Amal and the poet Laureate

 

 

Last week was busy and a bit stressful.  I did a projection for Amal the puppet on the Friday night then showed a film for Halloween at the Adventure playground on Sunday.  Last night it was the Simon Armetage performance with my film of the Peak District showing in the background.  It was the end point of two little projects that I had enjoyed been a part of. I was pleased with each pragmatic, yet better than expected outcome and it was refreshing to have big audiences present at all three of the events.

I have decided to go easy on myself today and do a bit of reading and to blog.  Although I would not say it was a busy weekend there were lots of stress points and the potential for things to go wrong or at the very least not work out.  I suppose the work I did this weekend is actually what people see me as doing. It is my professional profile, it does not really feel like a practice though. To an extent I have misplaced my practice,  I'm hoping to find it again at some point and recognise it when I do.  

Over the last few weeks I have been musing about building Dereck Jarmen's Prospect Cottage in my garden.  I think a prospect cottage is something many older artists desire in some shape or metaphor.  This thinking has had a twinkle of a practice at its edges.  The impossibility of it the crassness of it , the fact that if I were to construct it, it could be nothing other than a magical space.  Deep inside I have a little energy flash of excitement again.  This is held in the detail of the making but also in the idea. 

 

The original has parts of this poem by John Donne inscribed on the side.

The Sunne Rising

by John Donne

 

Busie old foole, unruly Sunne,

Why dost thou thus,

Through windowes, and through curtaines call on us?

Must to thy motions lovers seasons run?

Sawcy pedantique wretch, goe chide

Late schoole boyes, and sowre prentices,

Goe tell Court-huntsmen, that the King will ride,

Call countrey ants to harvest offices;

Love, all alike, no season knowes, nor clyme,

Nor houres, dayes, moneths, which are the rags of time.

 

[Thy beames, so reverend, and strong

Why shouldst thou thinke?

I could eclipse and cloud them with a winke,

But that I would not lose her sight so long:

If her eyes have not blinded thine,

Looke, and to morrow late, tell mee,

Whether both the'India's of spice and Myne

Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with mee.

Aske for those Kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,

And thou shalt heare, All here in one bed lay.

 

She'is all States, and all Princes, I,

Nothing else is.

Princes doe but play us; compar'd to this,

All honor's mimique; All wealth alchimie.]

Thou sunne art halfe as happy'as wee,

In that the world's contracted thus;

Thine age askes ease, and since thy duties bee

To warme the world, that's done in warming us.

Shine here to us, and thou art every where;

This bed thy center is, these walls, thy spheare. 

 

I was musing with the idea to  inscribe 

eeeba gum 

can ya belly touch ya bum

can your tits hang low

can you tie them in a bow

can your balls go flat

can you put em in a plat

eeeba gum can you do that.

In this private musing I see myself living much more in line to a  practice.  Hard learned through the years of anonymity.  Perhaps it is something of a musing about the potential to do things differently or perhaps within the raveling of a new making there exists a potential for or at the very least a kernel to hope , a longing for difference. 

I will return to my PhD writing this week - I was getting quite well stuck in yet it is always good to have a breather  as it helps to nudge things along.  This weeks nudging has made me think about territory and form.  I googled it to see what came up and I was sent to the home office website where you have to fill a form in to enter the territory of the UK if you are a foreign national.   I was pleased with this transgression,  a short but interesting diversion rather than a full rabbit hole.

Form and territory from the inside of a residency, there is probably enough there for a PhD  and much of my most current writing hovers around this area even if it struggles to say anything about it.

Art affords a scaffold which enables the creation of a territory.  (Historical/institutional/ through identity/philosophically)

residency happens within a space/( place/site/event) and holds that space open for a purpose.

Territory relates to form, we must resist saying gestalt.

The scaffold is about holding things open so something new can emerge, it does not have to be art. 

There are many ways for art to hold the space open in our minds and in our hearts and in our actions but not all of them end up raveling something recognizable as art.