Day 10. Teaching meditation practice of the 5 Rhythms in Oxford.
Day 11. I received a visit today from my long time collaborator and friend Ann Rapstoff. Ann and I have worked together for ten years, firstly running and curating VAIN liveart a national live art platform based in Oxford over two years and then collaborating as artists working in the areas of installation and performance.
www.kitchenanticsandappliances.
Ann and I are currently investigating various aspects of the element of water both as individuals and in some collaborative pieces. Our water work collaboration began with The Go-Between, linking the rivers Thames and Rhine. www.thego-betweenblogspot.co.uk
It is of great value having new work witnessed and to receive some feedback by a trusted colleague. When working in performance, the use of a video camera as witness is helpful but it is no substitute for the responses received from or the questions asked by another human being.
It was useful to hear Ann’s responses to the installation and to speak together about the links between the layers of the work, through my body out into the installation space and into the riverscape, both, under, through and around the city. Ann and I have often stood in witness to each other’s work, on other occasions we become photographer for the other and we have built a strong sense of trust over the years. I am enjoying the new experience of working in the same ‘landscape’ while making individual work.
During the day Ann and I visited some of the river and well sites that I have been responding to in the city.
Day 12. The artists on the Making Space residency gathered, we shared and reviewed the work as it has been unfolding for each of us during the residency. The four of us have very different ways of working with our bodies within our practices, the diversity adding to the quality of work and breadth of witnessing, I found the experience very rich. To be witnessed by other practicioners, I felt, brought a further dimension to each of the sessions.
I personally had a renewed sense of how much I had discovered during my time in this city and what a valuable experience it is to have the time to research work within a larger creative container (Summer Dance), without the pressure of outcomes.
The witnessing seemed to reflect time passing and my investigations within the city, the studio and my body, it became a layering of both invisible and visible maps. I was slightly amazed and surprised by my own installation, realsing some more of its hidden depths and possibilities as I dived into it, working without advance planning and following the landscape of the structured forms of the installation and the water both within the vessels and on the floor that constantly reshaped the whole.
One of the artists was unable to make the session in person and had sent some text to be read out, the text was full of strong visual clues into the landscape of the work. Through the way the words activated the absence of the artist, I was able to leave with a tantalising feel for the work. Written work as a result of moving the body often feels as though the threads of movement weave through the writing of words, often seeming to come from an intuitive part of the brain.
Day 13. After a week-end away, I arrived back in the city with the week of Summer Dance underway and into its second day. Artists, makers of many backgrounds, practicioners, teachers and students working on many different sites both within buildings and on the land in and around the city will continue for the week.
I began the day by working with photographer Christian Kipp, who spends much of his own creative time repeatedly re-visiting the same watery landscapes and noticing the subtle sifts of light and water levels through his lens.
Christian began to find his way into my installation both as it stood alone and while I inhabited it. It is quite a complex landscape, part museum, part laboratory, part ‘land’, part ‘river’, it is a site for ritual and a site for environmental comment. We moved together through the layers, caught up by and following different aspects, knowing there was always another thread in the web, right there whispering to follow. Sometimes we met across a narrow stream or beside a pool or though the inverted images inside a glass vessel full of water. We both felt the complexity of the layers.
On occasion, I empty the space of objects and reintroduce one element and focus on one aspect of the work or the properties of the water as it moves across the floor, this allows the detailed aspects of the work to expand out of the complex whole.
I was reminded me of an occasion when I watched a dew drop on the end of a blade of grass for long enough discover whether the water evaporated into the atmosphere or dropped from the tip of the grass to the earth. I watched as the sun rose and as the drop of dew became smaller and smaller and eventually evaporated!
The public showing of my work today was a residue of the work Christian and I had done earlier.