Friday 14th November
Well the inverter still hasn't been tried out. I discovered that with modern cars full of electronics if the projector doesn’t have a fuse then a power serge could ruin the cars electrics. Having spent much time thinking about what to do about this, I have a few options: buy a separate car battery, use a projector with a fuse (which I don't have), or buy a circuit breaker. I think a circuit breaker would work and I really want the car to be attached to the work, at this stage, so don't want to use a separate battery. This aspect of work has been put on hold, as I've been busy making new work.
I have printed copies of 'the typewriter walks' photos, and have been generating new text from the text written during the walk then typing this over the photos. I'm really interested in the layering of text and image and the relationship between the two both visually and in archiving. Text and image together are considered fact or truth and I'm curious about this in relationship to time, place and document. Where the truth and life lies within in a piece.
Wanting to explore when something becomes archived or dead, I felt the need to work durationaly through all the work so far, as a means of archiving what has been and putting it to rest. On Tuesday I spent the day in the museum doing a durational working performance to camera and myself. I didn’t feel the need for an audience present; I think because I am so often alone, working in the museum quite isolated and because the document at the end of the performance was key, it was what would ultimately be placed in archive. It was a very satisfying process to take my time working through all of my work, and really incorporating the camera as a tool for seeing and documenting during the performance and beyond. Doing this really allowed the work to pass on, and areas of interest arisen during this to be explored with new work/films/actions/photos/text.
Tracey has given me some of the poles and ribbon used to mark out dead pine trees in the plantation; Initially I was interested in using these to leave a trail, a means of making me feel safer when working. Now however I'm keen to assimilate their role of marking the dead in my work. Using them to mark out time or moments passed, the point of the death of my words and actions. This is exploring what is the work; the original words as they depart from my lips, the photographs, the text, or the last object generated and left.
I have spent a lot of this week exploring the local coastline, walking thinking and talking. Either walking and writing on my return, or conducting more typewriter walks, both ways generating a final text and returning to the original place to speak it to it. The point of words departure from my body has been pertinent. As has the air or wind, breathing and the convergence of air and words in and out. This has emerged both in the text written and in performance. Filming with super 8 I have been giving/letting speech be taken by the wind and sea. Documenting a spoken performance with silent film came out of the fear I feel from a loss of sense here, not being able to see the whole picture. In the bush there is so much sound, but it is hard to see for its density and on the coast everything is lost, swept up in the noise of the wind but you can see as far as the horizon.
This weekend I'm going to a 16 mm film festival in
I have experimented a lot with bleaching and drawing over found films, but not with my own footage- as I haven't yet had anything developed. I'm keen to take the narrative and meaning and my responses of these processes into the layering within my film work. Working in black and white I'm thinking about the adding and taking away of colour in an image or moment. The subject has also been crucial, the landscape is obviously a lead character, and this has been reflected by what has been in focus: myself or the elements I'm reading to.
On another path I have been reading a lot about community and public art and thinking about this in relation to my practice. I have struggled to get the local community involved and interested in my work. It has been interesting thinking about how important this actually is and why it is deemed important. It was important to this project to learn about peoples responses to the land, and I think that is definitely happening, just quietly in trickles of conversations and encounters and these have played a role in fuelling my work. However when I have tried organising or to get people making/creating I have had less success. I think this is partly because a lot of the things I did were spontaneous ideas I had and fairly arrogant in the assumption that people would be interested. They came out of a feeling of pressure, that I had come to a community and must actively do something with them. Also slight insecurities, that coming here to make work was not enough or a little selfish. This week I have had the courage to cement in my mind that this is not a community arts project and I shouldn’t feel guilty for simply being an artist and making work. This is a really complex area. I think that of course art has a positive role within the community whether it is 'participatory' or not. I don’t think it needs to be 'participatory' in nature to benefit the community.
