The Collaborator

… then, I blew out the candle

With a beautifully circular piece of lucky timing, I got to celebrate the opening of Kindle (my solo exhibition at John Rylands Library) with a trip down electronic memory lane… I went to see Plastikman live and – what with the opening sample being so appropriate and all – I pretended he did the tune quoted above just for me.

Anyway, I’ve been working with Untitled Gallery and JRUL for over a year to create Kindle and I still can’t quite believe it’s all installed and the show has started. I’m now preparing for the artist’s tours – the first of which happens next Saturday – and whilst going over various scribbles in my notebook, I found this quote from Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose” (a book which has provided much inspiration for the show):

[The library] was then the place of a long, centuries old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.

Yet again, the usefulness of collaboration suggests itself – as a visual artist you spend years turning looking into seeing, but what about the importance of turning hearing into listening? No listening, no dialogue. No dialogue, no ideas. No ideas, no artwork… and no artist.