“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.
The sun is shining and I hope it holds for tomorrow before all the leaves fall of the trees that back my top floor tenement. I haven’t sat here for a while, just as I have not really blogged properly for a while. I thought this point, on the kitchen table next to the herbs that match the leaves on the other side of the window, was a good point to list some of the projects I have been working on and other current projects. Perhaps these explain the absence of direct commentary on my work in the past months.
A bulletin of sorts
First up is a two-person show called IPSO FACTO with fellow artist Ross Hamilton Frew at SUPERCLUB in Edinburgh, this opens on the 28th of October. Ross and myself have been working on the project loosely headed as “this is meditative” since around January 2011. IPSO FACTO is the culmination of new works in a space using drawing as a model for collaborative exchange: each work in some way will support the work of the other in a matter of fact (or indirect) manner. We have been keeping a separate Project blog for this on Artists talking called Drawing as a forum for collaborative exchange…
Running up to the IPSO FACTO show Ross and myself also have an image that it exemplary of our curatorial approach printed in Drawing Paper 4, a drawing/exhibition/newspaper produced in Liverpool and distributed nationally – http://www.issuu.com/mikecarney/docs/drawingpaper4…
‘Abandoned house’ is also a result of ‘this is meditative’, the collection of work by Ross and myself in one room in a derelict house near Lumsden in Aberdeenshire (I posted two separate works up to Ross there) comments on the dialogue we explore in the blog and also sets curatorial makers for IPSO FACTO – http://www.rich-taylor.co.uk/archive/abandoned-hou…
On a more Individual level I am to get two pieces of my creative writing published in two art journals. The text ‘One moving but still the other still but moving’, is to be published in Gnommero: Exactitude, the third publication in a series produced by Sarah Tripp and Eona McCallum that respond to Italo Calvino’s ‘Six Memos for a New Millennium’. This publication will be launched at an event at the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow that maps the art journal activity in Glasgow today (other journals will include 2HNB and Victor & Hester).
Another text ‘-Repeated act, Concentricity-‘ is to be published in Critical Writing Collective’s upcoming journal COPY // Unfold – http://www.rich-taylor.co.uk/textworks/repeatact
A recently concluded project with writer (and now PHD student at University of Aberdeen) Sophie Frost records the wandering conversations and stories that are ‘The Sea (the artist) the writer (The Sea’. This text and artwork were printed with the support of The Mutual Glasgow and Vault Art Glasgow – http://www.rich-taylor.co.uk/textworks/seaartistwr…
A fast approaching collaborative work will surface come mid-November 2011. Artist Kimbal Bumstead and myself have been working collaboratively for the past four years now and our recent project ‘two men one room’ reaches Edinburgh with a week long residency that maps alternative space within the city and then culminates with a series of events and exhibition at The Old Ambulance Depot off Leith Walk in the north of the City (November 26th – 28th).
Another working project is with fellow artist and friend Jennifer Picken. Proposed title: “embargoed” Read Jennifer’s blog
Navigating Bempton Cliffs: “plan this step and each new move as you would equate one word upon the next.”
Both Ross Hamilton Frew and myself are drawing in the same place – as we draw the rain hits the tin roof of the studio and the wind shakes the corrugated shelter above our heads. For me these sounds re-surface the memory of joint, even familial, activity – caravan holidays and towed activity routed in walks along the East Coast of Yorkshire. Activities jammed between the sea and the North York Moors.
I then get to thinking about the language of this coast line. I should, by anyone’s reckoning of a taught or learnt process of acquiring a language, be fluent with these edges of the land by now – yet it is so long since I was there. Whenever we were there as a family our path’s were clouded by the sea-mists and we never saw but a puffin in the sky. If only this treaded language, this colloquialism of navigating the land, was the same as getting your ass round a gallery and understanding the walls and the floors and the ceilings. With written or spoken language you learn that one word means the following word should make sense – as should one step lead perfectly to the next along the path in front of you.
