barren

barren residency – poetic spaces

Day 4

Bachelard and the poetics of space have hooked in corners, stairs and drawers for looking at the psyche and space (Bachelard.G, 1958) Outside the domestic environment we also have psychogeography (Self.W, 2007) wandering and the psyche, stemming from the dandy in Paris to the drift of urban art practices. I’m also reflecting on the state of standing and looking and how we use that to apply a particular gaze at horizons and landscapes. If we take the heroic gaze on landscape it is considered male, possessive and objectifying. If we take the feminine we conceptualise its nebulous areas. barren perhaps epitomizes outside/ in, near and far and looking with intention.

I started with a poem, ‘What life is this if we cannot stand and stare…’ (W.H.Davies ). Davies wrote this in the 50s, now we sanctify it in little green spaces and openings, put turf roofs on houses and look at how every possible inch can be a representation of the rural as a nostalgic nod. The rural is used for escape. We think of adventure, a walk, an activity there is an effort to go out into it. So how does the value of edge spaces, transition points on the outskirts offer potential for barren to occupy and present a culture that activates these edges; and indeed is barren as a collaborative turn confined to that, when we have already occupied abandoned fenced off car parks?

To make a distinction – my research presents the problem of the outskirts but barren is more liberal and offers the potential to occupy, transform and take edgelands in a broader term. It engages space in a poetic manner for pulling from the outside to inside, to value and instigate occupation and preservation of what is laid waste. We might not be literally wandering the streets or in mobile homes but roaming and back to base offers fetching of something valuable and letting it occupy the poetics of space inside.

We are not reliant on our physical roaming, we have discovered objects which have been abandoned including a slide screen revealing slides made by a family in the 1950s which Dave brought in one day along with maps used for particular sites. So we are encroaching on a durational wasteland not history because history is something that there is already fictionalised and set in a timeline. These are hidden histories and are futile in themselves, just interesting waste sites. The aspect of duration with space combined lends itself to understanding the objects reclaimed within barren. The chair that currently sits in the exhibition belonged to a very old lady in a Flosh cottage in Yorkshire. She lived in a flagstone lounge where puddles used to creep and hung her washing on a thin piece of string across a waste garden. When she finally left there was this chair and a stool painted white. The paint has not been entirely removed and the formulas that now occupy it are poetic in that they refer directly to the site of the subject and the subjective view.

So, what is poetic about a term that means ‘too poor to produce vegetation, barren tracts of land, fruitless, unproductive and infertile? It is this very futility that has its attraction. A playfulness with barren stretches that have no obvious value and certainly not capital unless to be converted into another vertical building. The only production is the action within the space and it pays heed to the futility of many things. It does represent what is poor and in that case represents more than space; it presents the potential for, but lies sterile. Briefly the space becomes something momentarily and draws attention to a restless navigation and occupation of lands.

Dave and I have inadvertently placed pieces of poetry on the table before barren evolved but now we’re questioning its place within the work. In working towards a body of work which captures these notions it now appears to us that poetry may be essentially the futile voice that is synonymous with barren.

barren – uncertain furniture

Day 3

The idea of gallery as studio is not new particularly when workshops and work in progress etc are the substance of the crossover between studio and gallery. However the question of studio also reaches the laptop of which I have found I can’t be without whilst in the gallery. Images, research and projecting from it seem essential. The open sources nature verifies that the studio in many ways is always open. I am not able to confine myself to one activity the whole time and moving between those ideas of experiment, production, storage, throwaways and distribution punctuated by reading and thinking make the nature of the studio a constant go between. The gallery is at odds in terms that it appears to be a final resting place, however in this residency I am working within the gallery surrounded by so called resolved work and I’m busy undoing solving it and using it to proceed on new lines.

This idea of gallery as studio does not appear to present new forms of production or react against conventions but probably rests as an expanding cultural idea where production and post production of art occurs in ever simultaneous, transient ways and in ever ranging venues, places. What is apparent is that the notion of studio and display are under constant construction and the painting or aestheticising of all places, culturally, is occurring.

Residing in the space constitutes construction not just in the process of working but also in the process of constructing thoughts. I have identified old patterns of thought which now appear redundant and the space gives an uneasy challenge to let go of preconceived ideas and remaining in the balance of uncertainty. On that note it is apparent that the work here requires an uncertainty as it neither wishes to be monumental in the name of architecture but wants to expose the fragility of the body through architecture. Perhaps that is my best understanding for the moment.

