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.
