After Thames to Dunkirk was made and photographed, I felt that perhaps it would need to be exhibited in a context of related work, rather than alone. I made a group of 32 works called Watermark, including clay waterfalls, artist’s books, large stoneware vessels and artist’s films, exploring the river/life metaphor in poetry and positing Thames to Dunkirk as its ultimate edge. My work on Watermark has developed and deepened my understanding of the inter-relationship of the processes I’m engaged with to a very significant extent – all this work has come out of Thames to Dunkirk for me, which is very satisfactory, and I’m still engaged with the particular problems it presented, and ideas it raised to the surface. However, I made this group of work with a particular (big) gallery in mind, preparing for a specific proposal (not without encouragement, I must add), only to discover that at the moment when I had been advised to present, the gallery’s contemporary art programme was suspended due to lack of funding for a curator. Alternative arrangements for exhibition are still not finalised, but I have also developed the concept in another direction.
I have long had an interest in communal or interactive artworks or events. At the private view of my installation in the Southbank Centre Poetry Library in 2008, over fifty people completed an artwork with me on a glass lift wall. This event was very exciting, and generated a lot of interest among the participants, some of whom have told me that they will never forget it. But it was not without its difficulties: one contributor, a rather well-known artist who had come to the PV, said ‘How brave to let other people muck about with your work’ – and indeed, though most participants engaged wholeheartedly with the work, one person got a bit overexcited and defaced other people’s contributions with her lipstick – an unexpected and unwelcome intervention/sabotage. And though the resulting collective work Sea of Space was really interesting and curiously fragile/expressive, it was not wholly appreciated by some viewers, who thought it ‘messy’. Just what I’d hoped for, actually, but never mind. Anyway, this experience fed my taste for something a bit more anarchic and uncontrollable than we’re usually allowed to do, and also raised some questions for me about the relative values of participants’ contributions, and how we judge them.
All this led me towards developing the idea of an online interactive installation that would invite participation in making a River of Stories, layering fragments of individual stories from a huge collective event (Dunkirk 1940) in a inter-connected stream, where each contribution, whether ‘true story’, memory, anecdote or imaginative engagement would have an equal place, and where hidden, previously unheard voices would find a hearing, including those from outside the established archive, or the accepted or usual sources. I hoped to hear from women who had participated or whose lives had been affected by the war, from pacifists, from people with a different take, as well as from people whose memories hadn’t seemed important enough for telling outside the family, and thereby to gather a very vivid and detailed picture of the phenomenon, that would engage younger people who weren’t there in an imaginative response, and would perhaps prove enlightening about our inheritance of the continuing issues. This collective artwork would run alongside Thames to Dunkirk. I see now it was a very ambitious aim.
Next time I’ll talk about setting up The Dunkirk Project, how it’s going (which is astonishingly well, so far), and some of the issues it has raised.
