These photos are from a much larger selection of images made during the summer of 2021 ago during a month long residency at Cultivamos Cultura supported by Biofriction, during which I was investigating several currents related to menopause. These are from a series loosely titled Menopause Gym. I use the word current deliberately as energy and circuits were reoccurring features.
Working out, increasing muscle mass and looking at fitness regimes as a kind of sculptural practice was one of my main focuses. I don’t currently have a studio, it’s an expensive resource here in Helsinki, so I am working in my rented apartment at a small table. I’m sifting through the photographs, making fast, small, rough (and very bad) drawings. I’m enjoying the muscle memory that is produced as I practice my rusty hand eye drawing co-ordination. A planted toe - my planted toe, becoming an immediate synaptic imperative.
Following a residency, when there has been a benefit of an accelerated development of a body of work, it can be not so obvious how to quicken and bring the work to some version of fruition when exhibition opportunities are not forthcoming.
But, the ideas have not diminished. I’m going to keep drawing and see what happens.
Filtering by Category: residency
Örö Residency - Tuesday 13th October
The wind is whipping up outside in the dark, the sea is mere moments away from the house to both the east and the west, earlier as I walked it's western edge it sat between the pale sands and the cloud filled sky like deep grey blue steel, unearthly in its hue and observance of horizonal geometry. Every time I looked back to it from whatever else my eyes were resting on, it arrested me again with it's peculiar depth and saturation.
After encouraging sprays and mists of light purple flowers that I swear have just appeared overnight, I turned inwards from the sea towards the rifle range, taking a slightly off-track route, although careful where I placed my feet for fear of stepping on a plant. Under a tree, with one of its four corners lodged into the ground slanted a meter squared slab of iron, deeply rusted, and even more deeply bitten into by the tracks and perforations of munitions. Gorgeous, gaping orifices, some messy and substantial as if an enormous gauged projectile had ravished it, others more precise in their spherical punctures but still making undulations in the surrounding areas so as to evidence how the metal moved with the force and thrust of the projectile.
I laughed, but this is what I wanted to do.
Shoot metal.
I thought about Laila Pullien’s shot copper work, Bonnie and Clyde.
And of Cornelia Parker’s Suit, shot by a pearl necklace, 1995–1995
I placed my figures into the gaping wounds marveling in recognition of how certain morphologies, vocabularies and tropes insist across decades. Remembering for a moment clay slabs I ruptured with fingers all the way back in the first-year sculpture rotation in my undergraduate degree. Entry points not dissimilar to those in today's rusty target. Of course I regretted the absence of my phone with it's camera as I sat down to draw it. I tried to make rubbings and soaked some pages in the sea allowing them to saturate and then take up the imprints of the metal. Damn it, why did I not bring some decent paper? I thought of printmaker Terry James Conrads work. Perhaps I need to do a printing course. I fished out fallen layers of rust from the underside, whilst carefully checking for snakes, and layed the rust onto the small pages, hopefully they will stay overnight, absorb more rain or moisture and take some more impressions be it atmospheric of from the metal.
This is the object, I thought.
THE object.
The tipping point.
What THE object is can only be understood in the moment of apprehension, there is no prior concept, no wish, no missing, no absence or sense of lack. It presents itself fully formed and there it is. The island starts to come together, to make sense. To me at least, in respect of this residency.
I wish I had some paper, some big, thick, water absorbent sheets of paper.
I realise how múch I love paper and metal. Together.
Sometimes it really is a case of moving, walking, being with long enough until there is a recognition, and it generally is a re-cognition.
Earlier in the day I quipped in an email about the travail on the island. Beau Travail with its military (Foreign Legion) outpost flashed into my mind. Military legacies here on Örö, echoes of disciplinary choreographies that compose both the corps collective and the individual ones. Themes beautifully exposed in Claire Denis' film, a perennial reference in my own work. I imagined making small dances - training choreographies, one for each of the military facilities ie bunkers, artillery positions etc. scattered on the island. Damn, I wish I had my phone to document, I wonder if I can come back and shoot them another time? But perhaps they don’t require a document, they can be private, unseen.
Örö Residency - Friday 9th October
Upon arriving on Örö two references came to mind
The first upon witnessing the luminous mosses and deeply spongy lichen was Area X of The Southern Reach Trilogy perhaps also emphasised by the deep drenching of military history born out by numbers bunkers, facilities and accounts of personal and their being stationed here. There is no lighthouse, although there is a ’tower’, but there is a sense of the extended sensibilities and perceiving subtleties of flora and fauna.
The other being The Company of Wolves - the Neil Jordan film based on the short story by Angela Carter, with it’s theatrical forests that Little Red Riding Hood passes through. Here on Örö there are small dense areas of woods that one can pass though via curated tails, they have a feeling of the magical and faery tale, so enhanced and flamboyant with their eruptions of deep mosses and creaking trees.
