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.
