Brokeness and fearlessness

I cannot not know this anymore.
Pina Bausch has broken me.
Even with her eyes closed, with my eyes closed, I can't stop looking, searching, stumbling.

I'm grateful that I hadnt seen Cafe Muller before I did this experimental piece. I may have felt less lost had I known of Pina beforehand, and being lost was the most necessary and exciting part about doing this performance. In it I am remembering a drawing whilst re-drawing it onto the ground using sticks, with my eyes closed. My contribution to this performance isn't that 'good' or resolved, but it is a beginning, a sketch perhaps for walking into somewhere else. I see it as an extension of my drawing practice, in which I draw without looking at the page. But unlike the majority of my drawings, which I make as a way of looking and thinking, which are actions that need to be made before the 'real' work can be made and which shamefully pile up in the studio, this experimental performance is getting closer to bridging the gap between my privae studio drawings and the public ephermal installations and performances . As with most of my creative shuffling, it looks pretty straight forward, but behind the scenes where long conversations in which Nuno prodded me, gentle coaxed me, unsuccessfully persuaded me, belligerent nudged me, challenged me and encouraged me until just a few hours before the performance I surrendered, and walked all the way out there, into this...

Nuno Rebelos Swingstones

Nuno Rebelo's 'Swingstones'. Sound sculptures created for I-Park Environmental Art Biennale.

Sad flags in new york

Artworks part 3

Sylvie and Miruielle's holding trees up installation

Nuno's swinging pendulum stone sound sculptures

There are also a few other sound peices and videos which I haven't had the chance to record.

Art works part 2

Mary's palliative care for dying trees performance

Ward's kinetic word sculpture

Noa's dance piece on the dock.

Paul and Jillian's circle in the lillie pads

The art work

Pedro's Cyclone and weather vane.

Misa's floating island of moss and her mound of dead pine needles that breaths and moves as if its alive

Kim's spider webs in the swamp, spun from cling wrap

Working through the work part 3

Quite a few days this week I have had to surrender to nature, first there were days of rain and a new population of mosquitos to work amongst. Then a wind picked up and I would find myself hanging onto a leaf while cutting it, only to find out that the leaf was no longer hanging onto the tree. And then there was the day when I was walking out to my tree and from a distance I noticed the change of colour from greenest green into autumnal hues. Fall is here and the leaves are falling.

But every day is a day of joy, to stand in my try and create something new.

Who are the 'we'?

A few times I have mentioned 'we' in my blog. As you have most likely deduced, this 'we' incorporates the eclectic range of artists in the residency program. Perhaps you might want to know a little bit more about who they are.

First a picture of us...

And here is are their web links: 

Paul Burn, Visual Arts, New York | Jillian May, Visual Arts, Germany/New York
paulburn.net | www.jillianmay.net

Mireille Fulpius, Visual Arts, Switzerland/France | Sylvie Bourcy, Visual Arts, Francewww.mireillefulpius.com

Misako Inaoka, Visual Arts, Japan/Californiawww.misakoinaoka.com

Mary Ivy Martin, Visual Arts, New Yorkwww.maryivymartin.com

Javier Party, Musical Composition, Austria/Chilewww.javierparty.com

Pedro Marzorati, Visual Arts, France/Argentina
www.Pedromarzorati.com

Nuno Rebelo, Sound Sculpture, Spain/Portugalwww.youtube.com/nunorebelomusic

Noa Sagie, Choreography/Performance, New York/Israelwww.noasagie.com

Ward Tietz, Language Arts/Installation, Marylandhttp://www.wordimage.net/

Kim Waale, Visual Arts, New Yorkhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/kimwaale/

These are a few of our fine moments in fashion:

More on their artwork soon.

Working through the work part 2

Almost every day I wonder if my work exists in a 'Bermuda Triangle' part of I-park, as at least once a day someone says "I tried to find your work, but I couldn't see anything".

I want the work to have a fragile and fleeting position in relationship to the environment and I'm also creating a situation that requires a few moments of stillness and slow looking on behalf of the viewer. I hope that they will have a gentle moment of discovery and through a continued experience of prolonged looking, more and more of the work will be revealed. As a result much of this week has been spent inventing ways to ensure that the work is  'just visible enough' rather than 'invisible too much'.

Inside the tree I have now created 6 viewing positions, these are located at the end of paths which help people find the work and was a solution for managing the poison ivy problem.

I then dug holes so that I could insert my beautifully sanded cross sections of oak into the ground.

In my mind I have started thinking of these markers on which the viewer can stand, as buried pedestal.  

I have also sorted out more of my text. The leaves still say 'LEAVES' but the branches now say 'REMAINS'.

After I'd completed this much, I asked some visitors to the residency, who knew nothing about my intentions to have a look at the work. This gave me a chance to take note of the ways in which they went about searching for the work. 

The sound of each of them 'oohing' 'wowing' and muttering things like 'oh there's more', makes me feel confident that the work was getting closer to being resolved. 

Destruction Violence and Electric Sanding

My low impact intention felt marginally compromised today.

