William Blake Performance

Marco and I are doing a performance tonight, 'Blake and Ololon', as part of the performance party night of the William Blake 'Illuminations' Exhibition.  The party begins at 5.30pm, and the performances will be from 7pm - 10pm, with Calum F. Kerr, Stephen Micalef and many other artists.  This will be the last day of the exhibition of small illuminated works inspired by William Blake.  The exhibition is in The Crypt of the Church of St. George the Martyr, opposite Borough tube station.

Click on invitation to view larger

Please see earlier blog post for more details and pictures from the exhibition.

William Blake Congregation

Mental Fight Club

Pins and Needles performance, part 1 and 2 - West and East

Pins and Needles was a performance in two parts that Marc Vaulbert de Chantilly and I did in October 2011 for the exhibition East Pop West / East Pop Red, which was a two-part two-venue exhibition. Pins and Needles, Part 1 – West took place in West London, during the East Pop West exhibition; Pins and Needles, Part 2 – East took place in East London, during the East Pop Red exhibition. We devised the performance in response to the context of the east-west theme of the exhibition.

In preparation for the performances, Marco bought two brass compasses from a shop in West London, the chandlers 'Arthur Beale'. He then bought two boxes of dressmaker's pins from a shop in East London, the haberdasher's 'William Gee'. The compasses would be used to locate the direction of east and west. We would each have a box of pins and take out one pin at a time, place it on the ground, with the sharp pointed end towards the direction indicated by our compass, and continue placing pins to form two lines, running between east and west. We imagined our lines might meet in the middle and overlap, if our measurements were totally accurate; or perhaps our lines might cross or run parallel if our measurements were inaccurate. We expected each performance to take half an hour. For the first performance I would make a line east to west, Marco would make a line west to east. We would reverse the process for the east London performance – I would make a line of pins from west to east, Marco from east to west, and so complete the east-west cycle.



Pins and Needles, Part 1 - West

Saturday 1st October 2011, at 7.30pm approximately, at East Pop West exhibition opening.

Exhibition open from Friday 30th September to Sunday 2nd October 2011, 12 noon - 10pm.

Unit 1, Goldhawk Industrial Estate, Vinery Way (off Brackenbury Road), London, W6 0BE

Pins and Needles, Part 1 – West took place on a green carpeted floor within the exhibition space, on the opening night of the exhibition. We began the performance without any announcement and the audience was whoever chose to watch or notice.

Marco and I each held a compass in the palm of our hand. The compasses were brass, round and chunky, the flat kind used in sailing. We stood opposite each other at a distance of about fifteen feet. Marco used his compass to locate the direction of east, I located the direction of west. When the compass needles had settled we positioned ourselves so that we were exactly aligned with the east-west line. We were facing each other along the line: Marco looked east, I looked to the west. We knelt down, holding our compass in our hand or placing it on the floor.

The needle of my compass jumped around, taking a while to re-settle once I was kneeling on the ground. The small but chunky cardboard box of pins was positioned ready on the floor beside me. Marco and I looked at each other, then began placing pins.

Photo (above) by Anastasia Albertiné Sakoilska




Two photos above by Agata Johnston
I picked up a pin and placed it pointed end towards the west. The pin felt fragile and hard. I took a few pins out of the box and put them on the floor, ready to use. I continued placing pins along a line in the direction indicated, though I could see already that my line would not meet with the line that Marco had begun. The pins jumped a little on the stiff bristles of the very synthetic carpet. I pricked my finger sometimes as I laid them down. The progress of my line was slow, incremental, restricted by the length of the pins and the requirement to be neat and precise, laying them end to end. I was very aware of time - the pins, the process, seemed to track or measure time. The line created afterwards would be a track of time.

