5th November : First solo day at the Arts Lab, Bradford on WE ARE ALIVE AGAIN
(I will be working with Jez and Caroline each Friday this month)
Just wanted to pin down some thoughts from yesterday before I forget them and they meld with tomorrow’s session. Since the first session with Jez and Caroline I’ve been thinking a lot about theatre, sets, layers. I thought it would be interesting to construct a smaller version of what we did together at the Arts Lab on Friday, which could be like a mini theatre, with layers – three dimensional collage in a box.
I attempted to construct such a thing from a cardboard box at home on Monday – making a couple of slots from the top and side to put in acetate/ tracing paper/paper.A test run, a crudely made thing – the cardboard box is now mostly held together with parcel tape – but it gave me an opportunity to try out working in three dimensions.Trying it out at home on Monday, I was excited by the possibilities.But in the space on Tuesday, these things became deadened, somehow. Because they were encased in acetate? Too many layers making it too opaque and difficult to see?
I gave up and started working instead with some handwritten text strips made by my late friend, Madrid based artist Maria Cobo as part of a video performance she did (https://vimeo.com/10811292)
I put the strips in a box and lit them with a bathroom light and combined them with some excerpted text from Werner Herzog’s book ‘Of Walking In Ice” which details his walk from Munich to Paris in Winter 1974 in the belief that doing so would save his friend, filmmaker Lottie Eisner, from cancer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Walking_In_Ice. This book has been very significant to me in the last year. Walking as an act of faith, also for me has been a way of experiencing and processing grief. Herzog’s unromantic and often bleak account of his journey (‘Must the sun lose every consecutive battle?’) has been with me since reading it shortly after Maria’s death last year.
I am lucky to have Maria’s texts (which are themselves handwritten excerpts from Beatles songs) and earlier in the year did some experiments with working with them – which I documented on the collaborative blog Artist As Explorer http://artistasexplorer.wordpress.com/2013/02/12/f…
This work has felt unfinished but I wasn’t ready till now to work with them again.
Also in my head has been Rebecca Solnit’s ‘Wanderlust’ and ‘The Footing’ a fine looking new poetry anthology on the theme of walking newly published by the fantastic Sheffield based Longbarrow Press http://longbarrowpress.com/2011/07/08/the-footing/ which I would really like to get my hands on.
http://www.facebook.com/jeanmcewanfortheloveofpeop…
