Category: Uncategorized

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.

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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 !!

 

 

 

 

Turner’s ‘Slave ship’

turner_slave_ship_1840Created 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.

 

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.

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‘In free fall’

Read an interesting essay by Hito Steryl titled ‘In free fall: A thought experiment on vertical perspective’. Led to questioning on how do we navigate?, what is falling? and how do we look at things? In response to the essay I produced a perspex cylinder, lined on the inside with a google map of my village. I was thinking about what it might be like if we lived inside a cylinder instead of on the outside of a sphere (earth). Would our perception of perspective change with the absence of a horizon?