Coffee and Ponderings

Rick and I met up to discuss the Estuary Dialogue project. It has been a while since we talked about it because we have both been busy with other projects and work. It is frustrating sometimes but that is how you have to juggle things.
We talked quite a lot about the expectations that we may have of the project. I have been thinking of working with objects such as books, particularly the texts of Conrad and Dickens. Rick was saying that he is developing ideas around the periphery of the subject and wants to give that time to develop. Our expectations are that we want to make something satisfying, something which connects us to the place. We have no funding which means that we are not bound to those expectations. I think that I am willing to work towards an exhibition if that was right or to make work that is tangible. However, I am very open to the idea that the end result could be a sound recording for example or a book. We might share one collaborative piece but then add other individual pieces to it.
I think our collaboration is about a dialogue, where we generate discussions around a common theme. At some point it will probably tie up into the work.

These are my own views and Rick will have his own perspective on the project too.

The project essentially feels right; my heart is in tune with this work. I am returning to a place I find fascinating.

Alamar - Habana, Cuba

Mauro D'Agati is an Italian Photographer who has documented a place called Alamar in Havana, Cuba.
Alamar is a place that was constructed to house workers of a steel smelters, Fabrico Vanguardia Socialista in the 1970s. The resulting city was constructed by the workers themselves and it 'was to be a miraculous example to the world, an obligatory first stop for all the people who arrive at the island.' The place is described as 'coarse and crude' but looking through the portfolio of images there is a melancholic beauty to it, where a few treasured possessions glisten. Internal spaces are curated with perhaps, unknowing intensity. Few possessions dominate the spaces. Budget jacquard woven images of swans or dolphins drape on concrete walls.
The empty swimming pool is a trophy of dreams.

Alamar - Habana, Cuba
Mauro D'Agati
Published by Steidl, 2010

I need to Edit!

A current project, AdventureLand, is currently included in a group show at Portland House in Malvern (62 Church Street). The show is called 'One Thing Leads to Another and is curated by Charlie Hurcombe. It has been so good to be involved in the show and the act of installing work has helped me to think about and prioritise my work. I consistently seem to spread myself too far and thus can lose the impetus of the work. I felt as though I had edited enough but some of the work is not resolved enough. I have to think about the finishing details.

It is useful for this project to reflect upon these issues. Every project helps to refine the next one.

It has been a frustrating period recently as my teaching jobs have taken precedent due to the heavy period of assessment. Time has been given over to this and taken from my own practice. It will be relinquished next week and I will get time back. I'll be able to pick up the threads again.

I have suffered from a crisis of confidence and there are times when it is so hard to maintain an arts practice alongside other employment and domestic stuff. It has all hit hard recently but I am so thrilled to be involved in One Thing Leads to Another and to be collaborating with Rick on this project. Breathe......

Heart of Darkness

Since visiting the sites on the Thames, I have been thinking of many potential ideas. The two books Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and Great Expectations by Charles Dickens seem to be natural starting points for creative work. I have read that Dickens used to take regular walks from his home near Gravesend to the marshes, sometimes walking upto 20 miles. His writing was done in a unique wooden chalet which was built in the grounds of his house and looked out upon the estuary. Conrad spent time in Essex on the opposite bank of the Thames estuary at Stanford Le Hope. I don't know so much about his life but in the introduction to Heart of Darkness by Paul O'Prey, the estuary clearly has a profound impact upon his writing. Conrad talks of the sky as a 'benign immensity of unstained light'. He draws parallels between the Thames and the Congo river through the suggestion that 'all seas and rivers run into one another: from the 'end of the world' the Thames 'stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway', 'leading to the uttermost ends of the earth....into the heart of an immense darkness'.

O'Prey, P. Introduction to Heart of Darkness, Penguin Books 1983, page 8

This literary image conjures up notions of the 'sublime' and I wonder if Conrad was provoking ideas around this? I was watching a fascinating programme about Yellowstone Park called Unnatural Histories (BBC4 9.00 pm Thursday 16th June 2011) where the image created of Yellowstone was associated with this search for the sublime. This was a connection to God, a place where one could feel the danger and true sense of a wonderful landscape. In the case of Yellowstone it was through the spectacular geisers, the mountains or waterfalls.

Yellowstone was basically a construct of a wilderness where native Americans had been ejected so that the land could be appropriated for use by settlers. Below is the information from the programme.

As the world's first national park, Yellowstone has long served as a model for the protection of wilderness around the world. For Americans it has become a source of great national pride, not least because it encapsulates all our popular notions of what a wilderness should be - vast, uninhabited, with spectacular scenery and teeming with wildlife. But Yellowstone has not always been so. At the time of its creation in 1872, it was renowned only for its extraordinary geysers, and far from being an uninhabited wilderness it was home to several American Indian tribes.

This film reveals how a remote Indian homeland became the world's first great wilderness. It was the ambitions of railroad barons, not conservationists, that paved the way for a brand new vision of the wild, a vision that took native peoples out of the picture. Iconic landscape paintings show how European Romanticism crossed the Atlantic and recast the American wilderness, not as a satanic place to be tamed and cultivated, but as a place to experience the raw power of God in nature. Forged in Yellowstone, this potent new version of wilderness as untouched and deserving of protection has since been exported to all corners of the globe.