Jerwood Bank 2007

Duration: 03:48 minutes

marks the second thingamee/sharing/showing/landmark… what do we call these things? after an alarmingly unclear monday, for various reasons, ranging from ‘just a funny day’ to ‘just a funny knee’ to ‘oh, my sacrum is having an identity crisis’… er – tuesday was remarkably different (for which i am grateful; nothing like a bad day to make the next day brighter). the sharing today was very different also – both in atmosphere and because it wasn’t the first one… maybe also the tube strike, who knows? the material we brought was certainly changed. it is hard to know from your own perspective, i know i would hesitate to say i can see the forest for all the trees, however, i can say that it was really amazing to see the shift in everyone else’s material. so much more real somehow. not that we were imagining what we were doing before; more palpable maybe? was really caught up in these little threads that we brought forward today… i hesitate in front of the cursor… how to put this? i felt much more engaged, in that sort of effortless way, when you get carried by what is unfolding before you. mmph! a very satisfying afternoon.

Jennifer-Lynn filmed on the 4th September.
Duration: 34 seconds

Jennifer-Lynn’s clip from the 29th August.
Duration: 34 seconds

in trying to decipher my own ideas/meanings of ‘portrait’, and in the midst of re-reading Bachelard’s ‘The Poetics Of Space’ for the millionth time, i have decided that he writes portraits of spaces… one in particular i have to share, it just speaks, says so many things…

“In Paris there are no houses, and the inhabitants of the big city live in superimposed boxes. ‘One’s Paris room, inside its four walls,’ wrote Paul Claudel, ‘is a sort of geometrical site, a conventional hole, which we furnish with pictures, objects and wardrobes within a wardrobe.’ The number of the street and the floor give the location of our ‘conventional hole,’ but our abode has neither space around it nor verticality inside it. ‘The houses are fastened to the ground with asphalt, in order not to sink into the earth.’ They have no roots and, what is qute unthinkable for a dreamer of houses, sky-scrapers have no cellars. From the street to the roof, the rooms pile up one on top of the other, while the tent of a horizonless sky encloses the entire city. But the height of city buildings is a purely exterior one. Elevators do away with the heroism of stair climbing so that there is no longer any virtue in living up near the sky. Home has become mere horizontality.”
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not sure they make a whole yet, not sure that is the point… a portrait, to my sensibilities, seems to speak of, speak to… opens up a potential lifeworld, makes allegations…

so some words of wisdom from Bachelard, who i keep returning to, and should be sick to death of by now, but – i’m not.

‘Inhabited space transcends geometric space’

houses as containers…
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balloon: a bag made of thin rubber or other light material, usually brightly colored, inflated with air or with some lighter-than-air gas and used as a children’s plaything or as a decoration.

my head… i haven’t digested this afternoon’s content. patience, patience. and also – patience for myself with the tasks we are working on at the moment. i feel so much; maybe this is the magic, that this is so completely holistic, that no part of me is left out. i had a moment of coming-out-the-other-end today, a little like rohanna mentions in her post. that some circuit was tripped after class this morning and i found less the attic of my intellect, more the cellar, where things are maybe fermenting a little bit, the seals on the jars are not quite so tight as i would like them to be… and now i feel more confident in that what i am getting to is more real, more mine – but also more exposed inside of that, a little shaky.

maybe after a night’s sleep…

the time of writing has come – finding the way in to things seeming always so delicate (for me, at least at the moment) – and this seems reflected in how i work in the studio as well; there is a story about a potential bride who, upon meeting her bridegroom’s parents, is given a tangled ball of thread to unravel… and thus reveals her sensitivity of touch, resourcefulness, inner grace which slips past and beneath the radar of impatient confrontation, breath that sees through the surface tension of frustration… given – i am not meeting potential in-laws (oh, but there was that trip to norway, hmmm), but i do feel the meaning is not lost in work such as this.
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