My line veered off to the right at first, but then the compass reorientated itself and drew my line back towards the centre and Marco's line. At the halfway point, Marco told me afterwards, his compass went haywire. Was it the titanium in his wrist? It sent the second half of his line off in a different direction to the first half of mine, making a narrow 'fork'. I had passed what would become the divergent point before Marco had put his pins there; he must have found my trail but not me when he reached it. I found that I placed my pins more quickly than Marco, and at the end I had to wait ten minutes for him to finish. After the halfway point, my compass guided my line along exactly the same track as Marco's. I began laying my pins closely alongside his. I saw that my pins were less neat, more higgledy-piggledy, with slight gaps between some of them, or a pin jutting out, though the overall trajectory of the line was precise. We had different styles of line, a different quality: Marco's were careful, neat, end-to-end pins, (though the line 'wobbled off' after half way); my pins were wonky-ish individually, with slightly jumbled jumpy 'pin marks'. The pins on the ground came to feel like 'drawn' pencil-type marks.

I sat kneeling when I'd completed my line, looking to the west, waiting for Marco to finish his line. I was reminded of the moment in our Sun and Moon/Wrapping performance, when I paused, kneeling, at his feet, before I began to unwrap and then 'wake' him. I felt held by the moment of waiting, knowing a cycle was about to be completed. I turned to look over my shoulder periodically until I saw Marco had completed his line. We both rose to our feet and the performance was finished.

Photo (above) by Anastasia Albertiné Sakoilska



Photo (above) by Agata Johnston
When completed, the two lines of pins appeared to have a 'fork in the road'. It gave the sense of a much greater scale – a long road viewed from above, across an expansive terrain, not just a fragile line of pins going nowhere. The metal of the pins caught the light, glistening in places, and the slight meandering of the line was as if produced by an animal. The lines appeared like a snail trail. The scale seemed to change, seemed ambiguous. The action itself felt at once limitless, endless, ongoing, and yet was also predetermined, finite, contained.

Though we had used a compass to take measurements, the appearance of the lines we produced related closely to our bodily actions, and did not have the precision or consistency of a scientific instrument. The performance was a physical drawing, a drawing with the body, which mapped and manifested subtle movements. Whilst attempting our task, moving in particular ways, a kind of dance emerged. The movements repeated, built and refined, rhythmically; our actions related to each other's, to the space and to our sense of time.

Marco and I have collaborated previously on another floor-based performance, Aisle, a crawling performance; I have also made two solo crawling performances, Crawl and Dishclout the Human Duster. Pins and Needles was a performance of repetition, of patiently, silently repeating simple movements, as was our performance Silent Bell Ringing. In our Wrapping: Sun and Moon performance we evoked the cycle of sun and moon/day and night; reversal, ritual and opposites were central to Pins and Needles too. This was the first of our performances that intentionally produced an 'object' from the process, other than the traces of dirt, or wear or hurt that crawling or ringing created (and the large ball of crumpled tin foil produced by unwrapping Marco then tidying up the wrappings in Wrapping: Sun and Moon – which has subsequently become the head of a sculpture by Micalef, made for the William Blake Show at Freedom Press, opening on Thursday 2nd August 2012). Rather than making the performance more fixed or tangible the 'object' produced from it, the 'pin drawing', seemed to emphasize the ephemerality of the performance – the lightness and hard-to-see-ness of the pins suggested something almost or not quite there, easily kickable or missable, (though deadly to bare feet) – and pointed to something that had happened, though not exactly what, and reminded of whatever it was having finished or been and gone.

'The repetition gave me an escape from the upset of seeing you upset', Marco said after the performance. (A minor-in-the-scheme-of-things upsetting event had occurred directly before our performance.) After the performance he said 'I see your point now, I thought about it as I put the pins down. I'd be livid if they did it to me.'

The small, repetitive action of placing the pins, the following of a prescribed method, undertaking a task that could be endless, an action that could be a component in an endlessly repeated process, but which had an arbitrary end transforming it into a cycle, (the exchange of our start positions for our end positions), the sense of attaching to a bigger fact – east to west, of being a human embodiment of, allied to, a scientific tool (the compasses) and concept, created a meditative space, calm and soothing, a hiatus, a ritual: we were detached from ourselves yet focussedly, tangibly, present in our bodies and environment. The 'ritual' could be repeated, acting upon a space, our experience of time and place and our bodies.