The woods are deeply hued with layered light, this photo was taken at sunset when twilight was encroaching but the sunlight was coppery. The mosses seemed luminous and the lichen full of springiness. One might almost feel a whisper or a hint of presences moving about other than the birds and insects, a slight density of air, cluster of molecules, glimpse of shadow. Nothing perturbing, nothing to be alarmed at, simply senses sensing, as if the air becomes more knowing, perceiving, noticing and ones own perception prickles with that sensing.
So often it seems in writings and declarations by artists and thinkers in respect to our human selves is slow down in order to perceive with our embodies sensibilities. Perhaps less is given to being sensed and perceived as we are engaged in this unfolding of attention, being with, of, on and even integrated within. Hunters do this to some degree, so as to reduce and to camouflage their signals to those they predate.
As I sense the stony lichen, it sends amidst the scattering of impressions something that I might not even recognise as me. As I move across the sandy ground, yielding and taking impressions of my boots as I attempt to take care to walk only on the sand and not on the plants, what is perceived, perhaps mere impressions unrelated - pressures, temperatures - forces that are too dispersed in time to indicate one being - one me. Might the wind as it breezes in from the Baltic with a steady gait not distinguish between me, a rock and a ltree but rather embrace all the phenomena that break it’s movement as surfaces upon which to experience texture, to the wind I am texture experiences with a multitude of other textured surfaces. How I am perceived is indistinct but nevertheless a feature in the wider expanse of time and space.
I sense the sensing. The concentrations of light, the dissolving of edges, the terrains of play eddying. The sensing senses my sensing, across multi foci, myriad pin pricks of infinitesimal moments distinct and indistinct.
Örö Residency - Sunday 4th October 2020
Swans
From my high up perch on a rock I counted at least 43 swans upon the water, gathered on the darkening blue grey waters, impervious to the small but fierce choppy waves and unremitting windy gusts. In smaller groupings they amassed a flock.
Rocks
I clambered over the rocks that lifted up, Houses of the Holy (Led Zeppelin album cover - Giant’s Causeway) from the sandy beach to the east of the house, careful to avoid as much of the tufts of lichen as possible, they’re only lightly anchored and a careless footstep can dislodge them entirely. Whether they then have the capacity to take hold somewhere else I don’t know, doubtful I think. The wind is so beautifully sustained, strong but not enough to knock one over or to make the going too hard. My body has many memories of there strong and stonier winds, particularly from Kerry where gales were common place. Here it is just joyous.
The algae greens fur the rounded rocks on the edges contrasting with delicate fleshy pinks of the rocks. What stones are these?
Many of them cris crossed as if by a calligraphy brush making syllables and lithic alphabets.
I think of Lynn Margylis, and of Betsy Dexter Dryers A Field Guide to Bacteria - which I wish I had brought with me. Note to self, bring it on all trips.
Rock pools scudded revealing the patterns of the movements of air.
I find a place to sit, high up but within some trees and bushes in a mixture of both deciduous and conifer.
There some old lichen, flat to the stones surface finds it’s lithic sensibility. Which is stone and which is lichen as both communicate and merge in sympathetic mineralises.
Navy
As I wound back from the harbour area and my visit to the vista of the 43 swans, I saw in the mid distance at the base of the Snake Pit House and the watch tower with it’s vaguely camouflage paint job (how a watch tower might fade into the sky with dark camo is beyond me - but I appreciate the aesthetic deliberation) I could see a sort of featureless van, a proto-van even in dark mat hues, was it black? Dark blue? Deep green? It suggested covert, uniform, discretion, anonymity and selective seclusion. By it side I could see a tall figure in black, appearing even in distance silhouette undeniably military - however I still toyed with the idea that it was a hiker or other erstwhile visitor, tourists, work person. But sure enough as I approached I could see the beautiful cut of a military hat, with it’s gold edging. Moi, the figure in dark low key military garb said.
I know the tower was still in active use by the military, but had not expected to encounter any personal, I don’t know what I expected amidst the extensive historical rusted artefacts and installations upon the small fortress island.
Turning into the road that would lead me to the red trail along the easterly edges of the northern half of Örö I could see more military proto-vans. I call them proto vans because they look like they have been taken from the assembly line before they have fully differentiated into the branded characteristics that identify commercial, civilian vehicles. These are strangely rounded, buds intsed of the sharp chrome or otherwise design features that curry attraction and the wanty need of design particulars.
One is coming down the track towards me and stops.
A jaunty cheery person in uniform. We chat.
He seems very friendly and chatty, happy to answer my questions.
I asked him if they were part of the large
They’re navy. 18 of them will be stationed on Örö for the next 5 days for manoeuvres. There will be war sips about 10 km out to sea but I might see them if the weather is good. I think his gesture was towards the south or southeast of the island.
I told him that I might walk about at night time and tht they should be be scared. He laughed. Enjoy your holiday he said.
I continued past the buildings on my left where 3 more vans were parked, doors swung open revealing tidy stacks of flight cases. Some more military types were clustered on a porch, ’terve’ one of them waved as I turned to smile a greeting.
I continued my walk though the pasture lands of the long haired cattle who found me incredibly interesting, they didn’t move but simply stared watchful as I made my way though their pasture lands.