It is difficult to define what being here is giving me – as I write ’giving’ I wonder if I should expect that being here should give me something. I am getting something out of being here – not just ’something’ but perhaps rather ’some things’. It is interesting for me to pay attention to my feelings of things lying just beyond reach – my reach … our reach. I have the sense that something is not quite working … not quite right … not optimal. (Note: what is the etymology of ’optimal’ … does it have something to do with vision?) Or perhaps things are working and this is exactly what they they are and what they should be! Does my sense of things not quite working reveal inappropriate and irrelevant expectations? Is it perhaps more relevant to see how I can be comfortable in the moment … be non-judgemental … be in the process?
I find it easier to ’just be’ when we are doing things – tasks, activities. It is the times between the doing when I feel awkward and unsure … unsure of what is going on … if anything is going on … awkward in myself and as a part of this group. It seems that I require a sense of purpose. This might be something that would be interesting to investigate and work with … purpose and purposelessness. I like how purposelessness sounds and the way that the word feels in my mouth as I sound it out.
There is a great deal of not doing. Or perhaps I could say that there is a great deal of time and space between the doing of definite things. I have a tendency to fill time with definite things … to over-fill my time with definite things – that is certainly something that is being challenged and that I am having to think about here.
Yesterday I made my application for the artists’ working award. The one of the questions that I find most difficult and the one that is given the most space in which to answer is to say how I would use the time if I were to receive the award. Perhaps my lack of success with these applications has to do with my difficulties around time – understanding/knowing how I as an artist could (should?) use time.
One of the exercises we did while away at the weekend was a writing task. A number of steps led us each to having three words which we were to write about. I did not intentionally misunderstand the exercise but I wrote only about one of my three words: time. A few of our tasks on the residency and over the weekend have reminded me to working on what became Frozen Progress with Nic Sandiland twenty-two years ago in 2000. For this writing task I easily slipped back into the themed automatic writing exercises that Nic set us. I was not especially pleased with what I wrote until I came to read it for the group. It worked as a spoken/performed text.
It is taking time for us to work out how to work. I have no experience to compare this residency with however Sorcha said that this is like no other residency that she has been on, and she has been on several in the last two years. After a very slow morning we were tasked with identifying two outdoor spaces for installations – one large, and one small. Four of us headed out towards a large abandoned building probably less than one hundred meters from where we are staying. This particular building is simply a concrete shell, a four floor concrete shell pierced with large square windows in a strict regular grid pattern across the fasade.
Several rooms on the ground floor had curious features: two step-like blocks cast directly on/in the concrete, not far from that a pit with one sloping side. Another room bore traces that hinted that a row of four toilet stalls had been removed but perhaps the holes on the floor were something else. In one room brown paint flaked from the walls and ceiling in almost leaf-like forms. We climbed a staircase to the top floor. There was much more, and much better, grafitti on this floor. We walked the length of the building to the ’double return’ staircase near to the battered and rusted steel door where we had entered. No of stood too close to edge where it dropped to the floor below. We talked about fears of heights, fears of falling, fears of jumping. I experienced that curious tingling sensation in my groin that I always get when I approach a precipice. Walking down the stairs I realised that the fall from the floor above was of course only one floor, somehow standing on the top floor it felt as though I might fall through the whole building, all four floors, were I too fall. Was this a space for an installation?
The exercises that we are given raise questions that I cannot answer – at least I cannot answer them for the time being. I simply do not know what kind of installation space I am, or the group is, looking for. And at the moment I/we do not know how I/we will know what kind of space I/we are looking for. I could certainly imagine making something in (some of) the window apertures in the building’s fasade … but that would be my work work rather than a collaborative piece.
What is collaborative process? And how can it make work that exceeds the individual?
I note that I want the game that we are making to be as inclusive and as chaotic(?) as possible. While others talk of winning, taking turns, and it generally making sense I find myself drawn to it not making in sense, to it being played over different time-scales by the different players, to it being about participation and process. Is it a) game if players use the components in their own ways? I think that I am interested in the playing … and the playing being the process … evolution and/or development happening ’in play’. I surprise myself by not wanting or needing to know what the game is before wanting it to start.
I note that I am open to not knowing, I actually seek out the space of not knowing, when I am making collaborative live work (performance). It is there that I one hundred percent trust the process! I remember Goat Island, Queer Glow, Frozen Progress, the project with the two Andrews at Trinty Buoy Wharf. I miss making live work with other people. I miss being in those spaces (physical and conceptual) of collective exploration.
What would it be like to make work together with someone – a collaborative creative partner?
