Serious Thoughts
I wasn’t quite sure what I’d put here in the blog, but I think the fun, punchy highlights are for instagram and this is just serious thoughts?? We’ll see!
I want to visit a ploughed field if I can – Paola has some contacts who can hook me up so we’re working on that! I’m making a list of questions to ask and I’ve got some 15th century ploughing images to compare. I also found out that the Northern Ireland Ploughing Championships are this weekend in Craigavon so I’m going to that. I want reference images and I want a really good understanding of “a ploughed field” as a thing – I promise it’ll make sense. It’s key to the historical narrative that I’m interested in and key to the work I think.
I want to make some audio recordings. Rain. Voices or people shouting to one another. And stadium crowds. I went to Brandywell for my first Derry City match last week and recorded audio on and off through the match. I spent a lot of the first half watching the little decibel bar on my TASCAM recorder jumping up and down to the drums in the stadium like a heartbeat. Made me think about being in the maternity unit in the hospital. I haven’t quite digested what that audio is like or what I want to use, I’m just going to keep recording more I think.
Paola and I have been chatting about a structure for the “exhibition”. We’re thinking of multiple sites with small things at each one and you move through them on a route. I’m imagining these little discrete miniature texts using techniques from my miniature hobby excursions. And then sound; sound that you play at each location, or that plays throughout. I enjoy thinking about the potential of how that comes together, how it connects and becomes one experience. Even the walking between locations, maybe it rains in your headphones as you walk – things like that.
I’m thinking a lot about the substance of the work – like what is at these locations, or what are the texts, what’s the writing. And I feel the pressure to abstract it at this point, to make the texts quite abstract, to make them feel like artwork. And yet that sometimes leaves you feeling a bit stuck with what to write! I’ve been imagining telling this narrative as a film, with the miniature scenes and dioramas that I’ve been working on as the visuals – so perhaps more like an animation. (Earlier this year I watched this animated series Secret Level that Amazon Prime produced – they’re super short 15 min stories from video games, but I really liked how much you could do with such a short story and with animated visuals, and how “big” on multiple levels these little episodes felt). I worry about that being very literal, or there’s something quite straightforward about just trying to tell a story, but I’m starting to feel that that might be the way to approach this because I know where to go with that, I have stuff to write. I also worried that there wasn’t a place in our exhibition structure for something with moving images, like I don’t imagine playing something on a tv through a window for people to watch outside. But I think I’ll worry about that later, if trying to pull together this animated narrative is what’s giving me energy to make something then I should do that!
Alternatively I could just leave the historical narrative behind now, go on without it. My friend did a residency earlier this year and I thought it was the perfect blueprint. They had all this great research but the drawings they made created a world of their own, and I didn’t read about any of the context until I’d seen the show.
Seems like it was just serious thoughts! Tune in next week if you want more of that.
Pete