Stating/Showing

These are two texts that were written several posts (months ago), they are now planned art works for a project entitle ‘Mobile Library’, for which I am developing a publication. Art works from blog posts – not a first for me but hopefully here and now will explain this particular process.

text one:

Flash dance in scaffold open door firework run

“Shit, I truly think we might have destroyed her performance”

We had escaped from the party out the back door. Further we climbed up the road to meet a wire fence taller than twice our height. A small gap at the bottom allowed us access to the wasteland beyond: a place for crack den escapades. The night was full of the moon though, so no drug takers and beer can rusters got in our way. The broken wall at the other end of the field overlooked yet more ruin bathed in nothing but city light reflected off distant clouds – and the moon joined in to affect the landscape with such a haze to fit our drunken state. The wall was anything but safe but we climbed it anyway:

“Yes but, it was quite funny – I thought it had finished and I did apologise immediately. And you, you hid behind the door out of sight and it was your dare”

“I enjoyed our own private dance inside the sculpture though: the builders light really set the mood. We must have looked like a couple of flash dancers having a rave from the outside. Arms in the air with nothing but a wide birth of scaffolding around us, our very own catacomb aside from the rest…”

“Sit up straight or you’ll fall”

text two:

Gut throat and rhyme

“I recite the written description directly in to the camera. Little do I know that it focuses on my mouth alone. Whilst brandishing my characterisation in to the lens Len’s laughter escapes. A willowing dip in sensibility, a slight whine and then a realisation that gobbles up the sound and swallows only to let go again: to exasperate or to exult. Such an incantation this is! I release, knowing it’s exacting affect, its altitude in decibels, a measured intensity of two sources: a logarithm of gut throat and rhyme.”

(source one) Len had my laughter

“There’s a hill so steep that your bike would have to be pushed, not ridden, on the return home.”

Len laughed at the revelation of his creation, as we sat in the front room of his hill top semi-detached in Crookes, on the northern shoulder of Sheffield. This was 1989 and I remember match sticks making a composition of a house on a lane with a tree in the background: a snowy scene with fading orange light.

Len held the can of my laughter. Len’s brother was Jack. I wear Jack’s jumper and laugh. And talk in to the camera with the effect of conversation.

(source two) Talking in to camera

Sat in this place we face one another with teacups and sauces and crumpets in the middle, and a shiny Mongolian teapot reflecting our convex torsos noses knees and shoulders. We begin to write down every detail of the character in front of us, drawing out physicality on the surface using words that describe our knowledge of one another. At first a tip of the head, then the brow, the cheekbone and mouth and ears, connected by the odd smile. Then eyes come with a flash of further description. Then comes laughter; how do you describe laughter in words without alluding to the person’s history?

To edit text you first have to edit film. So – edit the film, re-play the film and decipher the words spoken.

When speaking to camera I will be aware of myself. I will laugh.

Certain bits and certain bobs

I do remember a time when hours were passed in great halls of sculpture, my friend hailed from Wrexham or thereabouts, she now resides in Korea – but for a time we inhabited the same imaginary open plan living space.

There we read everything backwards, each word was taken, read, and then the word before was to follow instead of lead. A strange performed language exuded from a need to translate your speech for others to understand: hand movements and head nods were needed to emphasise certain bits and certain bobs.

To Align or to Derail

Below is a film, which is being developed through modes of translation for an upcoming exhibition in Glasgow (mentioned in last post).

[Computer.m4v “A film developed from original ‘snap shot’ footage documenting travels made and repeated, underlaid with sound from buskers and singers in a tunnel in Belem (a suburb of Lisbon, Portugal). This film aims to translate the idea of communicating with other artists and groups by presenting a layering of image and text to configure or dis-configure – to align or derail.”]

