In how I’ve sourced material in the grit of the earthen work life, I see parallels with land art; trying to convey the sensual experience of working in the rural cold, with a medium shackled to the necessary equipment and infrastructure of the sanitised institution. Many works in the land art field (haha) are often geographically and semantically decentralised, that’s what inspires me. Photographic evidence of the piece may be all that returns to the civilised art gallery world, an emissary for the distant artwork crouched alone on the ground somewhere. That kind of resolute engagement with the earthen world outside of the institutional bubble appeals to my perspective, and calls back to my earlier post concerning multichannel installations.
There’s something very humanly structuralist about English sculptor and landscape artist Richard Long’s work, taking the sprawl and dissolution and wildness of natural elements, of the land, and straightening it. Aligning it in lines and circles, colour and texture arranged and curated. In some hyperbolic sense, it’s an almost offensive practice. In another, wonderfully childlike and pure. It reminds me of collecting rocks, grasses or feathers from the land as a child, (and still now and always) the gathering of the world in an ordered way, out of a fascination. In many ways, I feel like this directly correlates with my project, and field recording as an act. It’s taking the land and transmuting it. It’s taking.
I also seek to problematise my work, or interrogate it. Why choose building as a subject, and why there? I want to engage the bias that ripples through the project. The rurality of its setting is integral to my aesthetic view of it, a dwelling coming up, out of mud and clay and staking a claim on the territory. The people erecting the building, structuring the material, are held indeterminately on that land, divided in responsibility. I think I am also drawing a line between art and life. I want the art to just be a portal, holding open a window, enabling what can ultimately only be the briefest impression of that life. I might perceive the art life as necessarily distinct from material life to help us survive, depending on what day you ask me.
Making a work surrounding an observation and structuring of the labour of others, (in which I would rather be participating) discomforts me. Yet, in a sense, the piece is about survival; it’s a running, flowing briefing and debriefing of this kind of employment it can be for me, and a psychoacoustic, cursorily sensory version for the listener. Bringing the outside in, and bringing the inside out. Knotty, trying to make sense of these facets for myself.
A (lengthy) anecdote/side note:
Something I found interesting in a parasocial sense; Richard Long created A Line Made by Walking while he was a student at what is now UAL’s Central Saint Martins, and during his regular and lengthy commute from Bristol to London, he stopped in a random clearing in Wiltshire to walk back and forth, photographing the resultant path. On a recent Thursday guest lecture I had every intention of attending, my 70 mile commute from Sussex ground to a halt 50 miles from London, because of a now-routine train failure. The expense being what it is, and my schedule already ruined, I gave up and traveled back to a random station and walked the remaining 13 miles home through lane, forest, field and dark. I think I’m pulling at the tenuous thread connecting me to Long’s story, UAL, the commute, the importance of being in the land, walking. It also connects to the following guest lecture that I’ll write about in more detail later. All that to say, I find great inspiration and enrichment outside in a wandering meditation, connected to the land and the physicality of engaging with it by happy, motivated circumstance.