The iron fence demarcating St Mary Magdalen’s Churchyard, Bermondsey, 22 Jan 2017.
This text has been written for a-n in exchange for an artist bursary. This bursary supported me during an exploratory and transitional moment, allowing me to train with, and talk to, people working in experimental music and music education. In this text I look back at 2018 drawing from diary entries, images and recordings to trace this passage from my visual arts practice into something more loose, rich and alive – drawing from music and performance conventions. The experiences I will discuss include: undertaking a course in Dalcroze Eurythmics at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, discussions with audio producer Alannah Chance and composer Sarah Hughes; playing with Jenny Moore and other musicians as part of her project Mystic Business and residency at Battersea Arts Centre; the personal reading and research that weaved through this time.
Although loosely chronological, this text uses themes to address the issues that punctured my psyche and drove my discoveries during this time. I weave moments of learning and discovery into a deeper narrative with the hope of it being a useful account, rather than a descriptive gloss of sequential transactions. It takes time to tease out knots and to see how talking, learning and playing differently can stretch the parameters of a life.
I opened the door and walked outside. The inside was my studio space, the limitations of my art education, the typical demands of most gallerists or curators. This inside was also my conventional methods, my respective ‘practice’ and the image I had created for myself as an artist. Everything that was possible had grown to fill the size of this space. But stray tendrils twisted the handle.
