Well there's a lot there to talk about. Sounds like it's a busy month for us all. Thanks for making all those great connections Polly!
I am also really excited to be working with you Jessie! And I too am unsure how exactly we will be working together and exactly what Polly is thinking/wanting now - although maybe she's not sure either, but anyway I am open to all sorts of things and I suppose it is my inclination to say at this stage I'm keen to get some dialogue going and let things develop naturally.
To be honest, amidst lots of other juggling right now I seem to keep dipping in and out of the headspace for this project and so feel it's all very open/unformed, which on the one hand makes me nervous, but on the other hand is exciting to have such freedom. So on in this regard I think maybe just keeping in regular conversation with each other will be really helpful for me in returning to developing the work and keeping focused and inspired. Hopefully it'll be the same for you Jessie.
Plus I don't know about you but i find the act of writing a really effective creative tool for forcing me to think something through in a different way, so I hope that this getting-to-know-each-other through writing about our practices might actually be quite productive in terms of developing new work. I also think the collaborative thing can't be forced, but this is a good start to exploring common ground.
Ok, so to Polly's topic...
Well, to describe how I've worked with the rainbow in the past is much easier than to articulate what it means to me, so I'll start with the first bit and see how I go with the second after that.
So really my main (or only) rainbow work began as an exercise where I made a voice/field recording for each rainbow I saw, a project that I carried out over two years. Every time I saw a rainbow I would take out my iphone and 'log' the sighting, like a botanist or field reporter. I was also trying to avoid visual representation, and I guess I thought 'what's the most inadequate way to describe a rainbow?' and through that realised that in fact description and circumstance had a lot of expressive potential.
All the recordings state the date and time, my location, where the rainbow appears to be, and then circumstantial details like how I might have chanced upon the rainbow, or other observations that filter in. I also usually tried to measure it between my fingers, and give it an opacity percentage. In the end I had something like 120 sound recordings which I then categorised into 7 different types (regulars, doubles, appearing/disappearing, partials, obscure/obstructed ones etc) and played them through trumpet-shaped glass speakers that I had a scientific glass blower make. The speakers were held with chemistry clamps on long ear-height steel stands that were placed at different points in the gallery. To hear the recordings you had to hold your ear up to the glass.
I still see think of this as a piece in working, I often think about it and how I could better resolve it physically. So it might have another life yet. (In fact, I probably think this about most of my work, that it can have multiple lives and re-volutions).
So that rainbow work seems to have led people to identify me with rainbows, I guess in part because it had such a long gestation period and many people encountered it at different stages of its life. People started sending me pictures of rainbows they had seen, or texting/phoning me to alert me to a rainbow. Someone even wrote me a short story about the rainbow after i told her about the work. I felt like I'd become this rainbow whisperer for people who weren't quite sure what to do with the joyous excess of seeing a rainbow, or something. It's taken me a while to feel comfortable about that, I guess because I think my work is about more than the idea of the rainbow... but maybe the rainbow aptly sums it all up, I don't know. I think I'd like to work with this rainbow-channel thing somehow eventually, but haven't quite got there yet.
(Sorry this is turning out to be a long email)
Ok, part two: Definitely I have always been drawn to the rainbow but moving from Perth to Tasmania really saw that interest peak, and this is undeniably linked to the sheer number of rainbows I saw there. I think prior to my move to Tassie (where my work directly with the light really began) I was more interested in colour, the spectrum, and working with this through a painting process, but I started to seek it out in natural occurrences through light itself in the last few years. For sure this was influenced by my new surroundings as well as a desire to take my work beyond the piece of paper and into real world experience.
It's a huge thing to try talk about because to me the sustaining thing about rainbows is their unfathomability as well as their simplicity. And the fact that they really can't be talked about but experienced. They are a great example of this kind of simultaneously fundamental but complex experience of being in the world, a moment of relation or triangulation between us, and our time and space - a direct link (or can I say portal?!), to reiterate these fundamentals of empirical experience. The idea that each rainbow is unique to the vision of each person, or as Olafur Eliasson has written, the rainbow is a virtual image of the sun; or Philip Fisher, that the rainbow is the ultimate example of the experience of wonder - a unique encounter involving a combination of surprise, intuition, aesthetic pleasure, mathematical or logical 'working out' and placing oneself within that complexity.
All that really interests me, but I also don't know if I want to bang on about it, because ultimately it's the perceiving bit that interests me, the whole sensorial experience. I suppose that's where I felt my rainbow work reached an end point was when the descriptions became repetitive and took away the magic for me. I wanted to let the rainbows go, give them back their temporality (or maybe rather, give me back my own temporality)
I think that's enough of an introduction! Phew, maybe next time I'll do dot-points!
Yours spectrally, and slightly deliriously (it's late),
Claire
p.s. a confession: i once had this email address: rainbowbrite86@hotmail.com
No comments:
Post a Comment