Local volunteers arrive today to help us out with our projects. I had mother daughter team Angela and Yuba, who brought an enviable collection of electric sanders and so we got to work sanding the chainsaw marks out of my markers/ buried pedestals, and I have to say - Tools. They are fun.

oh the power of tools

oh the power of power tools.

oh the incredible volume of high pitched whining noise from a generator and 3 electric sanders.

And oh my, am i glad to have had a few pairs of extra hands to get through some of the grunt work.

Personal jokes (possibly lost in translation)

The longer we go without power, washing and contact with the outside world, the more ridiculous we behave. Our lack of decorum has escalated several times into chaotic but highly creative collaborative experiments. The most hilarious being, our attempt one night to create an interpretive contemporary dance pieces using the generator as a sound score and a torch and a candle as our lighting. It was hours of entertainment!

The masterpiece of our playful interventions, however, started early one evening when we realised that not only did we have no power or water, but also no working phone/email and no car. So, should there be an emergency, we were stuffed. Necessary caution, however, was abandoned when we decided we would entertain ourselves with night walk through the grounds and a boat ride on the pond to look at stars. After stumbling around in the moonlight we got the row boat into the water but could only find one canoe paddle - that'll do. So in we climbed.

"There's a 'ole in the boat" one of the french women cried.
"No no. its just a little water from the storm".
"No its a 'ole, the water is coming in."
"No no its fine, I'll scoop it out".

This went on for several minutes till someone with a flash light located a hole the size of an iceberg gash. Shrieking, scrambling and in a tangle of arms and legs we grabbed at each other and the undulating pontoon trying to get out of a leaking boat.

Later that night after we had taken it in turns to stargaze in the canoe, the exhilaration of night-wandering, universe gazing and a near drowning left some of us too wound up to sleep. I began the mindless gesture of cleaning the kitchen but just a few hours later 3 of us had turned the kitchen into one large practical joke.

Here are the things we made and in brackets a translation.

Emergency Phone

(hopefully no explanation required)

Communal Cutlery and Crockery.
 Also a smal post-it note pad for big important ideas.
(We had tried to set rules to manage the mayhem, such as, each person has 1 cup and 1 glass with a sticker on it so it can be reused without washing it)

Fire Alarm arangement

The night of the storm all of the 8 fire alarms went off. Instead of the normal high pitched beeping these ones actually yell "Fire. Fire. Fire" at you. Due to our no power situation we were ironically running around in the dark holding candles up to the alarms to turn them off. Then we had to rip the alarms out of the wall after we found out they were wired in. But they didn't shut up, so we pulled out the batteries and then they just kept on beeping. Finally, in desperation we wrapped them in a towel and shut them in a cupboard.

Turning water into wine

New cup for Sylvie and Mirelle

Environmental protest

I wanted to see this bench clean just once.

(Since we the storm the kitchen table and bench had been occupied by towering piles of paper plates (used and clean) bags of corn bread, apples and warmed chocolate, cameras, insect repellent and redundant phones and phone charges, cereal, napkins notes and candle stubs - it was feral)

We also made sculptures out of stuff found during the clean up. This one uses a Tupperware container, stale bread and paper and reminded us of some work we had seen in a Sculpture magazine. 

The next morning I woke to the sound of the house laughing. 

Working through the work part 1

In the first few days, when I was thinking about how to make a peice that had no impact on the environment, I wrote a handful of poems called 'Possible Performances'. I used some card from the recycling bin which happened to be programs for a previous performance event at I-Park.

This is the one that brought me out of the idealist position of not touching the landscape and into the beginning of the work that I'm making now.

I started cutting the word 'leaves' into the leaves.

But how to cut a tree without hurting it?
Mason, the grounds keeper and I have had a few conversations about the ways I could cut into leaves and bark and without killing the leaves branches or trees. Caterpillars were also very instructive in thinking about this - they never eat an entire leaf, they take a small amount from many leaves. So I reduced the scale of my text to the same dimensions of the holes left my caterpillars and would only cut 1 leaf out of each sprig of 5.

Interestingly, the caterpillars started collaborating on the work by nibbling away at my texts - its a delightful surprise.

At this stage of the development, the main problem was that I didn't want this to just be a concrete poem - the word 'leaves' on actual leaves. I wanted the word leaves not just to be a plural noun but also the verb - to leave. And I wanted 'absence' to be used as a material and as a conceptual investigation.

It needed more layers, more components. This isn't the right text, but it was a process of teaching myself how to cut into the bark and a way of maybe introducing more text that could draw out other meanings of 'leaves'.

The work is very subtle and requires the viewer to spend time discovering the piece in the tree. So I have created 6 viewing spots inside the canopy of the tree, so the viewer can have an individual experience of locating and being with the work and the tree. Funnily enough when I began the work I kept loosing it. I'd go off to lunch, come back, and I couldnt find it. Clearly it was too subtle. Now I'm thinking about a marker in the ground that quietly shows the viewer where to stand so at least they are given a chance of locating the text on leaves and branches. This was my practice marker.

After these small components came together I asked another artists to come and look at the work. This turned out to be invaluable not just for the critical exchange but also because she was able to point out that the ground which my tree canopy covered was carpeted with poison ivy.

So there are many issues to resolve, but its invigorating to be thinking through and around new work.