paulamusgrove1

‘Running to catch a train’

The opening night of the end of year show at Writtle College. My first live performance of ‘Running to catch a train’. More to follow but for now I have provided a link to the unedited video.

http://dvblog.org/

Continued search for Equilibrium…

Continuing to look at balance between mind, body and soul in order to achieve harmony / equilibrium. Considering how this can be portrayed through performance. I looked at the work of Kate Gilmore, a performance artist based in the US. Interested in the way she addresses endurance and how how she documents her work ( a beautiful, often chaotic mess!). I developed some prototypes for a potential performance.

The final structure/s would be made of wood (carefully measured) with a ball in the centre. At each of the 3 corners would be a bucket/cup. I envisage a performance where I would tip paint into each bucket until the structure became balanced. This would involve endurance, patience and mess ! Main risk is that it could go too well! (boring!). Not long until the end of year show! Keep experimenting !!

Equilibrium.

Early experiments using random objects in studio. Thoughts on balance between mind, body and soul.

Turner’s ‘Slave ship’

turner_slave_ship_1840 Created performance/sound piece. Exploring human and elemental restrictions and restraints. Turner’s painting of ‘The slave ship’ (1840) based on 1. poem that described slave ship in typhoon and 2. the true story of the slave ship ‘Zong’, whose captain had thrown sick and dying slaves into sea so that he could collect insurance money for slaves ‘lost at sea’. Turner accompanied painting with extract of his own poetry:

“Aloft all hands, strike the top-masts and belay, Yon angry setting sun and feirced edged clouds, declare the typhoons coming. Before it sweeps your decks, throw overboard the dead and dying – ne’er heed their chains. Hope, hope, fallacious hope! where is thy market now?” (Fallacies of hope, 1812, Turner)

Turner appears to be pitying the slaves but also the slavers – the slavers had a restriction placed on them, imposed by their greed for their money. I created a short performance/sound piece titled’blood on their hands’, where I tried to represent the slavers.

Artist talk and workshop.

On the 9th Feb. we were visited by Kristina Chan and Chen Qiaoxi, two students from the ma print course at the RCA. I created some pieces in response to their practice:

The recurring dream.

Dreams are the unconscious parts of us. Freud viewed dreams as wish fulfillment, in contrast to Jung who looked at them as a form of self-actualisation. Of good and bad. Dreams are windows to our souls. I made a sound and performance piece centered around a recurring theme of trains.

While the sound piece was playing I sat behind a plinth and painted images from my dreams onto glass and perspex sheets. Trains represent ‘power’. In my dreams I am lost, chasing trains, being pulled in different directions. Life is out of control and I am ‘powerless’. When the sound piece finished I awoke from my dream, switched on the light and displayed my painted glass sheets in front of the plinth. I completed my performance by taking a print from one of the sheets of glass.

Dreaming: Intervention and collaboration.

I was given the task of intervening in a friend’s work and creating my own response. Yasmin had used her dream book in the hope of finding answers about herself. Maybe they would give her a different perspective on who she was/is. She saw her dreams in black and white and considered the way they are fragmented so that we only recall parts of them when the light comes on. She wanted to play with repetition and liked the idea of documenting her dreams.