I am going out to walk along part of the Severn estuary with Antony Lyons today to look at potential material for a film we are making on transgression (in the geological sense). This fits into Antony’s on-going work around water, climate change and sea levels, and the whole issue of time and change, ecologically speaking. Walking and talking is also always a good means of reflecting on, sifting through, and generally sharing and digesting thinking material. Today’s trip has a particular feel to it because my friend the artist David Walker-Barker has just agreed to send me a clip of something that provided perhaps the most extraordinary experience of the complexity of geological time I’ve every had. While we were talking in his studio in Yorkshire one evening, David handed me a very large quartz crystal and told me to watch it carefully as I tipped it from side to side. Almost miraculously, as I did so I saw a small bubble of gas move in its liquid heart, much like the bubble in a spirit level. The paradoxical tension between the age and solidity of the crystal and that movement has always remained with me, as mysterious as the viral matter – inert but with the latent potential for life – that makes up part of the DNA of every human being.
Meeting Pauline O’Connell, announcing Invisible Scotland
Pauline O’Connell and I met yesterday to discuss her new project – I am acting as a mentor for its early stages. I’m very pleased to be able to do this (it would be great if ACE funded mentorships in this way) and am very much looking forward to seeing how the project – which concerns a publicly-owned field – plays out.
On Tuesday next week I fly to Edinburgh (again) in order to give a keynote talk on collaboration at a conference following up on an interesting ecological project called Steep Track. I am looking forward both to meeting Scottish artists and others working in this field and to catching up with Mary Modeen, who is also speaking at the conference, on all she is doing around the big Invisible Scotland event in Dundee at the beginning of August. This promises to be a really valuable international event. You can find information about it at http://www.uwe.ac.uk/sca/research/place/iscotflash.htm
Hi
Having stopped full-time work at the end of March, suddenly three weeks later I’m very busy!
This morning Mel Shearsmith and I had our first meeting to discuss a month-long contribution from PLaCE (UK) to a program of experimental live performance at The Parlour Showrooms. This will happen in september and I’ll put updates of our progress here as it happens.
On June 4th I start work with artist Pauline O’Connell, under a project development and mentoring scheme funded by the Irish Arts Council. Pauline has done some very interesting work recently (see Friends) and is going to be testing out ideas in a rural social in relation to a local communally owned field near where I live in a rural context in north County Kilkenny.