Stability Through Motion

Since the finish of Metron the exhibition on 20th May I have been training for the 5k Race for Life which I ran in Oxford’s University Parks along with 3,000 other women yesterday. Due to the intense heat I interspersed running with walking and made it round the course in a very sedate manner. It was great fun despite the blistering heat and I have raised a nice sum for Cancer Research through sponsorship.
Doing the training and the race re-connected me with my enjoyment of running after a long period of injury and physio. I like the solitude and the ease of doing it – just stepping out of my door. I have thought a lot about Alun’s RUN video and the meditative quality that it has. It really does capture something of the beauty as well as the pleasure of running. I do find beauty in moving in a different way through the environment I live in and know well, in experiencing it in another way. I like really looking at details I don’t generally notice, smelling the streets and the hedgerows, feeling the weather. I like the directness of running, of listening to my body, learning how it can move, being so aware of  my footfall and in competing with myself by testing my fitness and age.

Interaction with the audience at Metron was more intense and more dynamic on days three and four this week-end. In the performance work YOURS, I invited the audience to participate in the work. This was following on from MINE, that I performed last week-end, where the audience were witnesses to my actions. I talked to each about the symbolism of the objects I was working with, that I was crushing the rosemary in an attempt to invoke memory in the space through the scent of it. I then offered each a sprig of the herb to invite the idea of remembrance for them. I asked them if I might then photograph their hands holding the piece of rosemary. Everyone agreed and all seemed pleased and quite touched by the simplicity and sincerity of the gesture. Many wanted to talk about the significance of it for them and offered me personal recollections.
This was the most engaged with the audience that I have been in a performance work. It was an enjoyable and rewarding experience and gave me a sense of real connectedness with the audience. I think that they enjoyed the opportunity to talk with me and to get more understanding of what I was doing. I think that for some it all appeared a little daunting and inscrutable when they first entered the space. They were pleased to speak with me and have me answer the most usual question ‘what are you doing ?’.

This is actually a hard question to answer, and one that artists often resist. It felt a challenging and positive process for me to go through, of testing what I was doing, my intentions, whether my ideas were reaching the viewer and the overall relevance of the work.

Interaction with the audience represents a new direction in my performance work and I am intrigued by the possibilities of working in this way. It is the next development I am introducing to my work following my decision to return to performance work in 2006 and to perform solo works. It is progressive and challenging for me to do and is helping me to gain confidence as a solo performer.

I am pleased by how much people are willing to engage and to talk with me. I obviously make people feel at ease and able to offer their own ideas and feelings to the work which is positive. I am aware that this is a format that some artists, notably female performance artists, do use in their work and have done since the earliest days of it. There are early precedents like Valie Export, Annie Sprinkle, Yoko Ono. Their contact with the audience in the main seemed to be provocative and about confronting them with images or to participate in actions that were designed to unsettle and challenge them. I emulated this posture in the performance work,TAGS that I made earlier this year.

Contemporary artists like Ann Rapstoff and Sonjia van Kerkhoff appear to use interaction in a more conversational manner as I am now doing, as a means of making connections with the audience and offering ideas and images through identifying shared experience.

If I feel any dilemma with developing the work in this way it is that there is a conflict between my desire to engage with the audience and to make the work more transparent for them and my own need to absorb myself in the ritualistic aspects of the work I have made.
The work changes for me when I am not in conversation and I am able to perform the repetitive actions that I have built into the work – in this case the crushing of the herb in the pestle and mortar. I am able to sink into the rhythm of the actions and synchronize them with the sound of the footfall in Alun’s video piece. It quickly takes on a contemplative aspect which feels as though it is approaching the core of the piece – an attempt to invoke memory. I hope that Alun and I will be able to show this work again and if so I will build into it periods when I am able to sit and work the piece without distraction – with or without an audience.
It is difficult talking with the viewer and yet maintaining my ‘performance head’. I was aware even if the audience were not, that even though I looked like I was chatting to them I was in fact still performing and they were participating in an art work. This was implicit rather than explicit and few were perhaps aware of this until I pointed the camera at them and photographed them.