Landmass has no grammatical structure, yet if the steps you made all those years ago on those caravan holidays amongst the mist are copied and pasted in to a white-cube, is the language then translatable?
Back to the collective drawing exercise and the conversation in the studio under the rain. I finish one line like I finish a sentence and start another line with another word as I walk from one end of the room to the other.
FOUR F E A T H E R S
AN OPEN WINDOW
Of late I have been collecting the feathers that float through the window at the Eastern end of my open plan living space. The feathers seem to be from pigeons that habituate their movements in flight by dipping under the bridge across from my window frame and landing reversely within the suspensions and metal constructions that hold it together. Its as it the pigeons sacrifice one part of their wing span in order to be given permission to ‘land’ or to ‘rest’. I often watch from the interior side of the window as the birds, encased in silhouette against a background of light, grace the last inches of sky and then join the black mass of the bridge and its hinges – then, slowly but surely, a feather falls and gains drifting momentum towards the vacuum that is my open plan flat. The feathers enter and fall lightly to the floor – from there I pick them up and take them to the stair case.
The stair case, as I am sure you will know by now, makes up the centre and dividing space of my studio-cum-living arrangement. Apart from the occasional obvious spell of a line between where I work and where I sleep, the flat is currently in disarray – and the feathers add nothing to what should be a goal in clarity for me to define what is work and what is not. My old sofa now exists on the studio side as a sculpture, a broken function that folds in orange display with wooden feet jutting out from the top rather than the bottom. The coffee table also now exists on the brink of my studio space, on its side. It just needs one last push over on to its back and it will be ready for painterly affect.
I have four feathers in my hand and as I approach the stair case I trip over the cable for a light fitting, a four meter line of black wire affixed to the ceiling. The fitting comes loose as a result of my momentum, and the energy from my forward steps transfers like a pendulum making my body top heavy. As I fall head first to the ground my hands involuntarily follow my arms and spread out in a wing-like fashion, the four feathers again reach the air. My nose hits the ground with a tremendous force. The feathers float with a slight sweat taken from my hand, which affects their gravitational balance. The interior conditioning of dust momentarily contorts their time in the middle of the room directly above the stair case. I turn over on to my back and watch them above – they create a perfect circle in slow motion, a perfect mobile with no attachments and no armatures. A new art work by mistake?
There is a gust of wind and its as if the vacuum of my interior habitation flicks a switch, the pressure in the room reverses and in one fell swoop the air is sucked out of the window – the feathers follow this gulf stream and rush for the outside. I lose them in one blink on an eye.
Whistle blower
your table shine is mine
In my mind’s eye I saw from below the coffee table again, its underside constructed for ultimate-fold and transportability. Atop this table, opposite from where I hid, stood a woman wrapped in a scarf and covered from breast to toe in a black jump suit. She whistled a tune that, by way of my open-plan apartment’s acoustics, rang true through the room. The women held her arms aloft balancing core-weight against one table leg that appeared shorter than the others – she swayed from one foot to the other on the balls of her feet, and the table followed suit in time with her song.
I was sat amongst my objects on the half of the open plan space that housed my studio endeavors – ever since I invited the women in I had begun to construct a hide out for myself amongst paintings: by now she was so coveted by her song her eyes were blind against her senses, and I could move unseen and unheard gradually gaining on her – closer and closer still and then upon her.
I needed the coffee table, I had inspected its underbelly and had planned a painting using its alterior surface as a ground for decided incisions, cuttings, and pastings – I had the oils mixed and ready, emulsified with turpentine and bees wax.
I would only get so close before interrupting her flow. I had to carefully plan my moves, one after the other, to increment this sound and build upon her display. She had to fall in the opposite direction towards the window for the table, pushed by her dexterous mishap, to carefully roll on to my side of the space. One foot wrong on my part and she would fall the wrong way.
I got as far as the staircase in the middle of the room and had to stop. She stared right in to my eyes as her whistle reached a higher tone, as if to pierce right through me…
