The outside was definitely outside. Not next door. With no formal music education or experience of arranging music for other performers I couldn’t make a sideways step at the same level. But despite not being able to, I didn’t want to. I was looking for a third space, a mutable place which could take from fine art, musical and theatrical traditions but allow for uncurtailed play. This setting would hopefully be different from, but not necessarily less than, white cube performance art or conservatoire repertoire.
This images shows Bermondsey Abbey, which was a one of the largest Cluniac monasteries in Europe and a place of pilgrimage. It existed from 700 – 1540 (when the monasteries were dissolved by Henry the 8th). The long road connecting the river and the abbey is Bermondsey Street, which still exists today, with St Mary Magdalen Church sat where one corner of the abbey used to be. The abbey is built on an Island, Beornmund’s Island, (from which the area takes its name), amongst the surrounding marsh land riddled with tidal streams.
Traces of this community are visible all over Bermondsey, in topography, nomenclature and architecture. I adore the ritual of walking around this place, and the more I circle the river, the market, and Bermondsey Spa the more fascinated I become. There is a desire to sink under tarmac, trace the flow of tidal streams that run beneath. I’ve seen them burst through cracks and flow out into the street, like channels of desire. They can be buried, hidden, re-routed, but never stemmed.
I read a little about this place, and speculatively started to write.
The iron fence demarcating St Mary Magdalen’s Churchyard, Bermondsey, 22 Jan 2017.
This text has been written for a-n in exchange for an artist bursary. This bursary supported me during an exploratory and transitional moment, allowing me to train with, and talk to, people working in experimental music and music education. In this text I look back at 2018 drawing from diary entries, images and recordings to trace this passage from my visual arts practice into something more loose, rich and alive – drawing from music and performance conventions. The experiences I will discuss include: undertaking a course in Dalcroze Eurythmics at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, discussions with audio producer Alannah Chance and composer Sarah Hughes; playing with Jenny Moore and other musicians as part of her project Mystic Business and residency at Battersea Arts Centre; the personal reading and research that weaved through this time.
Although loosely chronological, this text uses themes to address the issues that punctured my psyche and drove my discoveries during this time. I weave moments of learning and discovery into a deeper narrative with the hope of it being a useful account, rather than a descriptive gloss of sequential transactions. It takes time to tease out knots and to see how talking, learning and playing differently can stretch the parameters of a life.
I opened the door and walked outside. The inside was my studio space, the limitations of my art education, the typical demands of most gallerists or curators. This inside was also my conventional methods, my respective ‘practice’ and the image I had created for myself as an artist. Everything that was possible had grown to fill the size of this space. But stray tendrils twisted the handle.
Desire
There is some sort of desire – but an inability to realise it.
Some sort of instinct – or are these received patterns of behaviour?
Work happened, but not the kind of work I had planned for, not the sort of labour I expected.
I made something in spite of myself. Why, how, what was it?
I was sick of something and went wild. I was sick of making things to order, or perhaps sick of the limitations of certain types of materials. The way everything gets weighed in text. Packaged in expectation. I didn’t want to make anything that could be saved as a PDF. I was tired of hiding behind images. I opened the door and walked outside. I drifted and met new friends and returned to old ways of thinking, playing and expressing myself.
I knew it was naive, but it was also about hope, about trying to rediscover something sensual in what had become routine. It was also about ending a relationship with the current phase in my life and allowing my focus to be shifted. I was sick of playing roles that had already been written for me. It has to be my structure now. Even if its an odd one. So, in some ways, the decision to make music, rather than strictly visual, gallery based ‘fine’ art, was about stopping for a moment, coming to terms with myself, what I’m frightened of, and imagining what I might want, now and in the future.
