Cuts and Splices
“It’s funny doing everything remotely, firing things off into space and waiting for them to come back again…”
I love this snippet from the to and fro of emails with artist/film-maker Catherine Weir. After a morning filming on Arran she has distilled – from hours of ‘footage’ (pixelage?) – these 2 minutes.
Cut, spliced, chopped and shuffled, it’s been a quest for essence, a long process – with considerable patience on Catherine’s part – through which I have come to realise I prefer being behind the artwork (and not spot-lit; describing what I’d really prefer others to find – or seek – for themselves). But I’m curious to know what others think.
http://vimeo.com/94773110
Looking Different
I’m thinking about slowing down, normally associated with ‘getting old’ – check – but in this instance taking more time to really look.
The artwork is slow-burn and needs ‘different’ eyes to process its qualities (which are partly about just being there).
So as well as ‘rowanising’ magnificum leaves, I cut apertures into a heap of fallen ones in the hope visitors might tarry a while, pick one up and focus using the limiting frame (of vision) to capture detail otherwise overlooked; the nose-up-close-style seeing of an attentive bee, rather than the ‘glance and move on’ of a regular human’s woodland walk.
I’m hoping for more. After the launch, opportunities for me to visit the work will be limited and yet it will continue to change. So in the hope others might lend me their eyes, I have set up a Flickr site to collect ‘framed’ images of the work. If you visit please tarry, take a photo and upload it to: https://www.flickr.com/groups/natureofchange/
Shifting, Slicing, Lifting, Burning
I have few rules: bring nothing into the glade, take nothing away and…
shifting, slicing, lifting, burning, YES.
There’s a rough attempt at composition (do composition and compost have the same root?)
And pleasure too in seeing how keen others are to play: best moment of the day, three of us shifting a moss laden log just far enough to echo its sculpted void, contemplating freshly revealed earth. And knowing too that when I’m next back – at the end of May – we can shift it again to have: old void, new void, new moss on old wood and less wood (as one end of the log is surely rotting away).
In the Open
My base is ‘the glade’, I’m working up close to the smell of sap from fresh-cut leaves, stepping back to inspect my progress, each footfall is cushioned in a plush carpet of leaf mould and moss, the mottled muted colours dotted with bold splashes of white: the underside of fallen monster ‘magnificum’ leaves.
The cool grey of looming rain doesn’t dampen my mood it’s still the ideal ‘open-plan office’: there’s the background ‘chatter’ of unseen birds interspersed with drumming from the woodpecker hoping for a mate, and background music all the while courtesy of the stream below.
My walk in each day is across a footbridge; looking down, the stream bed is littered with the remnants of a fantastical children’s party: each child has thrown in a pink purse, or a rabbit’s ear, or a floppy conch shell. (Or it’s the the waxy fallen flower-cups from rhodi’s higher up the gorge.)
