So now back to Unwrapping the Gift of my own R+D. The Arts Council have been very patient, with the vital interruptions of my son's birth and two large commissions in the last 6 months. Finally the space and also practical support – through Saj Fareed who is working with me on the participatory side – to move on with putting my long-germinating ideas into practice.
Where do i pick up? Maybe a quote from my Summary of Intention which is my rough blueprint for the next 2 -3 years:
Structural form
' I intend to create a large scale woven structure, woven and written into existence with the participation of thousands of people. The space will consist of woven textile texts on some kind of flexible frame. I envisage this being a very portable work somehow.
The walls/ceilings will articulate that which can be expressed in words via the incremental inscription on a single spool of ribbon which is taken my myself I to interactions with groups and individuals who will write on it in response to questions posed on their experience of displacement.
The final work will be placed in a public space for a fixed period with a % of an existing weave done through workshopping/online input and the rest to be written/woven by the public during the installation period. The space would be comfortable enough for people to ‘occupy’ for long periods of time, in the way that nomads use tents when they settle'.
The next part- my methodology- is to follow in the next entry.
Willow and I spent Sunday afternoon at the Clore Ballroom saying our farewell to The Bibliomancer's Dream and doing an evaluation which was really useful and gives us ideas for next time.
Southbank are keeping the installation for the time being with the possibility of it being shown again and I think a lot could be done to ensure it runs to its optimum as it was so popular that its scrolls got depleted very quickly most days. However this did not seem to deter the public from using it for bibliomancy anyway, as well as a place to sit reflect, read and interact to on that level it was very successful. I would have liked the written texts of participants to be more visible within the space so subsequent people could have read and responded but we have ideas about how this could be designed in next time
I realise, comparing the experience to Crafting Space and The Loom Project where we were a team of people in constant engagement with the work and there to facilitate the public at any given moment, that the 'live' aspect of my public installations need to be treated like a production process in themselves as they are so heavily participatory and the very physicality of the work requires regular tending to. This is a budget issue and something I will bear in mind when planning next time. Of course the audience volume and opening times were so much bigger and longer and it will be a case-by-case consideration.
I sat and did my last act of bibliomancy on sunday. I was thinking about my mother and how she would have loved the show and also about where she is now (physically, scattered in the ocean. Spiritually- everywhere, I feel) and I pulled out a poetry book called The Twelve Lays of the Gipsy' by Kostis Palamas. The passage I fell apon was:
'In the depths of the ocean,
Where the light does not penetrate,
There live whales, which see, though the sun does not shine apon them.
Their sun
Is in their own bodies , phosphorescence which imparts to them
The dim vision of an underwater dream'
****************
May this Dream rest in peace (for the time being..)
Now I can focus once more on my own R+D which is starting to take real shape and revealing the shape of its gift to me slowly…
I cannot believe that the Bibliomancer's Dream is going to be over within a week. It has been a whirlwind, the constant events of the Imagine festival and the half term week saw it lovingly mobbed by children and adults alike.
We just had not forseen how popular it would be and how quickly the scrolls would run out – we got through 5000 metres in a week (the amount we estimated for the whole month) and it has become impossible to keep up with demand. Of course I am not around on a daily basis to deal with it, it's the production team (and Willow an Terence were there a lot for the first week) but I think they are learning a lot about how it would be run second time around. It's also the nature of the Clore Ballroom space, it seems to be a space the public feels ownership of and so the space and this installation are rather like someone's front room, a living organism that gets unmade and remade every day.
However, even when the spools have run out though, the space is still full of people sitting around reading and bibliomancing -they write on bits of paper and leave them on the desks in the hope they will get written in, so its the intellectual act of engaging with the work that seems to continue despite the exhaustion of available scrolls which is an encouraging thought.
Am running a book art workshop with willow this week for the entire Limes Farm school (who I am doing a Creative Partnerships project with until the summer). 75 children per session inside the installation! Luckily i was there during some of the live workshops at the festival and got a sense of what it takes to hold the space in that way. It's going to be kind of insane fun….
