Watch This Space Residency Journal Entry #1 Exerpt
Daily, I am arriving. Landing within a warm body, a hot town, arriving into the perimeters of the studio, entering into ever-expanding boundaries of relationship. Long before this arrival began, in a night-time street outside a friend’s house, Tamar and I talked about a feeling that was beginning to emerge. A feeling that perhaps all things exist in a cycle, and that within this cycle, that which lies beneath rises to the surface.
This feeling has broadened into a web of interconnected ideas.
I am thinking of a tiny pea of sediment covered over by layers, its shape accentuated with the falling of each new layer until it emerges rocky, shaped just-so due to the tiny indentations on the pea.
I am thinking of whole layers of sediment being buried by new layers of sediment. What was once the seafloor now struck up, buckling and tipped sky-ward as mountain ranges.
I am thinking of an open-pit mine: of locating, digging, uncovering, extracting. Of how this process of mining is cut off from the natural cycle, how in taking-out we ignored the fact that we also need to put-back, to return.
I am thinking of a rock of styrofoam, drifting along the sidewalk. The material providence of this object: styrofoam too comes from the earth. Styrofoam holds within it its past as petroleum, wrenched up from depths, just as petroleum holds within it its past as ancient beings scuttling along the ocean floor. The past exists within the present.
And I am thinking of what we call waste, of reclaiming and reincarnating material that we have collectively deemed as useless. Of the very concept of waste being a mindset, an ideology. And how the act of refusing to see waste as waste, of embracing the hard-to-love parts of nature can also open us to embrace the hard-to-love parts of ourselves.
This morning -sitting half-dressed at my computer- I realised that these ideas are also our method. Tamar and I went into this residency with parallel intentions to explore lovingly, experiment open-endedly, and dive into what it might mean to work together.
And each day we have watched as our particular breed of collaboration has arrived. I say it this way because despite our intentions, it doesn’t feel entirely on purpose.
Collaboration is sticky, it is a kind of mining in itself, a digging-deeper where the hard-to-love parts of each other come to the surface. A practice that is at times painful, where boundaries of ownership are challenged and mine-is-yours-is-mine-is-yours. Collaboration is a kind of waste-collecting, a form of geology. Something said pin-pricking emotions and forming a mountain. The layer-eroding closeness of two bodies in a space continually talking, sighing, crying, scribbling, revolving with and reimagining each other. Mountainous, evaporative, rumbling, abrasive, fractal, cyclical.
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Watch This Space Residency Journal Entry #2 Exerpt
Last journal entry, I wrote about arriving and how arriving is continuous. Now, back in my apartment in Coburg, the word that fits is orienting. Orienting myself into ApartmentTeamsCoolAirColdWindTramBellOldFriends. Taking time to catch up with my body, whisked away from Mparntwe by aeroplane and plonked back home, cross legged on a chair on the balcony. Orienting myself within the variety bag of priorities and rhythms that make up everyday life - and doing my best not to get lost in them.
On the Saturday before the residency ended, Tamar and I sat at the big table and made zines. Scraps of paper, photocopied sculptures, printed out photos, layers of words written and read stuck together with tape and staples.
I called my zine A guide for continuing. It is designed as a way to get my bearings, orient myself towards some version of sustained artistic inquiry - which is a boring way of saying following the thread.
The guide asks:
How can I continue to follow the thread when I no longer have the luxury of space, time and a cohabitant within my artistic universe? How can I stay alive and permeable to the world?
The only way that makes sense for me to answer these questions is to do them, to make an attempt to follow the thread. For this reason, the zine is incomplete, interspersed with blank pages waiting to be filled.
[the church bell on the corner chimes, it is 5pm on a Thursday]
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