I had not counted on it snowing during the residency – an oversight as I did not bring either studs for my running shoes nor sufficient warm layers of running wear. Compounded by increasingly late sunrises I realise that I have probably run my last run here. The forecast for the coming week shows nothing above zero … perhaps a sunny -1 will be enough to melt the snow and provide the opportunity for run on the last weekend – that would be nice. In the meantime I shall shift my morning routine and do some much needed stretching. I cannot imagine my life without regular physical exercise … how do my fellow artists here feel in their bodies?
My days here are quite different from those of the other artists … I am at the other end of many different spectra – the earliest to rise, the earliest to go to bed, the ones who drinks the least, the one who does (the most/some) physical exercise. The other artist who is in his fifties is a heavy smoker and drinker … though often the second to rise. The other artist who drinks in moderation and is the youngest, she is also a non-smoker. This situation is not so unusual, I am used to being on the edge … at a distance from the majority of artists’ lives … in my own orbit.
Yesterday I spent a surprisingly (to myself) long time at the Riga fashion museum – Modes Muzejs. Despite having a modest collection of perhaps no more than 40 garments on display it kept me engaged and intrigued for nearly three hours. I have now seen a dress from the house of Charles Worth – the creator of what is now haute couture (it was Worth who first sewed labels bearing his name into garments, he was the first to show his collections on models, the street where he established his ateljé became the centre of Parisian … read ’global’ … fashion). I have learned about Watteau pleats, seen exquisite embroidery and beadwork form the eighteenth hundreds, as well as pieces by Chanel, Schiaparelli, Balenciaga, Halston, Ralph Lauren, Jean Paul Gaultier, Thierry Mugler, and Alexander McQueen as well as designers who were new to me such as Gustav Bear, Paul Poiret, and Rudi Gernreich. Often I was the only person in one of the three rooms – sometimes in the whole museum. Although I am fascinated by tailoring it was the draperi and embellishment that I found most inspiring … thinking not so much about how the garments might work when worn but rather how the pleats, folds, drapes, and forms worked now … static … as I encountered them … what could I learn for my own work, for the flags?
The museum shop was full of substantial monographs, surveys, and thematic publications … if I had unlimited resources and unrestricted baggage allowance I would have spent a fortune. As it was I went back to the very glamorous and helpful staff at the entrance and asked for their tips on local fabric shops. They recommended two (one each) on the same street a short distance from the city centre. I am going to use the remainder of the ’culture award’ that I got to buy fabric, and possibly some braids, ribbons, and fringes to take home with me.
Modes Muzejs
Writing and working with text … presenting text … presenting words has caught my imagination. It is something that we have done at various times over the past two weeks. And it is something that I have reflected back upon during my time here. Text, words, or language are not the usual material that I work with – at least not in my practice, they belong in other distinct (that word again) areas: proofreading, application writing, … blogging.
John 2, workshop 2.2:a
- write a text reflecting on yesterday’s walk – handwritten, approximately one side A4 paper, double-line spacing
- underline (single line) all the nouns, underline (double line) all the verbs
- sequentially trade/swap nouns and then verbs with others in the group
- read the text to the group
John 2, workshop 2.2:b
- read the text yourself
- select two sentences or phrases
- collate the sentences/phrases (we rolled a die/dice to determine the order)
- read the collaborative text
John 2, workshop 2.2:c
- write/create a score to perform/record the text
- perform/record the text
I really appreciated the processes through which my text left my possession and became a part of our collaborative text. The processes were playful, sometimes chaotic, requiring attention to detail, accepting chance and change. Our collaborative text was abstract and non-sensical, and at the same time it belonged to us – it embraced our individual experiences of having done things together while being a manifestation … exposition(?) … of our having done them as a group.
