Reciprocity

Performance, alchemy and collage

A month long collaboration with
For The Love of People (Jez Coram/Caroline Hick) on WE ARE ALIVE AGAIN, at the Fabric Arts Lab in Bradford

Day One: Friday 1st November

We start.

A white sheet
A table
Some sticks
Some miniature furniture: a wardrobe, a mirrored table, a chest of drawers
Cut outs chosen from the boxes:
A group of children lean on the wardrobe
A family group (mine) the children (me and my brother) in bathing costumes stand smile and squint into the sun
Two headless figures in Victorian dresses clutching each other
A giant pair of hands, removed from the piano they were playing, up – ended,
A boot
A standing clock
Back projected onto the sheet: A static ocean-like image. Clips from a cinefilm
A lamp
An oval viewfinder on the camera – a frame mount from an old school photograph

Caroline moves a lamp slowly over the the scene. I stand behind the screen and moved a cd in front of the project, creating a soft violet circular mask. Jez films the scene from the front. A magic starts to happen. Interaction between objects, cutouts, light from a slowly moving lamp, back projection. With these simple elements and movement, the scene becomes animated. We become animated.

We watch back the footage and then sit in front of the table, mesmerised. We talk about alchemy: moving into an another state. Moving light, image, shadows. The stage is a construct. We can see how the illusion is created. But this doesn’t spoil the magic – but gives us consciousness of it as a story we can play with.
We can choose how we experience it. Move around and pick your view. Look from the side, see the shadows of the legs of the children against the wardrobe. Go up close, look at the faces of the figures, the detail of the furniture. Place yourself in front, peer through the viewfinder. Enter here, if you like. What it means is for each of us to decide.
What seems striking is not the particularity of individual objects and images – or trying to make them tell a story. It’s our willingness to enter into another world. How easily we can, with the simplest of means. And how much we want to.

This day of has made me think of:
– Memories of playing with and looking at pre-cinematic devices at the Cinema Museum in Girona, Spain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinema_Museum_%28Giro… and http://www.museudelcinema.cat/cat/index.php in a childlike trance. I’ve been twice and I love the museum’s hands on interactivity, and the sense of magic and wonder it creates.
– Comrades: a film about the Tolpuddle Martys, told through the story of a travelling lanternist, by the late great Scottish director Bill Douglas:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RqjsIVGRJE

We have set up a Facebook page where all three of us will be documenting the progress of the collaboration – you can see it here https://www.facebook.com/jeanmcewanfortheloveofpeo…

A very good day – magical, playful, a feeling of childlike excitement. Actual glee.

Just home, feeling exhilarated and animated after a first day of collaboration with For The Love of People, who are artists Caroline Hick http://bobbyhick.tumblr.com/and Jez Coram http://www.jezcoram.co.uk/. I’ll be working with Caroline and Jez , experimenting with performance and collage, on WE ARE ALIVE AGAIN in Fabric Arts Lab (http://www.fabricculture.co.uk/opportunity/fabric-… in central Bradford, which we have taken occupation of for the next four weeks.

Before I post on today’s (amazing) session I just want to chart how we have gotten here.

The collaboration came out of my a-n Re:view bursary earlier this year (http://new.a-n.co.uk/news/single/a-n-awards-over-2…). Caroline was one of the selected artists I chose for my peer review, and after discussing my work with her in two sessions from May – July, she invited me to work with her and Jez in their new collaborative project For The Love of People.

So I met with Caroline and Jez in August to talk about the project and how they might want to be involved. From the beginning there were good vibes – open – ness, trust, mutual respect, synergy. With me it’s often a matter of instinct for collaborators – a gut feeling. There needs to be an essential feeling of trust. It felt good from the start.
Jez and Caroline’s role within the project is one of facilitation; supporting and collaborating with me to develop WE ARE ALIVE AGAIN. Between them they offer much in the way of skills, knowledge and experience – and I’m very happy to be working with them.

We had several meetings over the summer – at each of our houses, lunch involved, exploring the different aspects of the project and what we could do together, which were bonding, convivial and illuminating: In our first session, in Caroline’s lovely garden, we shared family archival materials, and personal memories attached to them. At the second session at Jez’s house, we did a visual mapping of my work with family photography to date, which was a very valuable exercise and helped to cement and clarify the many aspects of the project (from research to practice, individual and collaborative) to date. On the third session, at my house, I showed Jez and Caroline my studio table and discussed my method of colllaging (which use images from family photographs as well as found images) which was I was seeing as increasingly provisional, moving, dynamic. Not sticking down, or committing each element, but keeping each free to roam, to make and re-make new meanings,

We talked about this method as a potential tool in working with others on their own family archival material, and agreed to dedicate some time to collaborating and testing it out, together and with potential other groups/individuals.

Since that time we have all, coincidentally and serendipitously, become interested in exploring these ideas of unfixed-ness and fluidity through animation and performance. Me, via discussions with Pippa Oldfield and Melanie Friend at my recent portfolio review at Impressions Gallery (discussed in post 78) and Jez, inspired by an audio-visual performance he had recently seen which utilised a zootrope structure and cut outs to make live performance.

So that brings us to today.

I will post over the weekend about this. Till then I’ll just let it settle, think, enjoy, dream, and give myself a little time to find the words for what it was, and what it could mean.

Accidental collage

The studio table has to be a mess. A real mess. There are accidents, waiting to happen.

