In late January, I was contacted by a local gallery officer who asked me if I would be interested in creating a text based show. The plan was for me to design an exhibition based on the work of local writers who had written responses to artworks in the gallery’s permanent collection: my role would be to “translate” their work into a visual form, keeping some sort of textual element in each. There were thirteen texts in all and they were a mixture of short stories, poems and essays.
I agreed to the project even after discovering that my timeframe was very short. Due to a gallery programming mishap, I had just two weeks to acquaint myself with the texts, produce ideas, create the translations and design the space. Although I knew it would be stressful, I was actually looking forward to the challenge, as my own work usually takes so long to make (my latest piece, “Sit Gena Rowlands”, has taken well over a year to finish) and so a short, sharp shock was appealing.
As both time and budget were tight I had to look for simple, effective ways of getting across the essence of each piece of writing. This was relatively easy with the texts which were descriptive, but far more difficult when the works were not obviously visual and more contemplative in nature. I was wary that a show full of text pieces had the potential to look quite flat, so although there was a digital projection and a couple of large prints, the show also contained texts-as-objects: huge balloons, bunches of keys, sloganned t-shirts, lazertranned bricks, a beautiful old typewriter, a word game frozen in time and a whispered, looped sound piece.
The project was an example of “indirect collaboration” as mentioned in an earlier post – although I wasn’t working with any of the writers face to face, I had to consider them and their ideas before my own. I didn’t want the work to look like mine, I wanted it to seem as though each piece of writing had somehow disguised itself as another art form. I wanted each “translation” to seem almost natural, so that when each writer was confronted with the visualisation of their writing, they might be surprised, but not feel misunderstood or maligned. The sense of obligation weighed down on me more than it has during other projects; perhaps this was partly due to the stress of the short timescale, but it was mainly down to the fact that I was having to try and argue against myself on the writers’ behalf, which stopped me from creating lazy responses, but which was also a very strange (though rewarding) way of working.