The performance was an experiment - through fixed rules and repeated actions there was uncertainty and exploration. (Would the lines meet? Would they cross? How long would it take? How would the pins look?) A woman asked 'Can you tell me what the game is?' during the performance. 'Is this the first time you've done it?' someone asked us afterwards. 'Yes. We didn't rehearse. An experiment, I suppose...'

Afterwards, we picked up all the pins, one-by-one, counting them in. The ground – astroturf – felt dirty – I hadn't noticed laying them out. I lost count of the pins midway, when I got upset about something I was thinking over. I got to 58 before I lost count.
'See a pin and let it lie, You'll want a pin before you die. See a pin and pick it up, All the day you'll have good luck.'

'Never should dropped pins be disregarded..."See a pin and let it lie, Before the evening you will cry." '

'My husband's terrible. If he sees a pin he'll grovel in the gutter to pick it up. He'd go to any length rather than leave it lying.'

'It is regarded unlucky to find a pin with the point turned towards you.'


Pins and Needles, Part 2 - East

Thursday 13th October 2011, at 6pm approximately, at East Pop Red performance night.

East Pop Red exhibition: opening night on Tuesday 11th October 2011, from 6pm - 9pm; exhibition open from Wednesday 12th October to Tuesday 18th October 2011, from 11am to 8pm.

Red Gallery, 3 Rivington Street, London, EC2A 3DT

Pins and Needles, Part 2 - East took place in Red Gallery, during the performance night of the exhibition. The performance began without announcement, amidst the comings-and-goings in the gallery. We reversed the polarities – I started from the west, looking east, Marco from the east looking west. We would complete a cycle. I thought of circuits, a mirror, inversion. I felt excited, knowing the process, the ritual, and faced with the new surface. I was impatient to begin and be in it. I would lay the pins with confidence.

As I laid the pins I was aware of the world up above and around us, much more so than in the west. I felt like a child playing on the floor, crawling around. I was much more aware of being low, beneath sound and movement, than in west London – maybe we were more vulnerable here, with the hard floor and the busier night. (The floor this time was smooth and hard, wood laminate, rather than the wiry tufts of astroturf.)

I thought of sailing, and tacking. Tacking ships. And tacking garments – first the pinning, then going over the line, in between the pins, with the tacking stitches. A temporary line. A temporary join, seam.

'Are you supposed to be silent?' Alex asked. He laid his i-phone compass on the floor next to mine – they agreed.

Again, Marco was slower and neater – I waited at the end, kneeling, looking east, compass in hand. I thought about waiting.

Afterwards, Marco said 'At times I thought I was making trails of pins. Earlier I'd thought we were making lines of pins, east to west. Now it felt like a trail.' Trailing. Laying a trail.

Marco: 'Like ships that pass in the night, I said to someone. It seemed appropriate – I was pleased – the lines didn't cross – a random direction.'

At the end of the performance there was a moment when the pins started to get scattered and I enjoyed the beginning of randomness and obliteration, letting go of control. But once we quickly began photographing the lines – before they would be destroyed by more unseeing feet and by our own gathering-up and counting-in – I began to feel protective of them. I wanted the ephemeral marks to be indelible, to be mine, seen as me – I wanted to be seen, recorded, undoing the lines, before they were gone. My urge contradicted the ephemerality. My protectiveness of the lines did not allow me to enjoy their obliteration and scattering. Marco said 'I enjoyed watching people trample in them afterwards, I didn't mind', though he'd meticulously counted them in after the first performance.

Marco told me 'After, when we were dancing in Alex's disco, I saw a stray pin on the floor. I went to pick it up; it was between two girls. They laughed. "A pin. We thought you were looking at our shoes." I'm really glad I found that rogue pin. Lost, then found.'

Pins were put into 'Witch's Bottles' to ward off witches, along with hair, nail clippings, or urine. Pins were classified along with bodily cast-offs – inert/dead fragments but still potent. I saw one such bottle at the Pitt Rivers Museum, which had been mistakenly described as having a witch in it by the person from whom its donator had bought it. The witch was thought to be caught inside, so the bottle still offered protection against the witch, but giving it a different kind of power as an object, the potential to do harm if broken or opened. A bottle that needs to be kept safe, not one that will keep you safe. It rattled, I think, when shaken. The witch's bones? Or the pins?