This illustrates for me the necessity of adopting different performance persona within a work. As long as I maintain mindfulness of them and pay attention to where I am in the work then there need not be a conflict.

Most of the time I live in a world which doesn’t need an audience, but here we are, into the second weekend of METRON, and not just showcasing work to the public in Oxford, but disclosing the process to a wider world in the form of this online journal. A lot of my work comes out of just playing with materials, whether those materials are chalk and charcoal or Adobe Premiere and Audacity. Over the last few years, that playing has also been with my legs, while exploring a new found activity, running. Bringing that play into the exhibition environment was a challenge, but one I feel I’m beginning to meet.

It’s always fascinating to hear what people think about a new work, and also initially scary. Some people have picked up on a feeling of oppression about the film RUN. This is understandable, since the world is presented upside down in the video, and the earth is over our heads, falling onto us. Running is often described as a constant state of falling forwards, but hopefully that sense of relentlessness is relieved because the pace of travel in the video is actually quite slow. The video was filmed at slow walking speed, but the audio is recorded on runs of varying speeds.

Having a performance take place at the same time as this exploration of space and pace is a unique opportunity. I feel really invigorated (despite a full-blown cold now, Day Three) when I’m in the space: RUN is playing and Clare is performing, or talking about her work with the audience. Ideas for further collaboration do spring to mind immediately, but with me, as Clare has pointed out, the thought process is inevitably different. How could it not be? It’s taken me three or four years just to get round to producing RUN, and I feel like I’m only now re-emerging from a cocoon after a period of great personal change.

Avoiding the canvas and sketchpad for the time being, materials I was previously very engaged with, but forming new work in time-based media has been a really exciting process. Now I’m confronting, with Clare, the idea of work-in-process, of continuing to explore the themes in a work further with another artist. Not only that, but exploring these themes while exhibiting the work to an audience.

I think we’ve found some intriguing unifying elements between our ways of working, but a week isn’t long enough to fully explore these, and with the audience interaction in the space it’s hard to find the time to do so. I do hope the process won’t end here though, since the web site will continue to exist, and we will continue to communicate. I love the melding of sounds in the space, and this seems the most immediately striking connection between the works. The issues of memory and rememberance that Clare is dealing with may seem less prominent in my work, but the film is an attempt to condense experiences from a period of many months into a sort of memento. I can distinguish each audio clip and remember where and when it took place, even if the location isn’t the same as that shown on the film at the same time. So of course there’s a process of rememberance going on, and people coming to the work will inevitably weave their own memories of walking or running in woods, or on quiet morning, into the viewing.

The video and audio editing processes do tie in very nicely with Clare’s interest in the perceived veracity of an artist’s work. For the piece RUN I did initially think of showing one complete run, uncut, from beginning to end. But in the end I prefer to disrupt any idea of linear narrative. The video is unlikely to be watched through from beginning to end, it’s on a loop and visitors to the space drift in and out of watching it, as they talk to Clare or myself, and pay attention for snippets of time. It also expresses for me part of the joy of running as an activity, which is, for me, at its best, a goalless activity, when you can lose a sense of what time of day it is. Of course there’s another side to running too, when every second is precious, and every metre covered crucial. This was to have been hinted at by recording audio from Sunday’s Oxford Town and Gown 10k race, but this may have to be put on hold, as I’ve tried racing when ill before, and it really isn’t a great idea. We’ll see how I feel tomorrow. There’s plenty to be getting on with in the space on Day Four – editing audio already captured, uploading it and making the sort of audio mixer available on this site that I produced earlier in the week.

As the week has gone on it has become clearer that as Alun and I have differing attitudes to our work and practice, so we have chosen to use this blog accordingly.

