeds as the frontage for our project, reproducing them on huge banners at entrance to the lift area.

I think it was as we were discussing the perspective that I thought of drawing the frontage using a loose wash of colour rather than the photographic approach.

Eva and I had talked about the costumes which were based on children's cut out paper dolls clothes that we both remembered from childhood and we each had made for our drawn paper dolls.

Eva suggested we make the 'set' out of a thin voile material which could be painted or sewn on to create an ethereal memory of cinema, like a membrane between the reality of the goods lift and the cinematic space we were creating.

What it reminded me of was making dens out of net curtains as a child. We both liked this playful childlike element that was coming through.

This development in our choice of materials started me thinking about the spaces occupied by art and theatre and their individual traditions and materials associated with each.I liked the concepts of LIFT, but initially I felt our project could easily be viewed as a

I felt happier now about this straddling of the two worlds we were naturally being drawn to the traditional tools of art drawing.

How L.I.F.T. came into being
Whilst looking for a venue in Leeds for our performance installation B.L.O.T which we wanted to enter into Leeds Light Night my colleague Eva came across a large goods lift, part of the Electric Press building in Leeds City Center, she rang me and said what do you think of creating a cinema in a goods lift instead of doing BLOT?
I work with notions of space and use the ambivalence and multiple meanings of words in sentences and phrases. I’m working with ‘negotiating space’ at the moment and all the connotations this brings to my mind. I saw lots of possibilities with Eva’s idea, a series of linked spaces like a Venn diagram. I was using the word space as a visual encapsulation for ‘ideas’, memories, expectations, and assumptions as well as using ‘space’ in its physical meaning.
To Navigate the space we would create, you would have to traverse your own assumptions about art, where art should be seen, how people should behave in general, and in the presence of ‘Art’, what a cinema is, where cinema takes place, middle aged women, mothers. I especially liked the idea of upsetting notions of proper behaviour for a mother, and a middle-aged woman, as both Eva and I have these roles, we’re also blonds, if nothing else this collection of labels makes me laugh every time I think of us as ‘serious artists’.

This was exciting, we had begun with B.L.O.T to cross into performance and installation and found this added another dimension to our work one which we were both keen to explore. The idea of cinema…were we going to make and show a film ? how was this going to evolve? where was performance and interactivity to come in? should it come in? these were questions from which something interesting could be born.