'The old woman suddenly "turned back in a circle", and retraced her steps. Asked why...she replied "I saw a pin on the road with its point towards me, and I could not go near it or go on because of getting bad luck." '

'A large...apple tart, wrapped in a clean white napkin fastened with pins...was handed on board [and] I could see there was something amiss. One man held it, and the captain cautiously took out each pin, and with arm extended to the uttermost, carefully dropped them over the counter into the sea to drown...The captain then slowly, seriously, and solemnly assured me that pins were spiteful witches, and ought never to be brought on board a vessel.'

EAST POP RED Exhibition and Performance

I am showing two paintings in EAST POP RED, an exhibition at Red Gallery, following on from the EAST POP WEST exhibition. I will also be doing a performance with Marco, the second part of our 'Pins and Needles' East-West performance, which began in West London. Details below.



Not No Un (She Is Not Being Moved)

The opening night is on Tuesday 11th October 2011, from 6pm - 9pm.

The exhibition is open from Wednesday 12th October to Tuesday 18th October, from 11am to 8pm.


PINS AND NEEDLES, PART 2 - EAST



'Pins and Needles' performance will take place in the gallery from approximately 6pm on Thursday 13th October.

Red Gallery
3 Rivington Street
London
EC2A 3DT

Nearest tube stations are Old Street and Shoreditch High Street.

More information on the Red Gallery and Eastpop websites



Details of the previous exhibition, EAST POP WEST, and the first part of my and Marco's performance Pins and Needles - West, are in the posts below.

Wrapping: Sun and Moon Performance

Tin foil and crumpled flag, after the performance

On Saturday April 23rd 2011 I did a performance with Marc Vaulbert de Chantilly as The Sun and Moon. We were invited to perform by Micalef, for the final event of his exhibition The Wine Presses of Luvah. The event, at the Freedom Bookshop gallery, Whitechapel, was the third during Micalef’s exhibition, where he read his new Blake poems, and hosted various performances, including The Hoova of Luvah. Micalef added new poems for each event, which were based on things that happened in the previous readings and performances.

Micalef’s request/instructions/suggestions for our performance were only that Marco would be the Moon and I would be the Sun ('wear something diaphanous'), and that we 'do something about Blake's Albion'. Marco suggested we buy lots of tin foil – we decided on two large, wide rolls – and use two balls of grey wool; he suggested I wear yellow. We found nothing suitable and yellow in the charity shop, so Marco brought a yellow T-shirt of his own, with a mythological print on the front and back, for me to wear over my green dress. I wore my hair – which is long and yellow-ish – down. Marco brought a silver suit, trimmed with gold, for himself, and wore gold trainers with it. We changed into our costumes in the tiny toilet underneath the Freedom Bookshop gallery.

It was unseasonably hot weather on the Easter weekend, weather for shorts and dresses. At the event both Calum and John had arrived in shorts and intense, bright yellow T-shirts. This was coincidental, and not part of the exhibition, but perhaps the same awareness of energy and heat had prompted their choice of clothing as informed ours in the performance.

Micalef read a set of three Blake poems, after which we began our performance. There was already a large and worn Union Jack lying on the gallery floor. In a previous performance Marco had lain under it as Albion, with a horn held erect like a giant penis, sleeping and then rousing. This was referred to in one of Micalef’s subsequent poems. I began our performance by taking the flag and carefully folding it into a neat pile, placing it back on the floor. As I did this, the small but noisy audience paid little or no attention, continuing to talk and to encourage a dog to scamper around noisily on the wooden floor-boards right beside me. Marco felt afterwards that he liked the way people kept talking at the beginning, but also found it sexist – they talked as I folded, but when he arrived in the performance they began to watch and be quiet. Perhaps it appeared I was just tidying up for Marco. I felt the tension and ambiguity of performing, unnoticed, wondering ‘when will people realize we’ve begun?’, and the gradual focussing of attention on our activities. There was a juncture between being there ‘just doing’, and ‘performing’. I thought, as I folded the flag, of the women in the launderette folding sheets, and of times with my mother, folding sheets, ‘me to you and you to me’. The lack of attention - or respect? – for this part of the performance seems consistent with the quiet invisibility of such tasks. The folding was a preparation, a preparatory meditation, a clearing away before a beginning, and an allusion to bed-making (itself entwined with the cycles of day and night, sun and moon).