Sound from tunnel and back

I am finding some time to blog

not touched this for a while and not even so sure why… truth be told, I am currently rendering a film for a project that is to be screened during an emerging artist symposium at Tramway this weekend – so I decided to whip out TextEdit and get typing…

The film aforementioned is about male pattern balding and has gone through several phases using different creative practitioners at different points. First point of call – the artist Oliver Braid, who is leading the project, spied me out on Facebook, stalked my pictures and decided I was “physiologically apt” – i.e. going bald! He then contacted me to ask if I would be interested in producing a film using a writer’s monologue, which crafts a certain nervous character, who has dealt with the balding process. I said yes. I received the monologue via email and enlisted two actors to play out the script to camera – I got some interesting results and hopefully the film will end up having my mark on it as well as the actor’s and the writer’s.

… truth be told, I am currently rendering this film. I have not made a film like this before and feel oddly under script and within brief. Not sure I like briefs. Hopefully the result will be something aesthetically interesting as well as narratively engaging.

I will get used to it Oliver and so will you…

Another project that is well underway is a collaboration with The Mutual Charter for GI 2012 and artist Jennifer Picken: we have made it to manifesto three and then four five and (six) will result in a show for the festival in April/May and a residency in Amsterdam that develops the project in to a considered exhibition Netherlands style. See here for more information – http://cargocollective.com/audessusde

I was reading through an old guide to Amsterdam round at my partner’s flat the other day. The way they described the gay scene was something of archaic – perhaps it remains the same…

I have heard that if you pick the correct time before noon (approximately 30 seconds prior to the chimes) and wait at one end of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam – and then ride your bicycle with constant speed underneath the museum, you will hear each clock hit ’12’ as you enter in to one side of the tunnel, cruise through the underside, and then reach the other end.

Reach the other end, tunnel and back again with sound

file_name.mov

Story of tracker Dusty chalky dancing travels

“How can you make art about our dance?”

Moving to Glasgow involved a train journey north in the summer of 2009, and then a final a climb up to the west end of the city, following my nose, to Kelvinbridge on the Great Western Road, which takes you to Loch Lomond and beyond: one bag under one arm, another over the adjacent shoulder. 



Later I arrived at the third and top most floor of the tenement where I would reside for one and a half years: using my new set of keys, I entered the flat. Waiting for me was my landlord on the eve of her departure for a month-long trip to the south of England and my new lodger, an odd little drifting number in a summer dress who was well balanced on the balls of her feet. She greeted me with a smile.



A few days later the lodger invited one or two friends round for a meeting – I was keen to stick my nose in.


First two girls and then a third and finally, after I had been introduced to them all so far, a fourth came in through the front door, through the hall and in to the kitchen where we sat. I shook her hand in greeting, she smiled a wry sort of smile, and I took my leave of the table and left the room.

A week and a few more meetings later their plans were set amidst. But they needed help. And they would get it and get at it.



My time with The Group, you could say, started at this point in time. Now 2012, almost three years later, I have taken many a task and gone on one or two dusty chalky dancing travels with them. 



They push on and they give more, and they get more in return. They live in Glasgow still and many of their meetings, although not in the same flat, still happen in the kitchen… or the living room or the bedroom or the dining room.



The same lodger who hosted the first few meetings visits me from time to time in my new studio apartment in the centre of Edinburgh above the rail station. There, we battle and toil for words and for domestic objects to polish and shine in to art-forms. She prefers to stand upon them, ride them and holler or whistle from them. I prefer to steal them, much like I steal words, and drag them in to my studio and embellish them with meaning.

Whistle blower your table shine is mine.

THE BARREL THE ICE THE SNOW

Remember our outstretch to the gallery opening in the twilight months of 2009, chalk was on the walls as well as art and we whirled the room practicing and outlaying our movements in time with each other and apart from everything else. And before this, atop the shattered tower at the back of Trongate – we sketched out our footwear and step tip toes. Then, in the summer of 2010, together we built on our display in an empty warehouse scattered with sculpture. And then the same warehouse a month or two on shovelled under the snow, the ice and the barrel. 

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…