Being on site means I have the opportunity to pop into the two, public spaces we’ll be using for the project – Fisherman’s Cellar 4 - until recently a working ‘net loft’ and the ‘Borlase Smart’ Room - Studio 10 named after the artist, Robert Borlase Smart whom the trust which owns and runs the Porthmeor complex takes its name. ‘TTP’ will be in interesting company alongside another site-specific but, semi-permanent work in Cellar 4 by USA artist, Mark Dion, titled The Maritime Artist. Dion’s 2013 piece brings together some of his key interests for dialogues created by not only unusual collections, their displays and juxtapositions of material and object, but his exploration of the relationship, for example, between objects and communities: in The Maritime Artist the contextual locus of artists and the fishing industry together. Here’s Mark talking about what he describes as “…a very deeply collaborative endeavour…” working with eight students from Falmouth University and artist Jamie Barbour for St Ives Community TV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJPXZ0NxYG8 Cellar Four, an internal space facing onto the courtyard contrasts nicely with our seaward facing site, Studio 10. Modern technology equips this studio for lectures/talks and community use from exhibitions to where some of our workshops, displays and performances will take place. Evidence of older technologies associate Studio 10 with the first know photograph of an interior of Porthmeor Studios taken c. 1891-2 at that time, occupied by the Dutch painter, Sigisbert Bosch Reitz. Studio 10 also preserves concrete evidence of trace from its previous occupants, for example, in the form of residual paint on the window sills within reach to see and touch. I’m continually reminded in both spaces how tangible and real these experiences are; surfaces testify to the phenomena of creative practices relational perhaps to visual equivalents of the diachronic (evolved through time) and the synchronic (one point in time). The Maritime Artist is an enigmatic fictional construct yet made of factual histories, material components and arrangements in situ. As viewers, appropriately perhaps, we’re always in two minds about the subject, its ‘ambivalent position’ a quality which Dion likes to embed in his work. Dion playfully disrupts the linear progression of time in this piece by interweaving ideas through narratives with objects and place. In installing, he asked artists on site for paint brushes and other studio ‘tools’. A donation from my shared studio (7) included, a paint brush with traces of cadmium yellow, a cassette tape, a useful and much missed plastic funnel, a pair of protective gloves and a favorite improvised butter/palette knife – so extending the project’s material and human collaboration with other detritus and objects gathered from artists in the locality and Porthmeor fishermen of the past. This contemporary art work is a static piece - every item placed by hand, by Dion and his immediate collaborators, is as they left it in 2013. It perhaps asks potential questions about the notion of time trace and place in “…a very deeply collaborative endeavour” of our own forthcoming project.
Clare Ref: See below, links to similar works by Dion installed in the field in different contexts: Neukom Vivarium ‘Nurse Log’ 2006 Seattle, Washington USA and Society of Amateur-Ornithologists, Essen, Germany. http://art.seattleartmuseum.org/objects/32046/neukom-vivarium http://www.emscherkunst.de/en/kunstwerk/society-of-amateur-ornithologists/ TOVEY, David. 2009. St Ives (1860-1930 The Artists and the Community: a Social History. Tewksbury, UK: Wilson. HUNTER, Becky. 2009. ‘Interview with Mark Dion’. White Hot Magazine (April 2009). https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/2009-interview-with-mark-dion/1833 Images Copyright Clare Wardman Courtesy of Borlase Smart John Wells Trust click to see full images How’s this for a nice bit of symmetry: just a couple of months before our residency in St. Ives I find myself in another place that has its waters at the heart of its identity but latterly welcomes tourism too. I am in Vietnam on holiday and I’m struck by how celebrated fishing is here, but unlike Cornwall, the fruit and vegetable harvests are amalgamated and are sold at floating markets on the Mekong River at - or even before - sunrise. Tourists like me are guided along the river approached by boats selling fresh fruit, iced coffee, or steaming hot bowls of pho, alongside restaurant owners buying their ingredients for the day’s dishes. I am told that all the produce comes from within a few kilometres. It’s an amazing sight and not just a show for tourists, the river is still a better option than trading on dry land. It’s accessible, there’s no cost to sell from one’s own boat, and if not everything goes you can sail on down to the next spot where there are more buyers. Wonderfully, instead of a sign or any shouting, each boat identifies itself with a pole reaching up into the morning sky with an example of what it is selling. I see one showing off sweet potato, bananas, and coconut, another with a solitary pierced water melon. I’m not sure I’d go as far as to say that this is art although John Cage said "If you celebrate it, it's art, if you don't, it isn't", and this way of life is certainly celebrated. Boats are painted in bright colours and with eyes to see off threatening underwater creatures, round basket boats without engines are still used, and it’s not uncommon to see a lone fisherman crouched on a bare wooden boat armed only with a net. I’m now looking forward to my first visit to St. Ives to see what similarities and contrasts there are, and what we will produce in such an environment. Gary click to view full images 'Net-setters'
Going down to visit the ‘net lofts’, last week, seems an aberration of where such places are usually located, but curiously, these industrial lofts are situated in the cellars below the artist’s studios at Porthmeor: the original wooden floor boards, forming, on my side, Studio 7 and those of Studios 3, 4, 5, 6, 18 and 19: on the other side, creating one long continuous ceiling over the heads of the fishermen working below. The floor/ceiling/floor is suspended by iron pipes and to complete this assemblage of ‘logic’ a broad tree trunk as well. (The pipes were salvaged from local tin mines in the mid to late 1800’s). This characteristic of the ‘net lofts’ and studios in which to discover, improvise and experience the unexpected is a continuum of my own visual art practice. It creates a potential opportunity to explore, with fellow collaborators and participants, sound and visual work in unexpected ways - types of music score evolving from the performative elements of our Time – Trace – Place project. The photographic recordings for the project which I made last week of two of the fishermen setting nets seem to reveal the men’s own choreography, a duet of movement in a haptic ‘performance’ of materials and handed down knowledge through the actions of weaving and sewing. (‘Stuff’ is pervasive in the ‘net lofts’ - collections of floats, tools, equipment, particularly line and rope is ever present). In these blurry images, the traces of the fishermen’s fleeting and deft hand movements, their drawing in real time with needle and thread, attaching the nets to the ‘tramills’ or ropes, evoke the early experiments in photography to capture the moving world. I am interested in the idea that the artists who first occupied the studios above the cellars in the 1880’s were contemporaneous with many photographic experiments and inventions happening in Europe. For example, French scientist and physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey’s (1830-1904) chronophotograph and 1887 image of a gull in flight. And, later, the Italian theatre director and cinematographer, Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s (1890-1960) subject matter for his 1911 photograph recording the dynamic chiaroscuro of a cellist’s hands re-tracing in a criss-cross of lines moments of contact with string and bow. The ropes, like lines in a drawing or symbols on a music score are weighted, some will fall in the water whilst others – the top ropes - will rise like notes. There is one other feature in this process - a line with colored markers in situ acting as an indicator of time and space against which the fishermen create and make adjustments within their performative net-scapes. I’ll take the merging, blurring, blending and smudging of the subject matter in the photos of the ‘net-setters’ - where we just lose sight of something we know, before beginning to create something new and unknown - as my own potential and colouful marker for the experience of the collaborations and performances to come. Next step: preparing and developing ideas for the ‘off-set drawing’ prototypes… Clare Ref: SCHARF, Aaron. 1974. Art and Photography. UK: Pelican Press. |
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