With the longer and brighter days comes a more focused me and a clarity after what feels like a winter long spring clean, by clean I mean clear out mostly! The garden is getting more attention since Christmas. Meetings about what Is now called Lost Library (previously mobile library performance) have been happening and a funding application laboured over and submitted (late January).
Dancers are now not involved. I have approached a few possible dance groups, but the logistics, funding and timing with the Eisteddfod being in the summer holiday just added up to huge complications. Taking the dancers out of the equation means I can work with who and what we do have available and go from there.
(A little late for this project) I have found and read Education for Socially Engaged Art by Pablo Helguera as it is particularly relevant in this Lost Library project. In particular, I had vaguely thought about levels of community involvement, but not known how to talk about it.
Nominal, Directed, Creative or Collaborative participation. Nominal is when viewer contemplates the work, directed- the visitor completes a simple task to contribute to the creation of the work. creative – the visitor provides content for a component of the work within a structure established by the artist. Collaborative is when the visitor shares responsibility for developing the structure and content of the work in collaboration and direct dialogue with the artist.
I am complicating things by seeing the Lost Library project as a bit of all four structures. I need to brake down the elements of the project into their parts.
The performance day.. Mobile library built on a 1950’s wheelbarrow (this fits with the Border Country book), eing designed and made by Art Students from HCA. An idea put forward at last meeting was for the public to join in by bringing their own wheelbarrows from home and using them to transport books from Abergavenny library (spoke to librarians on Thursday and they have plenty of spare/old books) to a place within the Eisteddfod festival site. I have spoken to a music tutor at hca and am waiting to hear if any music student are interested in composing music for the performance (this could be played from our 1950’s wheelbarrow). I have been wondering how to shorten the project title from Mobile library performance based in Border Country by Raymond Williams for a while and then got more seriously thinking these past couple of weeks and think currently that ‘lost library’ fits well as I want to have the feeling of the possibility of losing, or already ahaving lost libraries. This could also be played with in the publicity and involvement of festival visitors…wheres the library gone? Find it at the Eisteddfod… ! Maybe think again on that one… My public facing blog on this project is on wordpress (wynnepatonblog.wordpress.com) where I am drawing parts of the project together, and developing reference pages for the project as things are decided.
Anyway, I’m doing a fair bit of reflection on my practice and of course overthink on certain things and completely ignore others. The last year and a half out of college has felt excruciatingly slow, with practical progress, but I do feel that I am finding my own rhythm and ways of working. Some things I am adding structure to, others loosening up. One thing I find hard with having my shed studio at home, is getting out there with perpetually so much to do at home. I write myself a note the other day simply to go to my shed.
Things that I am mulling over now:
Things…foliage alongside text
Animating these forms
Bring text to life
Saloua Raouda Choucairs’ latent movement in the forms – lyrical. Clarity.
My individual practice vital in bringing my hesitantly intuitive preoccupations into focus.
Synthesis with science.
My full engagement with the physical world -how? Dance, drawing where I
am…engagement in contemporary art…
