performances
unfallen
Unfallen is the continuation of the lecture performance series started in 2001 with Falling. It is the story of three accidents I have had or witnessed in London where I was born and grew up.
southwark
Southwark is the name I gave for an untitled piece I made as the result of being asked by Sarah Archdeacon to perform in an evening she organised at the Cafe Gallery, in Southwark Park in London, called 'A mixed Bill'.
I had intended to present Falling once more but as it had been approaching six months since I had made and presented it, I found myself unable to repeat that material as if nothing had happened in the months in between.
The new piece developed themes I had begun to explore in Falling. Location, geography,and personal history were once again the most important elements. The form was similar, in that it could best be described as somewhere between lecture demonstration and performance but this time I began to address what I considered to be one of the things I learnt from Falling - the problem of performing actions with small objects so that they could be seen properly by a seated audience.
This
was addressed in the piece through the use of a video camera pointed at the
tabletop in front of me, the signal from which was fed through to a projecter
throwing an image on the wall behind me.
The text of the piece concerned my sense of dislocation from where I was born, near the Cafe Gallery in Southwark, South East London, and where I currently spend the some of my time: in Berlin, Germany.
An orange was used to illustrate latitude and longitude, much as in an old-fashioned geography lesson which took in Berlin, Woolwich and Lowestoft, the history of Tempelhof airport in Berlin and the air lift.
falling
Falling
was made as a result of being awarded an Artsadmin
Artists' Bursary in 2001.
London is a curious place. It has 10 metres of what archaeologists call 'made earth', meaning that wherever you dig, there are 10 metres worth of man-made stuff before you get to native soil. 10 metres of people's building projects, waste, gardens, rubbish. 10 metres of rooms, roads, meeting places. Of ground over which people met, fought, fell in love gave birth and spilt blood. Over which people danced, tripped, skipped and fell.
This is how my first solo piece, Falling, began. It frames some of my obsessions in making work: the body as site and as archaeology, the city as memory, the tiny detail of the street and home as noteworthy event and my belief that the more personal and detailed the story, the more it resonates with the listener.
I made Falling during my Artsdamin Bursary during which time I devised and made the objects used in the performance in Toynbee Studios in the East End of London. I was given the opportunity to develop my solo work in an extremely supportive and understanding environment and to use the Courtroom studio and Artsadmin's marketing support to invite people to a final presentation of the material.
As I began to work on the performance which I was clear from the start would take the form of a lecture presentation, it became clear that I needed to respond to my own stories through the making of objects and to a certain extent, an environment, as well as through the text of the piece. My initial concerns when I first approached Artsadmin were two seemingly irreconcilable obsessions, namely falling over and knitting. These two things had haunted me for a long time. Falling - since witnessing a fire in an illegal cinema in Clerkenwell during which I saw a man jump from a third-floor window and knitting and sewing since I began to remember a curious thing about my childhood - that I was taught to knit from an early age by my Grandmother and to sew and make rudimentary clothes for my toy animals by my mother.
I began to think of these elements; not really opposites, although so disparate as to be close to opposites, as being somehow related to patterns of event that make up an aspect of life. Of falling as the metaphoric symbol of all accidents, derailments from planned action, even of sudden death and for that matter, the accident of birth in the first place. Of knitting as part of a class of patient, time-consuming, interior activity, of the careful and painstaking execution of pattern or shape to form garments that in turn record the hours spent making them. I recall the story of an Arran jumper my Grandma once knitted me which I quickly grew out of, to which she had to make extensions to the cuffs to make the arms longer. Unfortunately, the wool she was able to find for the extensions was not quite the same colour as the rest of the jumper and the cuffs became a reminder of my growth, of my love of the jumper and of a defining period of my life.
wallbrook
Wallbrook was an amulatory intervention I made in 1995, walking with water collected from the buried river, the Wallbrook, through the streets of the city of London one weekday lunchtime. I performed this action with my friend the artist and teacher Nick Holt. Starting the walk at two of the sources of the river Wallbrook, we met at the confluence and conitinued together until we finally emptied our bottles of water back into the Thames next to Cannon Street Station where the river, sewerised in the 16th Century, flows out of a storm drain cover.
Photos to follow when I track them down.