Key of locations
NAMES The IRL setting, a residential artist-project space in Scotland, a deforested forest with a pathway to a loch
NAMES The problem of my body as a single (un)contained entity in relation to (an)other(’)s and to all things
NAMES The Method of learning, recorded in the body as in my early violin teaching, as a distance between thin red and yellow strips delineating the distance between fingers and, so then, pitches. Notes to play. Sounds to replicate.
NAMES A series of images depicting things held in relation by the idea of a coastal landslide, and a bungalow or caravan collapsing, both foretold and experienced. These states and times overlapping. Ones and twos.
NAMES The other setting, a coastline walk past the site of a recent landslip and towards a precipice, one vertical, one horizontal
NAMES Words not naming.
Things I know the names for.
Butterfly
Lizard
Lizard
Butterfly
Robin
Caterpillar
Robin
Lizard
Nuthatch
Nuthatch upside-down pecking in the Birch tree
Robin returns.
Sanguine taste of dark tap water. Earth infusion in my glass. I spit into the sink to check my mouth is not bleeding.
Smell of a forest removed. Stilled and emptying. Sticky drying sap, bark coils on the path like bacalao.
Last night a voice repeating, replaying; us separate, in separate spaces, my ear drum resonating.
As a child, learning violin, thin slivers of electrical tape showed the position of the fingers. This distance was learnt by my bones, a correct separation between two things.
Fly bounces against the glass, the humming of life I can name. Static of things I cannot.
—
Electrical tape when you begin.
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Something - context, place. Return. The forest is coming down. We are surrounded. Still a moment, present, here. Entering the water. Washing a drawing in the stream. Walking into the forest. I thank the trees. And feel the tingling life. My big presence wants to disseminate, to disperse, to shred into the gaps. But with joy. Feeling a part of, not as in to loose, to shed, to disappear.
—
The labour of being together has swollen this stomach. It is not being together, but of maintaining separation.
I want sometimes to place a boundary around my thoughts to not be permeated.
Maintaining a defining thread without iterations. Channeling one version of what is happening at anyone time. I wrote that wrongly. Any, one. Any one.
———-
Walk to the loch, in the water. Directions surrounding.
________
The images feel flat but of me. Scenes rendered in ones and twos, dark space merging into light, objects becoming their environment, also depicting a movement to ground. To flatness.
Last night I fixed them to the wall, taped with red electrical tape strips*.
- 1. Flow of current, mediation, a channelling.
- 2. a continual disruption; the sensation this causes; a feeling of correct spatial tension between my index and middle fingers.
Selecting based on a sensed-into forming narrative, figure and compositional relations, with the memory of prior works fixed to white walls peeling down, undoing themselves in relation to uprightness.
Ever the urge to number, index, describe, list. Brief descriptions that both fix and expand, set these in relation. A gravitational pull, the drag of ground over ground.
I hinge these to binary sheets, held in gravitational tension by a roughly unwound paperclip. I want this to be invisible; suspension between uprightness and the drop.
There are things at work here that I am sensing* but am not looking at, not taking in.
*responding to, in dialogue with, feeling in my body.
A mapping of something unsayable but constantly felt and living in my body.
——
An apex roof, caravan park. Bungalow.
____
What had been revealed through the landslip?
I trace an image that did not make it onto the wall. Pipes protruding and cables hang the height of the new cliff edge, jut out exposed from the containing ground beneath the caravan park and at the top of the cliff.
These images contained too much information I think. Another shows the peaks of caravans on the edge. We couldn’t go beyond it.
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I want this place to be something else, somewhere else, but the feeling of it to potentially return. Or exist elsewhere. Where is the source? Site, situation. There is the place it was taken in, but the rest was anywhere else.
—
Another place / walking on the beach to the precipice. Come to the edge.