Alun evidently prefers to discuss his work verbally and is articulate when he does. He is currently engaged with his work technically and in exploring for himself the possibilities of video and sound and so is using the blog to up-date news or clips from the sound or video files.
Whereas I find writing progressive and an aid to me embedding my work theoretically and therefore am using the blog to ‘think aloud’ about aspects of collaboration and my processes in making this piece of work.
This is a reflection of the artists and people that we are, our attitudes to our work and where our strengths lie. Rather than being a forum for exchange or dialogue between us as it might have been it is more of a record of the event. That is fine, another way of doing it.

Alun and I have spoken on the telephone about this and had an interesting conversation about the types of language that one uses to describe ones’ work and the requirement or drive to do so.
Also about the experience that we have of blogging. Alun uses one for his running diary and inclines to using a more abbreviated and colloquial language in his entries, as though writing for himself.

I have never before used one and when I write do so in quite a lengthy manner as though i am in dialogue with another. So we have quite distinct views as to how we feel we want to express ourselves, the function that the blog fulfills, to whom it is addressed etc

This gives me a lot to think about. I am curious about the potential of this medium for dialogue and debate – of being able to make accessible one’s thinking during the making stages of the work and for the immediacy of response. It is intriguing to me to make this generally hidden aspect more transparent and to offer it up for testing and enquiry.

My hopes for exchange and debate are a little disappointed as no-one has yet left a comment –except Carrington on day one – thanks for that !

I have had the opportunity in the last year to join TIE, The Ideas Exchange, a group of artists who meet regularly to discuss their work and related issues. It takes place during the day on a Saturday when I have family commitments and so I have not been able to participate. A discussion forum on-line is ideal for me as I can connect with it when I have the time and can fit it into my schedule. I will look for existing on-line fora where I can contribute to debates around artistic practice and if I cannot find one I will start one.

The collaboration with Alun is remote right now. We communicate each day through this blog or by text or email having decided at the start of the week that we did not need to meet up this week in order to progress METRON.
He is working on other projects and with sound editing the recordings he made in the installation at the week-end of his RUN video soundtrack with the sounds from my performance, MINE. I am working in my studio producing new visual work – I have started on a new photographic series, NITTYGRITTY and on drawings to take into the gallery at the week-end as part of the next performance YOURS.
We are both really busy but know we can trust that we will segue well together once back in the space at the week-end.
I am really looking forward to hearing what Alun has been doing with the sound-tracks.
It feels to me as though a potentially rich new seam has been opened for both our works by the mixing of the sounds from our individual works. I hope that we can develop this by co-producing other sounds to mix into the piece and perhaps by inviting other artists or musicians to take it on and work with it.
We intend that at the week-end we can make both the blog and the sound-tracks available to the audience and I am planning to take in a couple Mac powerbooks and screens so that they can have a play with the sound.
One aspect of collaboration that wasn’t predictable before we began METRON is with the audience. Alun got them involved in sharing in the large drawing on Days One and Two and I have been intrigued and informed by the questions I was asked by members of the audience whilst I was performing MINE. Conversations, especially with artists Pam Foley and Tamas Malomvolgyi were challenging and prompted me to ask questions around memory and the reliability of memory as well as the trust implied in the relationship between artist and viewer.

The first of a series of photographic works by Clare, NITTY GRITTY, that will explore varieties of remembering, representation and interpretation of imagery and question the trust implied in the relationship between artist and viewer.

• 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.

