Points of Departure and Reflection

After the AIR presentation last night, I am truly beginning to wonder about Worcester and whether some sort of art network will develop and that we will bring present art into the conservative watercoloured 'city' that I live in, Worcester.

Nathan Pitt, (The Pitt Studios), who was the other speaker last night, seems to feel a passion for making something happen; studios, exhibitions and mainly just a group of artists who know each other.

I have been living here since September 2007, 10 months and have not met a single contemporary artist here. If I am here, a 22 year old live art artist living within this city, there must be others. Perhaps, and most probably, this is all my fault, but no one seems to advertise their existence. I hope, that now a few of have met, that there will be more of an arts community here, we shall see!

There is the prospect that I may be performing at an opening at Galerie Loris in Berlin this October, so I am musing over what I would present and how it would be different. Just as paint is a medium, and all paintings are individual, my medium is a laptop, a projector, words, an audience and me. Each piece is different and if someone else decides to use the same medium as me, our work will still be different.

I am currently thinking that bringing a more participatory aspect into my work might be interesting…

When I consider “points of reflection and departure”, the main thing that comes to mind, is the thought of graduating from Nottingham Trent Uni BA Fine Art course last summer. This obviously left me with time to think about the previous 3 years and contemplate where I wanted them to take me.

When it all ended, a group of us developed an artist group Tether, which is still based in Nottingham. We decided that we should start something straight away and began thinking about creating a mini art festival in Nottingham. Tether Festival happened last November and I got quite involved with the whole project. I made a book of 2 past performances which was accepted for an exhibition in Bromley house, I co-curated an exhibition called Throes, and also collaborated with a fellow ex-student to put on a performance called Forecasts.

My current series of work involves a live performance, where I am sat in a room, at a desk and I type on a laptop which is connected to a projector. Each word, letter and space is instantly projected onto the wall behind me. The audience is allowed to enter the room at any time, whether I am there or not. For an hour each morning and afternoon, for approximately a week, I sit at that laptop and type. When I am not there, the words of the last 5 or 10 minutes are left up on the screen, suggesting a sense of intrigue and the knowing that something has been before that they have missed. As I sit there typing, I move into a trance-like state: the words flow, a form of free-thought, improvised writing that also sometimes recalls previous writings. The narrative is story-like and intimate, playing with the ideas of who is writing this and who the other ‘characters’ are. It is ambiguous and by not using names, just “I, you, she, he and they”, the audience find themselves wondering whether I am perhaps writing about them. The tone and voice of the “I” within it, stops and changes throughout the text, fueling the ideas that there might be an alter ego or perhaps even whether this author or typist is writing it herself.