——
The images are printed in black ink on ordinary 80gsm A4. The images have all been scanned from family photos or archive photocopies except for one iPhone photo. This is the one I like the least. There is not enough removal, separation, space between the dots or sense of dissolution dispersal, dissolving, ones and twos fizzing out into separation or towards one another with magnetic connective energy. But it contains a sea of movement as though rocks, sand and ground were sliding in ongoing slow motion, never from the top and never landing at the bottom.
The sequence might be read by height order, although it is unclear whether
1 is:
A cliff edge with the tide beneath, an overhanging broken edge of tarmac forms a precipice.
Or
Is 1:
A cake the shape of a house with 4 lit candles in it is set on the table, looked on by 2 girls,
Where did this begin?
Or is it
A child looks on, present and detached with a distant expression, present and detached, at and away from the bungalow shaped cake with 4 lit candles, past and through the scene to past and future knowing something we can’t, our sight line partially blocked by the back of a lowered head, a girl with shiny hair looking closely at the cake, its doors and walls formed of Mr Men biscuits, its iced roof tiled with Jelly Tots.
I am both inserted (inserting myself) and removed (removing myself) from this overall picture.
And then the final one:
5. Two girls, one older, one younger lie standing on shingle, hands clasped.
Stand against shingle (portrait) lie on shingle (landscape)
__
Memory of shouting “I don’t want to have a body!”
Bouncing on the trampoline, imagining being drawn up into the overhanging trees, upwards into everything.
Where the waterfall came down onto the sand beach and the jumping flies hovered low and skittish, close to the sand. Sand of stone and building materials, things piling into one another at the edges.
Sitting on that beach with the children and the dog. There and not there.
Everything about the container rang, was shouting with sensation, that sound, for a short time, became overwhelming.
Matching what I feel in space outside of the body.
The thing and not the thing.
Embodied - learning to inhabit with your body. Or to know the limits of its outline?
How to know, when the body is gone? Spread out dispersed and equal, dissipated its outline no longer a place to read from.
To have a body is to be in a state of ones and twos. Relate to another body. To be other. To be the thing or not the thing. The filled in outline or the thing outside of it. Things get bigger and you see them less. Never the whole. Seeing in parts, in images, always in relation to the surroundings, a part, set in relation, the floury pixels dust into the next thing. So that nothing is touching. And nothing ends.
__
The tunes play. A perpetual motion. Snaking through space, pairs of feet walking together playing the same piece in up and down bows but slightly at odds and the lag of time from the front to the back of the marching line, tucked under their chins, violins held up at the ends.
A system is holding this together as a group, an event, a learning exercise, a schooling.
—
Time seeing self as other as another person as someone in an archive, as a child and an older person looking back from the future. The characters in the images.
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- Tarmac precipice over the sea.
- A mistrust of the house
- A man walks away from the centre alongside the tumbled edge
- Landslip cascading like oozing foamy fluid, matter formed of building materials mingles in with sea tossed, sea smoothed sand and dune grass.
- Lying upright, standing to rest. State contingent.
___
A mistrust of the house, as in:
Several years before the body cry, a relocation and a sense that the house was falling. Hours with the children, surveying cracks up the walls, into the ceiling. Feeling the judder. Watching the changing gap between the door and its frame.
What happens when things fall (apart)?
Falling: Part A (a-part)
Falling: Part B (b-etween)
Falling: Part C (c-eiling)
Falling: Part D (d-econstruct)
Falling: Part E (e-asily)
A tune that plays (perpetual motion) to walk in to as a group. I want to work with this The tune goes up and down again. The bow leaves and lands - the first time of learning this. Replacing it on the string without a jolt.
On the path to the loch and the clearance site, trees upturned, lying standing.
Closed to one thing and open to another.
The scent
The saplings
A lizard in the grass.
I sip the peaty water.
Taste like a tongue’s tip exploring the root of a falling tooth, dislodging, testing the angle of separation.
__
Words for the things I know.
Return to sand
To ground
To flatness
Brick and glass
Aggregate and stone
Chairs rocking motion.
The muscles in my calves.
The imprint / impression / figure
of a part fallen house in dots that my mind connects but a pencil outline does not.
Fill in the blanks.
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