Jessie on Collaboration

I have been sitting with this draft for a few days now. I think because collaboration is a new thing for me, I am not quite sure where to take it. 

The nature of my practice - being so small and subtle, and very much reliant on site, time, and setting a physical challenge for myself - has generally made it hard it hard for me to think about how I can work in such a way with other people. 

Or at least, I've never quite reached the head space in which to allow it to happen. 

In the past year or so though, this has slowly been changing:

First with Steve Wilson on a chalk work tracking the sunshine as it moved across a stairwell (above), and most recently (and more significantly) with Henry Jock Walker. 

Having known each other for years, and having practices which would appear to be total opposites from one another, we have only just found a common ground from which to make work together and I'm excited by where it is headed. 

Beginning in part with a week long discussion about rainbows and terrible weather as we drove around Tasmania last year, it has evolved into a whole series of projects that I feel we are only at the beginning of exploring. 

This was the first - an intervention using food colouring to create a rainbow waterfall we found on the side of the road. 

Mostly we have been combining Henry's experimental painting techniques with my rainbow colours: 

'Rainblow' (seen in the background) made by blasting paint onto a wall with a leaf blower; and 'Rainflow' (seen in process in the foreground) made by  freezing paint mixed with water and allowing it to melt and drip over a stack of canvases.

But unlike Claire's experiences we aren't always working equally on each piece. Sometimes it is a matter of taking elements of each others practices and working with that in some way. I have especially been fascinated with the surfing side of his practice and have taken rubbings of the surface of his board in oil pastel and combined crayon with surf wax to create a drawing tool (initially intended to be used on a board but we haven't quite got that far yet). In these instances the collaborative nature is less obvious perhaps - it could appear to be just my work - but despite the lack of direct input from Henry in the making I still consider it partly his. 

I think that I see it as an intervention into his way of working, treating his processes or his outcomes as a site in which to play with. Adding the remainder of the rainbow to his orange and blue. 

What I have enjoyed most about this is the way it pushes me to think outside the way I usually would, not limited by the rules and restrictions and concepts I put myself under usually. It's been nice to further understand the way Henry makes work, how he approaches it, the exploration of the process rather than the final outcome. And there has been a certain freedom I suppose in the brain expansion. Although I take it just as seriously as I would if it were my own work, I don't put myself under quite as much pressure as I normally would - it's been good to leave myself open to someone else's ideas and materials and work through the struggles I might have with working with them. 

I have plans later this year to work with a ceramicist too - breaking and repairing pots I think - so I'm excited to jump back into the 'mud club' again and see what I can do with some clay.

And working with Claire - thats exciting too. However we can make that happen from opposite sides of the world. 

An image for my previous post

Thinking about kept and unkept spaces made me remember this photo I took in Ulaanbaatar. There was definitely some form of care taken in the planting of the flowers but garden maintenance as we know it does not exist in Mongolia. With spring and summer taking up such a short space of the year, once the plants begin to grow they are just left until autumn, when the incoming cold will kill them off. Grass is rarely mown, often getting to waist height or higher, weeds left to run rampant: if it is green and it grows then it shouldn't be messed with. 

Jessie on the title

I have to admit that the more I think about it, the more uneasy I am with the title of the exhibition, although as this is what Polly is aiming for I guess we're on to a good thing.

Unkept. It sounds too much like a made up word to sit quite right with me in this context.  I say it to myself over and over, willing it almost to become unkempt, wanting to add the extra letter that feels so lacking.

I associate it more with not honouring something, like an unkept appointment or a broken promise.

But unkempt. Refers more to a persons appearance I think then a general neglect of a space.

Perhaps then in this instance the choice of word is correct?

So unkept. As in untidy, forgotten about, uncared for...

I think part of what unsettles me is that I would never associate my practice with these words.

Nothing in the making of a work is neglected - from the site, to the material, to the title - I can spend days (or even weeks if I have the time) deliberating over tiny details. My studio may be a mess, and I may work with humble spaces or materials, but the final outcome is always far from unke(m)pt. I am usually on the ground amongst the grit, the dirt, and the dust, but I also spend as much time cleaning the site as I do making the work - sweeping, mopping, picking up rubbish, getting rid of excess material - doing whatever I can to make sure it's just my work in the space and nothing else. My attention to detail in this regard borders on obsessive and I associate anything else with laziness, as not enough effort, as in I could have done better.

I guess this paradox is the point of the exhibition? But I wonder...

Can I still consider a site unkept if I'm elevating the lowliest of materials to a higher state? Celebrating the grime and the muck and the chewing gum? Repairing the breaks? Cleaning the space? Surely this is the opposite? Surely I am 'keeping' a space, a material? Showing it care, giving it attention.

Is it enough to use the word if the action or outcome is the polar opposite?

I am still more than a little unsure, but I am confused and questioning of much these days.

I will muse on this further and write more at a later date.

