When tracing the history surrounding St. Ives and the studios, it is inevitable that one ends up reading alot about pilchards and the 'Huers' that helped locate shoals of fish from clifftops. This led me to thinking about the subtleties of shoal behaviour. In my research I came across a useful behavioural model, designed by Craig Reynolds, that described elements of shoal behaviour, also known as 'flocking'. The three rules of flocking are: SEPARATION: not crowding/colliding with others ALIGNMENT: facing the same way COHESION: staying close to each other As shown in the picture to the left! These rules make for interesting performance instructions. Imagine multiple performers following these rules in a sonic/musical way to create a 'shoal' of sound that contains multitudes but moves as a single organism? It would certainly be exciting to explore. Since these rules were originally written as a computer model, I have began to research the possibility of a visual shoal, programmed or filmed, as being the impetus for the performers' movements (sonic, not spatial!) Sarah So far, this month, I’ve been gathering a collection of discursive interests and content ranging from a radio programme about marine ecology to visits to arts and science events and workshops in Cornwall, relational, perhaps, to ‘TTP’. In radio wave form, a broadcast of underwater recordings of fish tapping and or what seems to be bumping into coral reefs or gnawing algae from the reef’s surfaces with emphasis on just how noisy, or how much sound there is at any given moment in the oceans. In the other direction, that of deep space attending workshops at Goonhilly Earth Station near Helston and the experience of being close to the working, concave/convex and towering forms of the satellite dishes sited in Goonhilly Downs National Nature Reserve. The shadow drawing made by sunlight in collaboration with the antennae of the radio communication discs acts as its own time keeper, reminding me of a sundial like apparatus on the surface of this mottled and weathered disc. This subliminal-like effect seems to permeate all around including the lily ponds where I found myself, without thinking, quietly tracking the movement of a tiny reed warbler sensing its environment through the feedback of information from its feet as it traveled slowly across a lush and giving surface of weed. I’m back there in the moment of memory, image and sound. My actual focus on the project over the past couple of weeks has generated a bubble-like structure of thoughts and actions around practice and making as we get closer to starting our residency. Questions about the ways in which an individual or a collective’s creative processes can bring about a potential communication and response to an environment or space have been surfacing. For instance, which elements – materials, concepts, shared visual and audio experiences, or just simply doing – can best support our exploration of experimental approaches in working in installation through our performances and workshops? How to discover and recognize cognitive events taking place through play and within our engagement with, for example, materials, tools, instruments and happenings as they take shape. Will this be, for example, in the exchange of sound and visual recordings we make, the feedback we collectively give, interpret and translate as well as the experience and skills we’ll all take away? One question which surfaced and one I will be thinking about came in a conversation in 2016 which is how do participatory and collaborative events different from one another in content and action? My interest in Brazilian artist Lygia Pape’s process and play from wall-based practice into viewer-participatory pieces developing into collaboration and event seem all the more appropriate. Next step: looking forward to working with my fellow collaborators in a couple of weeks time… Clare Ref: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b0pvmz ‘The Life Scientist’ with Professor Callum Roberts, Marine Biologist University of York, UK http://www.goonhilly.org/ Goonhilly Earth Station, Helston, UK http://groundwork.art/ Ground Work: international art in Cornwall, Helston, UK http://www.mayescreative.com Dark Skies: Bright Stars Project Cornwall UK With our arrival in St Ives now only 2 weeks away, I've been turning my thoughts from logistics to what my own particular interests are, & trying to articulate them out from the percolation stage to something more concrete.
Rather than a fixed concept to explore, I am more interested in approaching the fortnight from a 'daily practice' perspective, being open to different ideas of traces, tracking these through daily attention to engage with what's going on both in terms of the town & what fellow collaborators are doing, bringing my findings into the installation spaces & threading them through whatever else is going on. That said, there are aspects of trace which draw me, revolving around absence-presence, emergence-erasure: The relationship between presence & absence is strong in the historical elements of St Ives - the regular indentations in walls where a wooden beam would have anchored to press a barrel of pilchards, the hooked stones that would have hung on the beam & pressed the lid in this process visible in many place around town. Or the communal courtyards where the fish were once baulked - with central drains & specially placed cobbles which would have drained the liquids & especially oils from the pilchard baulks (the oil used as lamp fuel, often exported to London as well as being used locally). These courtyards also highlight another absence - in St Ives the historical activity of the men is still traced through the current fishing industry, whereas the historical work of the women of the town - the baulking & packing of the fish, the creation of nets, is evoked through these spaces now repurposed for other things. Language traces: obviously the traces of Cornish - in place names, street names (a favourite being Wheal Dream - an evocative name where the Wheal more practically denotes a tin mine, once where the Museum now stands); but also language usages that trace unusual differences: in St Ives, 'cellar' & 'loft' denote usage of spaces, rather than necessarily their spatial layout: a loft is a space for maintaining nets, & is as often below a 'cellar', which is a space where materials - usually originally the pilchards - are stored. As the above suggests, architecture tracings abound in the town, from the buildings in the old town whose floors accumulate vertically but may also move off crabwise to the side, so that a room from house 'A' may form the top floor of house 'B'; or to take another example from the Porthmeor Studios, a wall revealed in the recent renovation of the building shows evidence of 2 previous roof tops under the current one. Erasure is also a trace-element that interests me; both the more obvious ability of a natural force like the sea to erase the day's human traces (as well as bring in materials of human presence - plastic fragments, frayed strands of net), & the human activities that erase - for example, photos of Porthmeor from the Island clearly show Porthmeor Studios as a building surviving from an older period amongst newer apartments complexes, & the Tate building (& its somewhat controversial extension) is a presence representing a space which was once a gas-works. Finally, trace through other senses: touch, taste, smell, & perhaps (as a musician) especially sound - what are the soundmarks of St Ives? What sounds are now absent, erased? What sounds are emerging, soon to be new presences (the drone camera I heard for the first time in St Ives last year, for example). 2 weeks to go - we're looking forward to our time in St Ives, to the people we will meet during our stay, to our workshops, performances, explorations & interactions with this extraordinary town & its people. Gavin As I was exploring graphic scores, I came across one that really inspired me: This is Kwi - drawing the air, a representation of an electronic piece. What inspired me was there isn't an obvious line or path to trace - there are many within the collage, and which line you follow depends on what draws your gaze - which colour, which shape, which pattern? It's collagic nature really struck me, as my map/graphic score plan is also based on collage. It made me think about other elemts I could include in the score - not only parts from maps, but also excerpts of brochures, newspapers - anything with strong links to St Ives.