I was sat here for days this week, moving things around, too consciously. Trying to ‘make’ mages. It was torturous, ineffectual, there was no spark. Nothing worked.

Now, a day I decide to have a sort out, I tip all the pieces of paper I’ve collected and cut out from the boxes I keep them in, and onto the table. Found images from magazines and books, cut out bodies and parts of bodies from photocopies of family photographs, fragments of text and drawings. At first, it’s chaos. I can’t find anything. I feel a rising frustration. Have I totally lost my mojo?

But then, I take a seat, and I start to really look.

A woman, walking away, into the faces of some school children in a torn school photograph, next to a photocopied fragment of a house. A cut out hand from a magazine on a rephotograph of a child’s folded hands.
Me and uncle Gerry standing in a book illustration of a rural landscape. An archway, a window, weirdly skewered against a tree

The table stops being hopeless chaos, and becomes charged, animated. There is no fixing, or sticking, – these pieces of things must be free to wander, be found, meet others. Meaning will be made. Then re-made when the boxes are tipped out again.The process, not a final image, is what’s important.

I am not ‘doing’. I just try to create conditions for the accidental collisons. i.e. make a mess. That’s easy!

I will just try to ‘see’ what’s there. All I do is document what happens this time around. And be ready for the next.

My Portfolio Review session at Impressions Gallery on Friday, with exhibiting photographer Melanie Friend and Head of Programming Pippa Oldfield, has given me much to think about over the weekend.
Although I am very interested in Melanie Friend’s work, and found her current exhibition The Home Front (http://www.impressions-gallery.com/exhibitions/exh…) which explores the presentation of war as entertainment very powerful, I hadn’t thought of applying for a review session. I don’t think of myself as a photographer, rather as an artist who works with photography in a variety of ways. Most recently, with my project WE ARE ALIVE AGAIN this has focussed on using family snaps and archive material as source material for making new images and objects. I was encouraged by gallery staff on a recent visit, however, to apply, and was given a slot.

I wasn’t sure what to show Melanie and Pippa, as my work in this area has been diverse, from photo collages, to rephotographing to ‘re-enacted’ photographs to collaborative photo dialogue to representations of archive images, to installation work. In the end, I took a selection of images from each category, in different formats; an exhibition catalogue, images on a laptop, as well as some prints and some original photocollages.

Melanie and Pippa were both extremely friendly and positive, gave my work their full attention and made many thoughtful and useful comments.
Both of them said they were intrigued by the work, though looking at it as a body of work, felt it was quite disparate, due to the range of aesthetic strategies and approaches I was using. Both said they were looking for a narrative, way in, to understand the work but that this wasn’t immediately obvious. Melanie asked about some of the photo collage images and the use of images of my father, and the personal experiences behind these. She felt that these experiences of loss (my dad died when I was 9) as a subject matter for a body of work were resonant, and would have power for other people. She said the questions she asks are – what are you communicating? what do you want to say? who do want to reach? She suggested that stepping back from the personal, and trying to spend some time writing about my motivations/intentions might be valuable in gaining some insights into the ‘whys’ of my making.

Pippa commented that her responses to my work were as a curator/programmer, and so seeing the work in the form of an output – exhibition,publication etc, was what she naturally did, but that she didn’t want to discourage my experimental approaches or to ‘box in’ what I was doing. She also asked about whether I did or might see performance as part of the work. This surprised me, but has made me think. Both were interested in the provisional, and ‘unfixed’ nature of some of my photo collages, and how this echoes the fluid meaning-making that goes along with using and interpreting family photographs. Pippa asked if I had thought of filming/animating the process of continual moving around of collage elements, and suggested exploring this as possible more meaningful way to present my ideas, rather than a static, ‘final’ image. We talked about projections, slideshows, the possibility of incorporating sound and text, but also the importance of the materiality of the images.. the physicality of cutting up, placing together.
We also talked about the research aspect of the work, and my intention to use some of the aesthetic strategies in collaborative work with others. Both suggested that although my participatory work would inform my own making, it might be good to keep these two practices separate for now. Both suggested spending some more time developing each body of work, and finding the right time and mental/emotional space to do it in. Pippa suggested looking at some artists working with photographs as objects, including those showing in the 2009 exhibition “The Photocgraphic Object’ at The Photographer’s Gallery, and also Farhad Ahrarnia and Carolle Bentitah (https://www.lensculture.com/articles/carolle-benit…)

I was really glad to have had this conversation with Melanie and Pippa. It was extremely valuable to have their responses to my work at this point when I have some time (still off sick with broken finger) to think, write, make.

Had a successful operation to mend my broken finger a couple of weeks ago, followed by a week in an arm splint, then stitches out yesterday. It’s taken a while to recover from the effects of the general anaesthetic – but I’m feeling a more myself now. The scar is a bit Frankenstein-looking, the finger is still fragile, and I cant use it for another 3-4 weeks, but luckily I have use of the other fingers on my right hand now.

I have so missed being able to make – it’s been so long – and have been so looking forward to the day I have energy to be in the studio.

Today was that day. So good to sit at the table, move things around, get activated again.

Happy too, that I have a portfolio review session at Impressions Gallery in Bradford next week with photographer Melanie Friend and Pippa Oldfield, Head of Programme at Impressions. Friend’s current exhibition at the gallery, The Home Front is excellent (http://www.impressions-gallery.com/exhibitions/exh…) and I am looking forward to hearing her, and Pippa’s responses on the photographic work I have been doing for WE ARE ALIVE AGAIN.