Polly notes during Skype with Claire

[12/05/2014 8:33:09 am] Polly Dance: Call started
[12/05/2014 9:15:45 am] Polly Dance:
Tribute to Hobart
Wind instrument
Trumpet is blowing wind
Sad and comical
revealing the sky lights

[12/05/2014 9:16:02 am] Polly Dance:
Labelling and notes and titles

[12/05/2014 9:17:44 am] Polly Dance:
Trumpet is keeping time
Unseen time
Kept and unkept sounds
ears cannot be closed
Sound being boundless

[12/05/2014 9:19:17 am] Polly Dance:
Sound being relayed
artist attempts to wistle

[12/05/2014 9:19:48 am] Polly Dance:
Correspondence between here and there

[12/05/2014 9:25:34 am] Polly Dance:
Unseen, invisible or manifests itself in different ways
Revealing invisible
The cobweb - its there but unnoticed
The light - its occurring without us noticing it
 The dust is there all the time - you put a beam of light and contribute movement

[12/05/2014 9:25:49 am] Polly Dance:
The presence of the artist
Presence in absence

[12/05/2014 9:49:49 am] Polly Dance:
Collaboration - it's a bit more out of my hands
Responding to the situation

[12/05/2014 10:03:43 am] Claire Krouzecky: Call ended 1 hour 30 minutes 34 seconds

Unkept the title

When I first applied for the curatorial mentorship I called the exhibition 'Dirty Language' but I struggled with this title when the exhibition hit a fork in the road and went a different direction. It was no longer 'Dirty Language' - a raw, abject, loss, messy, mischievous, naughty, gutsy, dirty conversation. I felt this was 'too MONA' and Hobart's already got that so it needed to be a more subtle, softer, open, sensitive approach to the language of dirt and the unseen fibres that make up everyday life. I battled with the title and wrote my own lists trying to figure out what I was going to call this.

It wasn't until I went to Bruny Island with my mum for a mental health day off and we were walking along the beach talking through the title and trowing words around. It had to sound right and look good on paper. Mum asked, "So what is it about?" And as I described that it was about artists working with materials and spaces that are often unseen, forgotten or considered dirty and altering them ever so slightly to create moments of beauty and intrigue for the everyday passer-by. I liked the sound and strength of the word 'kept' and so we toyed with various sentences and word groupings; kept just so, keeping, to keep, kept still, quietly kept, etc. I kept coming back to 'kept'. I wanted the title to be the opposite to 'well kept' but I didn't want 'not kept' because this sounding too negative, this is where we fell upon 'unkept'. 

I researched the word and found that there were many meanings and ambiguity surround this word and its modern meaning. Many people used the 'unkept' instead of 'unkempt'. I liked that it was a bastardised term that created confusion. I let the title sit with me and the more I thought about it the more I attached I got to it. I spoke to people about the potential title and whenever I said it people asked, "Unkept or Unkempt?" and I responded, "Unkept." I talked to Colin about it and he asked the same question and wrote it down on paper. He said, "I like it. I like one word titles though." We chatted some more about its meanings and connotations and how it might unsettle people. I explained that I was okay with that. I liked that people would question it because in questioning something you search for an answer. It's not obvious to you, it keeps you guessing. I liked that it was associated to women not being 'well kept'. If a 'kept woman' describes a women that is maintained by a man, is an 'unkept woman' one that was not maintained or fulfilled by a man? I found this idea that a women needs to be 'kept' or maintained by a man/or men so strange. It was so opposite to everything I had ever known or been taught to believe in my lifetime but was something that existed, and not so long ago, for many women of my age. I wondered then what an 'unkept' women was and whether we are all now 'unkept' because we are free entities, independent individuals and maintained by ourselves. 

Being 'unkept' made me think of being dirty but free. 

wind//silence

Claire on collaboration

I've been stumped trying to figure out what I'd like to write about my collaborative practices... other than to say that I participate in collaborative projects regularly and I really enjoy it, oftentimes more than my own individual practice. It somehow eases the pressure I give myself with my own work and means the creative development is coming from multiple angles rather than just my own. It feels like expansion; a particular kind of freedom, or a departure from the foggy headspace of solo practice to find common ground with someone else's practice. Learning how someone else thinks about something can be a really interesting adventure.

The collaborative work I have participated in so far usually involves equally balanced roles, where all parties contribute more or less at every step of the way, with the final outcome being something that could not be achieved by any of us individually, and where it's not fully possible to separate out the 'bits' that each person did, because it's all one and the same. Although different people will bring different experience and skills/resources to a collaborative project, I think the dispersal of defined roles, and the slippage between who contributes what, and when, and how, can be exciting territory. 

Maybe that's my ideal collaborative scenario, but I suppose it operates on a spectrum, depending on the nature and intentions of the project.

There's just something FUN about being in on something together, meeting in the middle and discovering something new.

Inter Collective, An Operation Preserving Isomorphism, 2011

(Photograph by Devika Bilimoria)