A gift from Akismet

• incredibly, after uploading my gripe about technology i went into site admin on the blog to explore and familiarise myself better with how it all works and noticed that ‘Akismet’ had saved a comment as spam. i clicked to find out what the comment was – and it is my lost post from last night !

yippee – isn’t the internet great – i don’t know or care how that has happened but i could kiss Akismet, whatever or whoever it is !

this means that i don’t need to sit and try to re-visit my thoughts of last night – here they are …

• clare | clare@metronart.co.uk | clarecarswell.com | IP: 83.104.232.189

  Alun – it is great that the clip from MINE is up there with your clips from RUN. thanks for that.
  it will be interesting to see what can be done with them to make a joint piece – maybe that is OURS.
  it would certainly be a first for me to have a stand alone sound piece as a work. which is perhaps curious because in all the performance works i did in the nineties sound was a very important part of them – the blending and interweaving of memories through different voices, native tongues and ages of the groups of women performers.
  however, since i started doing solo performance works last year, they have each – and there have been three now – been largely silent. given how much i like to talk this is a surprise – and perhaps a relief to some !
  i have felt more comfortable working with objects and drawn visual images – not surprisingly as i have made art with them for more than two decades.
  i had suggested that you and i take this opportunity of showing alongside each other as a chance to collaborate and make our thinking and working process an implcit part of the work. but, i was really struggling before METRON started to know where and how there could be a meeting point between us as artists and between your video work RUN and anything that i could make.
  i decided to trust my instinct that a dialogue between us through the work would be possible and fruitful. the worst that could happen would be that it wouldn’t gel in which case we could just get on with making and showing our own works in a shared space as we have both done with other artists many times before.
  i knew that you were editing the video you had made from your running, and i had thought a lot about our original concept of calling the exhibition METRON and all that it signified – being the Greek root of the word metre, an equal and measurement of distance, or rhythmically – in music or poetically. i knew that i wanted to interpret the idea of METRON, that equal measure, as analogous of time passing, lives spent and that i would make something that alluded to memory. it is something that we all experience and that can be shared as concept without the need for personal revelation and yet is always personal.i have always wanted to sing and although i have a fairly tuneful singing voice it is untrained and i wouldn’t easily use it in the work. just once before have i, when i recorded my voice singing ‘When i fall in love it will be forever’ which was played every minute as part of an installation i made in 1999 called VOW – a drawing made with rose-petals of a rose – symbolic of love – on the stone floor in the chancel of a twelfth century chapel.
  given my timidity with regard to my voice i did not consider at all that the response i made to your work could be with any kind of sound.
  i decided to approach the space and your work – both pretty unknown to me with an open mind and a box of objects and materials that were meaningul enough for me to be able to work with. i actually expected to bring them into the space and that i would sit and draw them. that was pretty much all i knew when i loaded the car to come over to the gallery with the objects such as the blouse i wore when i married, my mother’s gloves, my aunt’s scissors, and including the large bundle of rosemary that i cut from my garden that morning – a symbol of remembrance.
  i did hope that it would be possible to make a direct response to your work. as soon as i saw your video work RUN looking and sounding so beautiful and mesmeric, i knew that it would be the sound of your footfall that i would respond to and that it was going to be the sound of our works that would connect them. fortunately i had put the marble pestle and mortar in my box with olive oil as i had thought that i would crush up rosemary and draw with it. i hadn’t considered the lovely stone clanging sound that the pestle and mortar would make but as soon as i began to grind the rosemary i realised that i could allow my actions and rhythms to be determined by the sound of your footfall as you ran and so that is what i did and i think it worked really well in the space.
  it was very meditative to do and i will be intrigued to see what can now be done with our two sets of sounds in the mixing desk.
  it occurs to me that we may want to get some time in the space without any audience there so that we can do some recording to get as good quality as possible ?
  a final note about sound and my confidence to use it in my performance work…
  of course it doesn’t matter at all that my voice is untrained – i am not planning to be a lieder singer! but for some reason it does feel important that i do use my singing voice as a material in my work. i decided some weeks ago that i wanted to start to work on this and i asked singer and voice teacher Liz Hodgson to work with me on a future piece of work. she has agreed to work with me but we haven’t yet met to talk more of this. i anticipate that the work i make with her training will be part of a new series of works i plan where i assume the role of learner and ask teachers to teach me things i don’t know or understand.
  so i think it will happen that some time soon i will be singing in a performance or video piece – not this week though !
  Alun, this all feels very energized and good – thanks for all your hard work. let’s talk tomorrow.