reflection1: The value of opportunities like Making Space. The chance to spend a week experimenting in a recoginised and well known venue, Fabica, is potentially very exciting. The building, a former Regency church is a very static and layered building to respond to. I called my project Space Interrupted.
Working in site responsive ways can mean limited opportuniteis to make work but this project enabled me to test my practise against the scale, function and architectural structure and character of Fabrica. Space Interrupted was all about finding ways of taking hold of a space and finding a way to disrupt or change perceptions of what it could be. It was an opportunity to experiment, no finished work expected !
Such opportunites are scarce, and despite my reservations about it not being dark enough, it was a good way to stretch myself and push ideas hard in a really short space of time.
day 4: Difficult to know whether to focus on physically disrupting the space or using projections to do it. Tried breaking the space up using stretches of fabric, metres and metres of baking paper but neither works – both are too poigngant drooping and sagging in a melancholy way – not what I’m after at all.
The projections have the advantage of being quite large and once it’s dark the architecture begins to take a less dominant role allowing the projections to take on a more ambiguous and angular quality.
Surprisingly good turn out of people to view the work and my talk; good discussion about working site specifically, getting ideas, working as a mature artist and opportunities for artists.
day 3: All vey quiet and made some headway into finding ways of breaking up the building (mainly at 3am !). Am looking back at when I cut into a building to disrupt the space and so am thinking of ways of making a symbolic cut – maybe using light.
I’d like to create a light line cutting the building in half – but the projectors are not powerful enough and I can’t get far enough away.
However I can continue to disrupt and animate the space by using filmed bits of the building to jump around and across the architecture.
day 2 – part 2: A quiet afternoon didn’t lead to much but I began to get a sense of the subleties of the space.
Enjoyed an engaging converstaion with Liz Whitehead, co-director of Fabrica, weighing up the difficulties and opportunites of working in buildings that are rich with history and religion; the intimate and comforting scale of some churches and the sense of the overwhelming architecture of others.
Perhaps more sigificantly, we discussed the value of being terrified, how fear generates an energy which forces the individual to act, sometimes rashly, in order to make something happen !
day two: the light is very different today, pushing its way in through the windows in a half hearted way – it’s hesitant movement counterbalanced by the tack tack tack of the stone mason’s hammer, the electric whirr of the the workman’s drill backed up with the harmony of another hammer tack tack tacking another rythmn …… it’s really quite hard to think !
Talked to Ian one of the stone masons who is interested in the drape of fabric I’ve hung up – ask’s questions about how and what I’m doing, which makes it somehow more present.
Undergoing a steep learning curve …. dealing with noise, people, drills, hammering ….
