INCREASING PRESENCE..
‘There is an unseen presence we honour that gives gifts’ (Rumi)
The structure is quite rapidly transforming, generating itself into an iridescent communal poem. The diversity of text is revealing itself – from the simple and banal to the obscure and profound…
People came in waves today – large groups of arts students in the morning who immediately took to participating and were so at ease talking to us about the piece and what it brought up for them . Men whose wives went off gift shopping while they sat and participated and who found a retreat within the blue voile walls. Makers from surrounding stands taking a break to reflect, chat and read the walls which are writing themselves into existence. Children squealing with delight at the white pens that write like snow on blue ribbon and the see- through nature of the walls through which they can play hide and seek…
I experienced a constant charge of social interaction with all kinds of people and realised this is my favourite medium – the energies of the public engaging with the work. I love the unpredictability of how people will react to and engage with it. We have a very tuned-in team of volunteers, individuals who really get what the work is about and intuitively engage with the public as and when needed. They are from textiles, arts, anthropology and writing backgrounds – all areas this piece references.
My gift today was a visit from Stevie Bezencenet who was the MA Media Arts Course leader and my supervisor at Westminster 7 years ago. It was a real treat to sit and talk with her and catch up on our lives, and I realised that it was with her help that I let go of working exclusively with digital media and made the transition into installation work. She was the one who pointed me in the direction of the ‘sublime’ and the ‘poetics of space’. Crafting Space is in fact the first project where I have not used technology at all (apart from this blog!) since 1994. And I am not missing it, because in fact the intensity of the interaction satisfies me as much as any piece of digitally networked art has done. I am enjoying this cross-breed of the handmade, the conceptual and the person-to-person interaction that can only come from having a constant mass of public brought to the work through a Fair like this. And my collaboration with Willow on the structure feels like 'a perfect symbiosis of our two mediums, one could not have existed without the other' (as she expressed it yesterday).