Note to self: find other artists to collaborate with
Sorcha, Aina, Kristjan, Mattias and I ended up at an intimate concert in an apartment on Thursday evening. An intense man played guitar and sang in Latvian to a crowd of twenty or so students(?) who were sitting on the floor of the bare living room. Aina knew someone who had previously lived in the apartment – now the tenants (artists?) were having to leave and this was the last event. It reminded me of my life thirty or more years ago – life at Dartington, and early years in Edinburgh.
The city that night was especially full of flags. I have noticed the abundance of flags since arriving here: on public buildings, private homes, shops and businesses, on the lampposts along the roads in and out of the centre. There are billboards showing the Latvian flag and poster seeming to advertise a programme of concerts and events connected to the flag. All of this appears to be in preparation for Friday’s Liberation Day celebrations. The Latvian flag is quite beautiful, described to me as red and white it is actually a very particular shade of red – burgundy? It is a sophisticated colour that suggests a long history, it has an earthy quality … bodily … the rich dark red of blood. On my first day here, in old town with Fenu and Sorcha, Fenu told us the origin story of the flag: in ancient times the mighty warrior king was seriously wounded, possibly even killed, on the battlefield. An improvised stretcher was made of white cloth, the king’s powerful and weighty body was carried to safety and lifted from the blood-soaked cloth – a broad white stripe marking where the pressure of his imposing frame had stopped the blood from staining the fabric.
Friday was a national holiday, it was quieter on the roads when I went for my run, however I saw more other runners than I have done before – five. We did not have a holiday, we had the first day of our second workshop with another John – also from the states, and also now living in Estonia. John 1 and John 2 know each other and have previously collaborated in running an arts space. John 2 works with sound and is a professor in the new media department at Estonia’s art school. After chatting over tea and coffee in the kitchen he suggested that we go out to an area of the coast not far from the city. It is a place that he has visited before and which interests him.
We put on warm clothes – we had been watching the light snow fall from out of the kitchen window. We did not know that were were embarking on a four … five? … hour walk on a windy frozen beach and back through a seemingly endless forrest as the daylight diminished. At our point of destination where a winding river meets the Baltic Sea the forrest meets the beach. There are no dunes here – the sand and the pines meet directly. Many of the front-line trees had fallen … some bare and weathered trunks revealed a considerable period since falling, others still bore needles, bark, and intricate delicate root systems that told of more recent collapse. The angles of the fallen trees leaning against those still standing caught my attention. They made me think of the previous day’s white flag – falling and coming to rest.
Later back at the residency John invited us to listen to two of his pieces – sound works accessed through QR codes and played in mobile phones. The sound from our eight phones filled the dark project room – an amazing and inspiring experience. I have been wondering about how I might include … present … one or two text works in our show here – could QR codes be a possibility?
Yesterday I made some flags from materials found around the building. As works, or perhaps pieces of what might become an installation, they are (un)familiar to me. The flag form is something that has evolved in my thinking over the last year, and was made real with new works for Rest. Those flags were – to me at least – heavily loaded with meaning. Yesterdays flags were not. They were exercises in materiality. The single blue/green curtain is simply that – a length of material that very handily has an opening at one end of the hem which allows me to insert a metal pole that I found in a heap of scrap on the way to the basement. The curtain cloth itself was screwed up on the windowsill of the ’conference room’ on the fifth floor. I had found the cloth the day before and placed it on the floor as an addition … response … intervention to Sorcha’s arrangement of materials in the project room. Something shifted in me yesterday morning and I allowed myself to start thinking of what I am doing here as an extension and development of what I have been doing in the studio in Uppsala. I had been giving myself a hard time thinking that I should find an entirely new approach. The white curtain is the outcome of scouting for materials without a specific objective in mind. I realised that I was missing materials – physical things – to work with. So far on the residency we have been making but without materiality.
The blue/green flag was made and propped up against the wall before I found the white materials. Once assembled I leaned the white flag also against the wall next to its blue/green sibling. It looked staged and ’flat’. I went in search of more materials to make other flags returning an hour or so later to find that the white flag found its own position, it had fallen to the left and came to rest in a corner, the overly long train of fabric pooling on the floor. That chance composition was much more appealing.
