The Time & Tidal Flow live art and performance projects are linked by the theme of change. If you are an artist performing, how does this theme relate to your work?
Largely, how can a work reflect tiny or momentous shifts in time, place and history? Does this make the work have an overall purpose/story to tell and should these themes be obvious to the audience or used as a starting point?
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My new performance "Blueprint of the Mind" is a journey of personal change, breaking down layers in my work and focussing on my core practise of drawing.
I draw on a long roll of lining paper over a pasting table, playing with movement and mark-making and attempting to free myself of rational control.
I try to reach a state where automatic drawing can take place, possibly revealing something of the subconscious.
I have practised this technique over a period of time; the audience may be able to listen to my personal journey on headphones in the space.
There will also be a constant shift as I'm involved in the process; changing emotional and mental states and changing states of consciousness.
I hope to create a space for reflection in the act itself, as process is needed for change to happen.
Change is present everywhere
its as big and is little as one wants it too be.As we see it and need to have and even run away from it.
But in ART you can make change stand still in an act of playing a character that is trapped in its own past.
Change exists as a metaphor for the past as in that Colonial figure haunting that post and present colonial landscape.
A Imperial figure Of "White Mans Ghost" a figure of the easy answers of the past from which we have not learnt?
A figure of political and social impotence ,sorry and pathetic trying to impose itself on a landscape that it is responsible for. By having made and exploited other landscapes to create this one and is now trapped in a limbo of it own cultures making and expectation.
So the "Ghost" figure of the piece is an attempt to inscribe on the landscape of the real and the landscape of the imagination this being of unchanged-ness.
Stuck and forever searching. Lost and sorry but ready to make the same mistakes again and again.
The work changes through:
The transition and transformations into another present day world.
Through to the studio piece, the stripping of the costume and washing away of the whited out face of this ghost officer.
The melding and changes of my performance personality into a closed and intimate world is again a way of demonstrating and commenting upon the mutability of the present social world and cultural landscape.
The audience is invited into a world were they become audience/participant/performer by turns.
Through their interactions, where they are free to relate within this closed environment.
But free in the context of the rules that are imposed negated and bartered and changed through the relationship to myself and the world of the piece
Just as we are free in this world in respect to how we frame our understanding towards the notions of freedom and responsibility.
To how meaning is framed by our expectations in a "Art Work"
So the work "Available Light" is framed around how much one is willing to engage with the work. In order to be responsible to it and to invest within its meaning.
And create your meaning to the work too.
The Writer, Will Self said recently that present day culture was about us all having the freedom to:
"Say anything...but not to be listened."
This work is about attempting the reverse this using an audiences relationship to a performer.
To be responsible in the full meaning of the word.
To just be able to respond-fully.
Not to be caught in some anodyne game where the audience stands on the outside and says for want of anything better:"Thats nice" or "It's interesting."
When confronted with something that may put them into the space of The "unknown"
But where the language created is about engagement,relationship and responsibility.
Going into a world where the rules and boundaries are not fixed where you have the choice to relate or not to relate but that that choice is really of your deciding.
If one on entering this closed world if an audience member feels that they don't want to engage.
In what is only an invitation to play through these ideas in the world of artifice and relationship to their sense of real.
That is to say.
That they want to see the work as a picture or a framed installation where they are the viewer. Remote observingly distant and and pass through the space. (literally and morally)Then of course they are free to do this too.
It is their,choice and they are free to make it.
What work? Present? Where? Can Change, whatever that means, ever be a Leitmotif?
As a photographer all my work is inked to change, from the isolating of a tiny piece of time with a flash to recording the minutes silence for Diana. Although time is essential to the process extending the time frame reveals the way time influences our perception of the world.
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