Yesterday I actually managed to get out and do some work on an idea I have had for a while. It’s half term so I’m not tied to having to do everything during school hours and my son is happy to entertain himself most of the time. Also, the weekly craft workshop I have been delivering in the village is having a break this week – most of the participants are women with children or grandchildren to look after during the holiday.
The beautiful sunny day took me by surprise after all the rain, so I had to charge the camera battery and make other preparations before I could consider going out to do some filming. I got onto the moor as the sun was beginning to go down – I still haven’t got used to the clocks changing at the weekend. It was spitting on to rain but that stopped so I got the camera onto the tripod and did a bit of exploratory filming. It started to get too dark so I had to pack up and away in the car.
I think I will pursue the chimera idea. I want to film this during the winter, but the practicalities of filming outside mean that I will have to take my opportunities as and when a good day comes along. Not always easy to drop everything and grab the camera, tripod etc when the sun shines! Many of my ideas over the past couple of years have involved outdoor locations, some of them in the winter. It’s fine again today but I have things I need to get done, so may not get out. I could go onto the Fell today, no travelling needed.
Disarming the Dead
This evening I re-read a chapter from “The Buried Soul: How Humans Invented Death” by Timothy Taylor, 2002, Fourth Estate. The chapter, An Unexpected Vampire, recounts the post- mortem isolation of a prostitute who died in 1933 in a small Anatolian village. Buried close to the Neolithic mound of Catalhoyuk, far from the village graveyard, her staus as ‘other’ in death as in life was made clear. Some time after her death, her grave was re-opened and her gold teeth taken from her mouth. Perhaps these men included some who had paid her for sexual favours while she lived. As Taylor points out, by this action, “Her mouth was desecrated – made to return its profits – in an attempt to finally lay her ghost”. As if by taking back their money, the actions of those who had used her as a prostitute, or at least suffered her to exist on the edges of their community, could be neutralized, their guilt assuaged.
I have been thinking a lot this week about my physical location – where I actually spend a large amount of my life. How it impacts on my being an artist. The shadow of the former mining industry has a long half life and the place seems to be in a state of suspense, waiting for … what?
Perhaps it is that inchoate sense of possibility that I am drawn to, and back to. Meanwhile, where else would I be woken at 5 in the morning by a mass of horses running through the street after being let out from their enclosures on the fell by local malcontents. Or be given a guided tour of the fell by an ex-miner who later brought me a large section of a fossilized fish from the time when the fell was under the sea.
“That the accused persons, mostly poor themselves, were not responsible for this economic suffering was beside the point; they were perceived as the cause, and that perception sufficed to justify scapegoating them.”
From Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts, by Anne Llewellyn Barstow, 1994, p.100 [Pandora]
I had hoped to catch the Witches and Wicked Bodies exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, but it ends on November 3rd and I won’t be able to go up until December due to various work committments.
http://www.nationalgalleries.org/whatson/exhibitio…
Of course a lot of the work in the exhibition is likely to be familiar – Durer, Baldung, Goya, Paula Rego and Kiki Smith, but the witch-body ties in with my interest in sinister and monstrous bodies and their production within a particular set of social, political and economic circumstances.
Whose are the reviled bodies of 21st century austerity Britain? The usual suspects: benefit claimants; single mothers; immigrants – often all three qualifications are found in the same body . There are others, but these spring immediately to mind.
How are we/am I as artist(s) to engage with these manifestations?