Before making the flags we had a project planning meeting. In one week it is Riga’s Final Thursday event – a programme of cultural events on the last Thursday of each month. Kaspars (the project co-host, and founder of the residency) wants to know what we will do … but we do not know what we will do. This week has been a bit of a push and pull between talking about getting something together and at the same time feeling that we (participants) have not yet got any clear idea of what we are doing – either collectively or individually. Participation in Final Thursday is important for the residency – it ticks those visibility and accessibility boxes. It demands however publicity material. The meeting was a moments fruitful – we agreed on an image – and at moments it was awkward – what sort of event would it be, and what should it be called. Various words and phrases were thrown around but nothing seemed to fit – how could it when we didn’t know what we were doing. The meeting ended with us committing to return with a title later that day. In the kitchen we carried on playing with words and phrases, eventually settling on the idea of writing the most appealing on pieces of paper and then drawing them out of a hat. The six of us in the room each draw a word, Aina who had been out of the room returned and created a sentence from the six words. Together we agreed on one change, we had our title: Show the curiosity of losing content
Reflecting on the whole day now I see that losing content and playing with materials allowed me to make something simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. I really enjoyed making those two flags. I don’t know what they mean … I don’t think that they ’mean’ anything, and they do not need to. It is almost like asking what do I, or anyone else, ’mean’. We don’t mean things, we simply are things.
This morning’s run took me passed the Swiss and the German ambassadors’ residencies. Every morning of the residency, except while we were away in the country, I have been for a run. The runs are about 40 minutes, I have no idea how far I run and that is not so interesting to me. I brought with me my running shoes and some warmer running wear. I wait until it is light before running – I did not bring lights or especially reflective clothings. I notice that my runs now start 20 about minutes later than they did when I first got here – daylight hours shorten. I have chosen different routes for each run: by the lake, on dirt tracks, on gravel roads, beside major traffic ways. These routes have provided me diverse glimpses in to the areas within a 5 to 6 kilometer diameter of the residency. I have run passed small industrial units, abandoned buildings, residential tower-blocks (both older and under construction), grand old houses behind electronic gates, the Jewish cemetery, the military academy and the Nato compound. I have run passed small local grocery stores, allotments, a vast complex of lock-up garages far from any housing, roadside flower stalls, the Latvian Sports Academy, tennis courts, and a car-wash. I have run over train tracks and tram-lines. I have noticed the red covers of access to the underground water pipes, the overground pipes that form arches over entrances and slip-roads, the parking signs that show exactly how to park – on the road perpendicular to the pavement, on the pavement perpendicular to the road, on the road parallel to the pavement, on the pavement parallel to the road. I have seen architecture from the soviet period, from before the soviet period and from after it, buildings that are neglected and building that are immaculate. I have seen clean pavements, bare trees, deep murky puddles, and the tiniest of snowflakes. I have raised my hand in greeting as I have passed other runners (only three to date). My glasses have become wet with the droplets of the morning mists, and my cheeks have become rosy with this weeks drier colder air. Are these runs part of the residency?
We, myself and the other artists, are fascinated that Laura (residency co-host) is a beach-tennis champion. That piece of information seems at odds with how we experience her. On the way to the countryside, in her car, we asked her more about it. In a guarded(?) response she spoke about how she sees her athleticism as an aspect of her practice. It is irrelevant to her if her opponent, or partner when playing doubles, is aware of this. I keep my athleticism – running and/or CrossFit – quite distinct from my practice. Why do I make this distinction? There are other distinctions that I also make: my employment and interest in baking for example. There are even the administrative aspects of being an artist that I see as distinct from my practice. I find myself wondering if these distinctions are necessary and/or useful. Could they perhaps stand in the way of my practice having a more certain kind of integrity … could they stand in the way of me having a sense of wholeness? Could they at once both explain my frustrations and hint at resolutions?
