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.