The whole space as Perec comments is organized around furniture – we find this in most instances and the gallery space is constructed no differently and furniture does appear to obscure much of the space we inhabit. The space offers scale, dimension and support to the constructed identities of furniture. I have been literally inscribing furniture but it is no different to what occurs in our inscription of surfaces and pieces with anecdotes, placing next to ornaments and positioning; selecting from time frames in order to construct an identity. My aversion to many spaces is from a deep desire to take an arm and sweep so much of this aside yet here I am inscribing. It is a space which is slowly moving from uninhabitable to inhabited. Despite this the set or scene of the gallery while moving has an air of being untouched and intangible I’m not sure if this is to do with that church like air galleries conjure and they do not touch or whether the work offers a an uncertain, fragile touch of intangibility between architecture and furniture – I would like to think the latter is what it will become. Perec (Species of Spaces; Pg91) desired the paradoxical nature of wanting spaces that were stable, untouched, unchanging but also intangible as points of reference and departure. In my state of sitting in the middle of the space I hope that this body of work begins to reference spaces whilst offering a point of departure.

barren – 04/06/2013 Failure

Back to George Perec and his note on failure – it is apt to say that it may not be wrong but the space the place where you are putting a mark may be uninhabitable. First impression on the term uninhabitable conjures wasteland – a kitchen with only a tap – a graveyard perhaps with one or two corpses. Likewise the subjects within architecture receive similar contempt especially brutalist architecture and while the term failure is synonymous with the utopian ideas of much architecture and experiments I place myself in the middle right now. I’m not making architecture – I have been dealing with the subject its effect on body and habitation, even organisation, yet applying white pencil marks to a glass cube which summarise utopian architecture and the modern art has ultimately been met with uninhabitable results. Both the replication of projected image and the materials have proved incompatible and it is possible to see the inhabitable as the incompatible. The glass cube, the white cube which frames so much of this stuff creates the distinction and the distance. Working within it makes me reflect on the lack of malleability, lack of giving working in certain conditions. A place such as a white filled gallery has certain elements of out-of bounds. It is not a shanty town nor scattered with jagged glass but it is mean when you are working in progress and process, as the failure is encased within the very nature of its display. It is well known to artists that failure is the gap between intention and realisation yet often offers the discovery. Where there is no discovery or revealed realization Gonzalez – Foerster refers to these as black holes that always seem unsatisfactory ( Le Fauvre. L, Failure, Intro; pg13). I’m right in the smack of that except there is no black just clear glass – a void clear, hard and more reminiscent of glass conservatories!

The other note on inhabitability occurs to me when I think of my studies on edgelands and buffer zones where I’d like to place some works – why precisely because it is not permanently inhabited and is often avoided without perfect conditions. Distance occurs and we use these edges as transition points rather than places deemed hospitable or habitable. They are inhabitable because they are on the edge, contain no distinct purpose of value and certainly have not acquired the value of nostalgic dumping grounds and industrial remains such as with city scenes. It has no ‘lifestyle’ no factor of something yet it is not without nothing – it contains everyday organisation and space. Can spaces be containers for an abstract place where we remember to walk the dog, fly the odd kite, ramble across the field and do we remain looking at it distinct and separate because it’s not just uninhabitable but with many current architectural organisations of work and leisure it is uninhabitable? Perec did add converted attics and superb bachelor pads to his list of uninhabitable spaces – why, because they were for display; the gallery space in some way is similarly uninhabitable for the artist at work for the same reasons.

barren residency at Artsmith;Derby 3/6/2013

Working in a space with a collaborator presents certain pressures – sometimes it is best to ignore the other and the pressures, and just begin – silent workers. Usually you end up gravitating, which we did, and focussed on the apex area of the roof at Artsmith and the greenhouse panel which we would like to use as a starting point for a wall drawing. I have been co-opting Dave to help with a kite project for the PhD which has developed to become a duel film piece together. We have unfinished business with the subject of the kite on motion and static, so this looks to be on the agenda.

The greenhouse was also a project for the PhD and my first etched panel sits in the gallery – however we took it down and transcribed the technical drawing of the blueprints, I had been working on, and followed those through behind the glass, intersecting lines to begin.

We were flummoxed this morning because I had thought to myself, just continue to draw the greenhouse, then it shifted to mapping places which we were agreed upon but now seemed a bit naff. So Dave turns to me and says ‘shall we draw the greenhouse?’ – I nodded, we already have several short films and stills using the greenhouse as a lightbox, set and stage so projecting them onto the space and extracting and re-scaling seemed the best place to go. Dave’s short films from inside the greenhouse projected onto this has already created a new range of images……

As Perec would advise there is no sense in meetings in spaces like these – everything has been studied and there is no question of getting it wrong and no case of any error being detected. He comments on the amazement of workmen meeting together. It feels like this – tea, coffee, looking, seeing, agreeing, banter then agree and do. The doing is such a focus that actually not doing seems very productive and decisive because the intention distils. Perec. G. Species of Spaces ;Pg 89)