While 'drawing the air' is just a representation of sound, I'd like my score to be instructive, to inspire performance, not just accompany a fixed piece. So, how shall I turn the collagic elements into information for the performer? Or shall I leave the musical interpretation completely up to them? More thoughts later... Sarah 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. During my research into Porthmeor Cellars & Studios, I was struck by how much the recent renovation emphasised the people who worked there. The wants and needs of the fishermen and individuals painters were carefully considered by the architects. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised by this, as Porthmeor’s history and evolution is intrinsically linked to the people who chose to work in the building. It is a place built from traces left by people over time. This got me thinking about how I could explore the theme of the traces people leave in the project. Interactive installations are something I very much enjoy - I like to ‘break the fourth wall’, encouraging the audience to participate more actively in the experience - and exploring the theme in this way seems apt. My initial idea is to allow members of the public to leave their own trace on the installation, probably by adding something visual to a score. In this way, the work will grow organically through these additions (which parallels the way Porthmeor grew over time).
This approach would explore the creative traces people leave, but not all traces left by people are creative. Some are more destructive in nature. Perhaps there is a way to incorporate this side of the theme. I am still considering how this could be done... Rachel My inital thoughts about St. Ives, TIME-TRACE-PLACE, and the visual/sonic potential of this project.Over time, industry, culture and the elements all leave their traces on the land. Years and years of human history and natural metamorphoses are written into the shapes, lines, and symbols of a map. A map of the area surrounding Porthmeor Studios illustrates the result of this rich history with many layers:
Maps give us directions to navigate though a place just like a musical score gives us directions to navigate through time using sound. Instead of simply using the map as a graphic score, however, I want to explore using separate layers of the map / score, standalone and superimposed, to investigate how the layers fit together and influence each other within the structure of the real and sonic landscape. I'm looking forward to exploring the sonic possibilities of each layer with the amazing musicians on this residency. Here are my initial ideas;
Next step: Trace and paint each chosen layer of the map... Sarah Welcome to the blog space for time-trace-place, our 2-week performative installation at Porthmeor Studios & Cellars, St Ives!
Over the next few months this space will fill with ideas & plans from all the collaborators involved: Clare Wardman, visual artist; Rachel Graff, composer-performer; Sarah Keirle, composer-performer-visual artist; Nina Whiteman, composer-performer-visual artist; Gary Farr, trumpeter & creative collaborator; & myself,. We're all excited about arriving in St Ives & working across 2 spaces in the Porthmeor Studios complex - but why trace, & why St Ives? Trace is an interesting concept because of the sheer amount it can bring in - we leave traces, we leave tracks, we can also trace (or track) something, or make tracings. Traces can be ephemeral or concrete, historical or current, can build up in layers; a trace can be followed or left in many different ways through time & across space/place. St Ives is a great example of a place in which trace & its various possible relations is wonderfully present in almost any way one could choose to explore. Its history as a fishing town which eventually attracted many artists, & where both these aspects are now bound up in a variety of ways in the town's tourist industry, is written in traces through its layout & architecture that are still clearly visible. Multiple & changing usages, additions & alterations can be easily found, often with visible layers tracing various histories & stories. Porthmeor studios is itself emblematic of this often living palimpsest - a building still used by both artists & fishermen together, as well as the sensitive & sympathetic renovation of the building revealing not only architectural traces (layers of over-building, use of newspaper & beach sand to insulate walls), but also the traces of generations of artists at work, as well as the fishing & pilchard processing industries. Finally, other traces - the manifold presence of the natural world & its processes on a coastal place, & the day-to-day human traces that run through the town are all fertile grounds for exploration. How we plan to explore & bring together our findings through creative collaboration will be the subject for future blogs... Gavin |
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