2017 -- time for thinking
In the 2016 report I can see that I completely failed to mention our reconnaissance trip to Berlin in October 2016: the general sense of disarray in which we woke up to the hijack that had been effected on UK politics, meant that we ought to see what it would take to continue as European artists. We booked a month in an AirBnB flat in Lichtenberg Kreuzberg, just inside the S-Bahn Ring and got on with making contacts. I didn't get much time to make work but I did notice the variety of wall colouring and hydrant plates.
As every year will tell my practice seems to proceed along several disparate trends. Some years I get lucky and some consistency emerges. The theme of SHADOW meant that I worked quite hard on network building to take this work back to Berlin in June 2017. I worked on contacts to make Light's Festive Tents available as a pop-up experience in parts of Saxony where Novalis and the Jena Romantics were significant. Unfortunately the Gallery where I was hoping to make a residency base in Berlin finally got around to reading up about the Berliner Lands parliament's legislation about short term lets and with painfully little notice pulled the plug. Clutching two airline tickets we looked around for another location to spend the month of June. This turned out to be Madrid where we could start all over again to make contacts and develop networks of shared interest.
Just before leaving for Madrid I had gone back to some of the thoughts I had when first building the Festive Tent and began to think about the play of shadow in the Myth of the Creation of Painting. I wanted to see what the tracing of the outline of shadow looked like as a performance piece.
I have been thinking a great deal about time from a phenomenological point and and how it seemed to me that we use narrative to hold our world view together. Going far back to some of my earliest work on Jumping Shadow, as soon as the Shadow becomes the only player in the scene it seems as if time and motion are at least slowed down if not eliminated.It occurred to me that it would interesting to play video footage of some action in both directions and to locate the class of actions where the viewer cannot absolutely tell which is the action running running in normal time and which in reverse motion. You can check out the 'time out of time' link on the events page next to this archive section.
Once again the nice people at Fringe Arts Bath smiled on me where I showed my 'Walk the Chalk' video for a group show Embodied Cartographies, again check the events page
A question of getting in there:
Shadow Dance from aldobranti fosco-fornio on Vimeo.
exploring the space in and among shadows of the Other
