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….
The last week has been taken up with the install and opening of The Bibliomancer's Dream at the South Bank Centre. I had an intense time sorting through the boxes of 6000 donated books, rather like Christmas with a few unwanted dodgy boxes of fiction but a lot of thrills with the volume of poetry and small treasures of wisdom. I got a sense of the vastness of human thought and expression that has been committed to paper…
Everyone pulled it together with great focus and style….the lighting has created a magical, womb like atmosphere. Willow and Terence used their design genius to get the mechanism working perfectly and a few other touches too….
The opening drew a lot of the south bank staff including Jude Kelly who was extremely happy and excited by the work, it seems this is the kind of project they feel restores the space to its original purpose, so I was pleased to hear that kind of feedback! There have been events going on in the space as part of the Imagine Festival and it has been buzzing. The hazards of public art have become clear as children have been testing out the robustness of the crank and spool system and a few have broken with the pressure but they are getting fixed. I would expect there to be a snagging process as the visitor count in that space is something like 500-1000 a day. I feel very honoured to have been given the ballroom space to work with and it has felt very natural, like it’s what I was always supposed to have been doing. It’s given me a sense of confidence that I can now work in major spaces like this, hopefully internationally. I really hope too that this installation can tour somehow, it is such a resource and would be so easy to store and set up in different locations. I am inviting the universe to provide the opportunity!
It seems that people are really responding to the idea of bibliomancy as a momentary access to self knowledge and playful reflection and I enjoy the feeling of having passed on a small part of my heritage in this way. Quite a few people mentioned its something that they do in their own way anyway but didn’t realize it was a cultural tradition.
I will be going up later this week with my family for some of the events – poetry and dance workshops, Gamelan day etc – and on Sunday we will be doing some stills and video documentation.
Lastly, Six Pillars to Persia, an Iranian arts online radio programme featured an interview with me on the project and my work today and it’s being repeated on Sunday 22nd 8/30pm. It’s on http://resonancefm.com (104.4fm)..click on 'Listen now'. I think It will also be archived at http://sixpillarstopersia.wordpress.com/ in case you miss it and are interested to listen.
They are starting the install of the The Bibliomancer's Dream today at the Clore Ballroom. I am not needed till tomorow, so have just been feeding creative choices and responses in by email and phone in this last week. I have really been enjoying the more hands-off approach and I feel very confident in the South Bank team’s ability to pull this incredible short-turnaround project into a public installation by Thursday when we open.
This is such a shift in my practice as up until now I have project managed almost all my own work. However it has been an intention of mine for this to change as I always ended up almost burning out, paying myself very little and not able to do any other projects properly. I realize I need the time, energy and guaranteed fee to do other things at the same time – professional and family-based.
I have really enjoyed the poem-based jobs I have had on this project, like choosing poems for display and also spending a day at the Saison Poetry Library making a wishlist from their collection for potential bookcase stocking.
I realize I have drawn a lot more inspiration from poetry than visual arts for my work and that bibliomancy (the art of divining with books) is like an old friend that I am finally getting to introduce to the a wider audience.
We needed a lot of books to stock the bookcases for the installation and Julia, the assistant producer has been working hard on this and they have sourced 6000, all donated. It feels right that the books have been gifted, there is a lot around gift and exchange with this piece, as with my previous ones, and I am looking forward to the whole thing being separated into units at the end and gifted to schools and libraries. This feel right energetically.
There is a small thrill in being able to choose Rumi and Hafiz poems to be vinyl-printed onto the floor of the ballroom that thousands of people will stop and take in..
Meanwhile I went to Goldsmith’s last week to discuss my R+D project and came back with some interesting ideas and contacts which I am looking into. Saj is on the case developing a network for us to begin working within and we are meeting at the studio next week to discuss.
I began a Creative Partnerships project the other week at Limes Farm school in Essex and will set up a separate blog for this as it runs till July and will be quite an involved process. I am looking forward to sharing my practice in a new environment as it has been a while since I worked with children, having them myself took up all my emotional energy…
Another month has passed, but what a month. It's full force head on the projects front! A brief resume of what is going on, after having been out of touch for so long..
1. I am now working with Saj Fareed on setting up the first workshops for my R+D, which is going to eventually turn into a nomadic textile installation on a wide-reaching scale. I think i finally cracked what form it has to take, more on this soon.
2. An installation at the Royal Festival Hall (Clore Ballroom) ..hooray, one of my favourite spaces in the country I am so blessed and very excited. I got called in just before Xmas – one of the producers, Becca, had been sent images of my Origin piece and other projects and she invited me to come and discuss ideas. She is one of the participation producers, with a speciality in visual arts and could see straightaway some resonances with their programming and asked me to come up with an idea to coincide with the 'Imagine' children's literature festival next month.
I got an idea together which is based on a practice that is dear to my heart – bibliomancy (the art of divining with books) and it is already in the fabrication stage. The fastest turnaround project I have ever done and also the biggest! But it has been coming together remarkably swiftly and I have had the gift of bringing Willow and a friend of hers, Terence Williams, to design and engineer a Heath Robinson type system behind the work.
The project is called 'The Bibliomancer's Dream' and offers people the chance to intuitively select from one of 4000 books, then open up the book at random and write the line/verse found onto a section of giant scroll.
The structure is basically an enormous set of 12 bookcases set out in a half-circle shape. Most of them have writing desks attached, with a giant scroll flying across the desk that you write on and a spool/pulley system linked to a crank at the other end that you wind on yourself once you have written your piece. The scroll then gets moved up and around the top of the bookcase, displaying your text and eventually getting rolled back up onto another spool. The scrolls will get cut into lengths and hang from the columns in the space so you can read what others wrote. The feel of the piece is time-travelled, ancient Chinese with a hint of the mad inventor and deranged poet I guess. It opens from feb 12th- March 3rd. I need some sleep now but will write again this week..
