A current project is ‘Parallèlement à l’intérieur (au-dessus de)’, an explorative run-through of work with another artist, Jennie Picken, that will culminate in a show in Glasgow in 2012, along with a partnering show in Amsterdam.
The plan of action was to post physical elements of work to one another, myself being in Edinburgh and Jennie being in Amsterdam. However – as much as the project is about notions of communication and distribution to muster an overall idea of what the final shows will be (and to define the content of them) – snail mail has failed us: an original drawing and set of photographs have now been lost somewhere between Scotland and The Netherlands via Airmail.
Perhaps I wrote the wrong address down – or perhaps Jennie’s mail box is not big enough for a square package to fit through: but the result is we are now looking at alternative methods of sharing these ideas via email. And we are looking at the material of email and the possibilities of this in order to develop a language that progresses the project without giving too much away.
So we now progress with the project using Skype to catch up with one another and to discuss developments. We are also waiting for certain ‘terms and conditions’ to not be ’embargoed’ – so we can distribute ourselves freely. For now, our project and its whereabouts – somewhere in between here and there above the sea – remains deliberately embargoed too…
“I plan to re-visit the work made during these excursions – make them in to episodes the commemorate their existence. We have plenty of footage between us. What do you say?”
The failed system?
Last year has past and this year has, almost, gone through the same trajectory – as we reach Winter it is cold enough to remember the approach of new year. Back to last year, 2010. A culmination of mustering thoughts on moving away from Glasgow joined with a fellow artist and friend buying her soft top yellow car. We both worked together in another capacity, drank together with too much capacity and ate together with lack of capacity on her behalf. This, strangely, developed in to a mutual understanding of creative isolation – both a longing for it geographically and a feeling of it within a wider city and a consolidated art scene.
To deal with this notion of isolation we crafted an idea from within fictional desire. After watching the enough science-fiction and talking about it enough we jumped in to her car and headed northwards toward Loch Lomond and its surrounding areas. We went in search of that which Glasgow did not give us: space. Space in the sense of a designated area for us to make work comfortably and head-space beyond and above the city.
On the north-western tip of the loch we came across a mire – a pebbled and wooden enclosed stretch of water that acted as an over flow for a river that ran its course eventually hitting the loch itself. From the mire, in the distance and set in to the hills was a waterfall. In one place we had immediate privacy and time to experiment and record happenings, we also had perspective, as the waterfall in the distance – connected by the flow and idea of water – gave us a destination.
We made three visits in all.
One to re-arrange the water’s path and to make film works next to the mire under the beating sun.
The next to talk to the deer and its family under the pylon, beyond the fence in the field next to the mire.
And the last to climb barefoot through the bracken in the rain, to hit the mist of the waterfall itself and whiteness its scale and its affect upon us
In all these visits and our talking about them became something of a method for working through and on to ideas. The system of working became fictional in our ability to re-visit it in our heads. We named the system ‘Dagobah’, after the swamp moon of Jedi teachings featured in George Lucas’s Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.