Could artists place ads like musicians do when they want to form a band? Could I?
I found the discussion around designing, formalising, structuring the game very difficult. I wanted us to play all the variants before refining … defining … what it what we had created. I did not want to reach a conclusion … it felt far too early to do so. I wanted to enjoy more of the organic growth … I wanted to see where that you take us … I wanted more of the unknown. I was very happy (excited) to have components that I did not know either how or when to use – I wanted more features, tools, aspects that could be brought in to play as and when we needed them. I wanted the playing of the game to be creative in and of itself.
I think that in thinking about the game I am investigating what open ended creative processes might be. This is perhaps ’my thing’ to work with for the time that I have here.
Feeling inspired and even a little intimidated by the breadth and depth of yesterday evening’s presentations. The evident scale of imagination and the commitment to practice led me once more to wonder how long I can continue as artist and educator. I think that the difficulty is the ’and’ rather than either ’artist’ or ’educator’. Currently I am trying to be two distinct things at the same time – or at least in the same week (and by currently I mean in my day-to-day life in Sweden). I want to change this and I feel that I am on the way to doing so – this residency being a part of that change. That is perhaps why already the experience of being here seems so important. I am being reminded of what being an artist is.
I am writing these sentences to make sense of my jumbled thoughts and almost as soon as a sentence begins to form in my mind and on the page I start to edit it – consciously re-writing from (and in) a positive position. I say page, but I am typing on my laptop and the words on the screen. The delete key erases the words. If I were writing in pen on paper I would cross the words out and there would be visible traces of how I am shifting things. On screen is the result of thinking and writing rather than the process of thinking and writing. I rarely if ever use the strike-through function that sits quietly beside the b, i, and u functions – what is a keyboard shortcut for strike-through? The others I know by heart.
The morning’s workshop, the second with John, made me realise how result driven I am. The task is to create a game and I feel myself wanting to see things take shape … things are not taking shape. As a participant … collaborator(?) … how much to I voice my needs, how do I find a place for my needs in the evolving collaboration, how much do I let go of my needs? What is my contribution, and what is my contribution’s relation to other contributions?
I made two very concrete contributions/suggestions: the game should incorporate as much as possible, and each of us should ask a friend/contact to send us an instruction. We now have 20 instructions that range from the abstract to the specific.
What do I take from yesterday – both the workshop and the presentations? The importance of acknowledging process … truth to process … truth of process … truth in process(?).
The residency is not what I expected. Not that I (we) had received any information about what it would be. Perhaps that is why I found myself reflecting on previous residential artistic experiences even if they were not exactly residencies. I am here and I am doing things. I am doing this with other artists … I am spending all my time, 24 hours a day, with other artists.
Yesterday we started composing two lists: joys, and frustrations. I wrote ’the company of other artists’ on the joys list. I think that we held back in our contributions to these lists, perhaps they came too early in the process. I know that I could have said more but held back as I did not want to speak more than anyone else – perhaps we all did that. This week’s guest workshop leader, who is very clear that he does not want to be referred to as an ’expert’ (the word that that the residency hosts Kapsars and Laura used in their brief email about the programme), is John and his theme is ’games’. The three-day workshop is about making a game. Much of the first day was spent playing the board game that John and a friend of his made where the aim is for players to work together to establish an arts venue. It had been a long time since I played a board game, and even longer since I played one with other adults. We stopped playing in the late afternoon.
After dinner Kaspars asked us to help with kitting out the room that would become our kitchen. He had spent Monday evening hooking up a sink to the water supply in the bathroom next door. Now it was time to move the fridge, tables, induction plates, ceramic plates and other crockery, cutlery, cooking pots and utensils from his studio. Dinner that evening had been made by Lidija and Fenu in the common kitchen on the third floor, but we ate it at tables carried to the soon-to-be-kitchen on the fourth floor. Kristjan and I had realised the challenge of cooking for a large group in the common kitchen at lunch time when we could only use one cooking ring and a rather modest pot to make soup for the ten of us. After moving things we set about putting hooks in the ceiling so that lamps could be hung over the cooking benches and the long table. Throughout these activities there was much discussion about the tasks, about the day, about tomorrow.
Does is matter what I am/we are doing? Or is the doing, the process of doing, the important thing at this stage of the process, project, residency? Another strand of the residency is about collaborating … on the first day Kaspars talked about learning through doing … don’t black holes swallow up everything … indiscriminately? …
I am paying attention to my reactions, my challenges, my way of being, my willingness to be open, … my joy in the company of other artists.