Late in the evening of Tuesday 15th and it looks from this blog as though I lost interest in this project after Day Two on Sunday 13th as there are no entries from me for yesterday. Whereas Alun has been working away uploading sound clips and video clips. That though is not the real story though… oooo no ! I wrote a lengthy – and I mean seriously lengthy – as any friends (Colin?) used to receiving my e-screeds can well imagine I am sure; post last night.
It covered everything from artistic collaboration to the use of sound in performance art to me singing lieder ! I up-loaded it at 1-30am not knowing that half an hour earlier, at 1am, the server had crashed. This is very, very rare event apparently and the full extent of the problems this would cause only became apparent as today went on. I could not access web-sites that server hosts – most importantly the METRON site. I could not send or receive email for large parts of the day. Most frustratingly for me though was that my long and I hoped, illuminating blog post had vanished into cyber space. Alun has explained to me why this is in an email – I am inserting some of it here because it is so interesting to learn more – I hope you agree – about how this technology that we are all so dependent on actually works…Is

From Clare to Alun : ‘Subject: possibility ?

hi – i see that the blog is up again and you have added to it.
i read all the techy stuff from the server and it all went
down at 1am today – which was at the end of a couple of hours
of thinking and writing and re-drafting for the blog for me.
i sent it at about 1-30am and it didn’t get up-loaded to the blog.
is it possible though that the server will have a place where
it will have gone and they could retrieve it – surely they
can see what traffic goes to and fro from a user and they
must have copies ?
can you find out – i think it is the least they could do. i
wouldn’t mind generally except it was a substantial and
thoughtful piece of writing and it will be a lot of work to re-do.
any chance ?

Alun’s reply :
I think it’s highly unlikely because of the nature of the internet.

What happens is . . . the blog page only communicates with the web server
when you push the submit button. In between that it’s
not communicating at all with the network. Then you press the submit button
and your web browser software sends out a request to your local ISP asking
for the address of www.metronart.co.uk . It has to find the right unique
number that identifies the web server, and it has to do this each and every
time it requests it, it’s so stupid!
This means that by the time you pressed ‘submit’, the number was no longer
resolvable /findable, because of the hosting company’s networking error. So
the message never actually reached the server itself. It is possible it got
caught in another computer at the hosting company, though it may not
actually have got beyond your local ISP, since that’s where it would have
got stuck looking for the right computer address.
So I can say for sure, that the message is not on the Metron web site server.
You may be right that it’s on a networked computer somewhere at the hosting
company, but it will be extremely hard to identify, since these things are
mostly binary numbers before they get re-interpreted by the correct web
server, and there’s an awful lot of network traffic every minute.

I will ask them, but I really wouldn’t hold out any hopes.’

Isn’t that great ?

But fascinating though it is – the text is lost, as yes – you guessed it, I hadn’t backed it up. I hadn’t thought to – I had trusted the technology that I now expect to be there 24/7 and had sat in bed with my Powerbook and had composed and written the piece straight into the blog. So there was an important lesson for me today – this inscrutably clever stuff can break – it can let me down. It does seem bad luck that if this error is really so rare that it should happen in the week that I am using the internet for the first time to make a piece of work.
I have felt frustrated all day today – it felt as though the dialogue that Alun and I want to be having about Metron through the blog was being undermined. I felt personally aggrieved that my writing had been chewed up in binary numbers on an anonymous computer.
I am much restored now as the blog is back up. It is brilliant to see that he is back on the blog uploading sound and video and being creative with it all. I am going to attempt to retrieve the scattered pearls that I had strung together last night. I am now drafting first in Word and will then upload to be on the safe side !

And here, for your listening pleasure, are a couple of minutes from Clare’s performance MINE on Day Two, alongside the audio from the film RUN, and some background chatter.

Go get Adobe Flash Player!

Just a quick note to remind you of the photo album – it should now be linked in on the right of the home page, and is available on our Flickr gallery.

RUN is now available to view online. Turn the volume up and go to Vimeo to watch it. Obviously it loses a lot of quality on the web version: www.vimeo.com/clip:189675

I’ve uploaded some stills from the video piece, which will stand in for the piece itself until I can get video clips online.

I’m only just discovering the breadth of Clare’s internet exposure, and openness to this form of communication, and even though I’m a professional web designer by day, it’s quite awe inspiring!