Hi there from beautiful cool and green skirts of Taranaki.
I look to residencies as a time of refreshment and inspiration with
lots of energetic projects and perspectives- and an amazing physical
environment for city dwellers-- In the last two days I have seen a
shooting star and glowworms! the glow worms did look a lot like high
intensity blue leds embedded in craggy wet fern encrusted rock
faces, but i'll suspend judgement for now and believe they were of
biological origin..
My project is called 'stringr' and is focused to actually weave
together the artists and writers while they are trying to produce
thier own projects...
so I am competing with deadlines, superb dinner menus, external
concerns and of course the inevitable install crisis, or tetchy
technology temperament.
This weaving project mostly consists of talking to people, being a
student as they recall their own knowledge and teach me how to weave.
It also means we get to play with bodily adornments like neck pieces,
halos, epaulets, sporrans, broaches, cuffs, etc - made from myriad
string, rope, wire, stones, tooled leather, children's aplhabet
cards, lace, plastic, vegetation, etc etc. Trying them on..
discussing them and the personas they generate. I must add I have
absolutely no experience in making this sort of work - so I am
placing myself as an awkward novice in an environment where people
are making highly resolved work for exhibition and publishing outcomes.
The artefacts will become a globally physically distributed artwork,
as i will give them all away to particpants to carry with them a
material memory of the scanz experience .
I'm also building a museum style wiki ( still at a secret address)
where documentation of the artefacts, and each persons words, or a
channeling of what the words may actually mean, be covering or
exposing , are woven together. Some people have promised to
photograph themselves wearing the distributed artworks in other lands
and add them to the wiki... As the work is online, the issues of
venue and install may not seem to apply to me , however I have never
made a wiki before, but am surprised at how remarkably simple and
straight-fwd it is.
From my experience with location based exhibition - most galleries
and installs have similar issues, and as an artist you get to know
what they may be- so after a few you are pretty much prepared for
the usual road blocks, like connectivity, noise, light,
misinformation etc The joy of working online of course is that the
work continues to be accessible and engages a global audience.
Im am of course, like everyone, running out of time.. racing to
finish physical works, and photograph them, entice people to wear
them to the exhibition opening. I mean to make 30 artefact works -
perhaps it will be 10. In terms of art work the project has its
highlights. In terms of a perforative piece it has been fun to
explore. In terms of creating binding ties and weaving together...
we shall see.
Personally I believe two weeks is not long enough in a self directed
and self organsied residency, especially when you come from another
country and must do both the physical, time, and cultural
acclimatizing as well as gather materials and set up spaces be they
physical or virtual. Three weeks could be a more productive time
frame given the last few days of SCANZ are the Interconnections
symposium.
Is it a romantic notion to sit in a public venue weaving, sewing and
winding wire while I listen to discussions of Chaos theory,
Complexity, Cybernetics, Post-structuralism + Pasifika, Aboriginal,
Indigenous, Indian, Asian, Polynesian and Maori Knowledge and Belief
systems?
Melinda
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