When the flag was folded, Marco walked over to me, in his thick, wool, shiny silver suit, and I helped him to sit on the floor. He sat with his legs straight, outstretched, and his back vertical, forming a right angle, parallel to the wall. He sat extremely still. I took one of the rolls of tin foil, which I had been holding like a wand, and began to unwind it, wrapping it around Marco’s head. His head was recently shaved and so as I wrapped it in foil I could press the thin metal directly on to both his skull and face. As I did so I thought of the lampshades I make at home by wrapping my own head in foil to form a lampshade-like shape, and a residue of my facial features, which then hangs from the ceiling, shedding out light. I was careful to press gently but firmly onto the foil to capture Marco’s head without hurting him. I felt I was looking for his features, looking for and making the ‘Man in the Moon’. Marco said afterwards it felt very caring, as I pressed the foil to his face.

I began to wrap the foil further down, towards Marco’s neck. I wrapped by circling him, moving my whole body around him, orbiting. As I wound myself and the foil around him, concealing his neck, and shoulders, I followed my progress by unwinding a ball of soft, grey wool, binding and tying it over the foil, holding the shape in place. Marco said this part of the process felt precarious at times, that the foil ‘case’ might slip off, or burst apart. It would have spoiled the effect if bits of the moon had broken off. Breaking the illusion – however nursery rhyme-like or absurd the illusion was – would undermine the potency of the performance, the ritual. The precariousness of the ‘encasing’ demanded my focussed attention and careful application of pressure, a certain amount of balance and quick dexterity to get the 'moon’ wrapped up. It was important to entirely encase Marco, to make a solid and complete shape of him – to transform him into a shape, an object, but an abstract entity too. I felt as I wound and bound him that I was making something precious that could be broken – the ‘object moon’ and the ‘idea moon’.

It was such a hot evening that as I circled round Marco, bent over doing it, I began to feel light-headed and a little dizzy, over-heating slightly. Marco, I realized, inside a thick suit and an ever-growing tight foil casing, must be starting to sweat, heating up with the radiating, reflecting, intensification of the foil. His whole head was entombed, his mouth and nostrils covered. I hoped he could breathe ok.

I encased Marco’s torso, with his arms strapped to his sides, with swathes of foil. I tied him up with more wool. Then I put one hand on his back, and one under his legs, stretched out on the floor still, and guided him backwards to lie on his back. As he tipped back he retained the ‘L’ shape, his legs rising up into the air, to form the inverse ‘L’, or almost-crescent shape. The movement was comical, absurd – a ‘tipping up’, as Marco said afterwards. The cartoon-ish-ness of this movement suited the foil ‘moon’ we were making. I began to complete the crescent, this time winding the foil from the top of Marco’s gold toes downwards to his belly. Part way through this process I heard a muffled sound from his foil-head which made me aware that he was overheating and struggling to breathe. I poked a hole through the foil, where I guessed his mouth was, for him to breathe better and steam to escape.

Time was pressing, with the audience’s short attention span, the heat, and Marco starting to steam inside the foil and his legs becoming exhausted – ‘it was like being at the gym’, he commented about the legs-aloft posture afterwards. Marco was blind for the duration, his eyes enclosed in foil, his hearing similarly muffled, suffering a strange sensory deprivation combined with sensory-intensification, of the heat and posture. There was finite time to complete the moon wrapping. Timing was all important; duration was palpable, emphasized by the condition of heat and tiredness, energy manifested. I thought of the cycles of sun and moon, imagining the sun as having tasks, tasks to achieve before night, preparations to complete, routines that must be performed and punctual. The darkness dependant on the energy of the light. The formation of rituals by the intertwining of light and dark. Marco said afterwards that I was dancing round him like a maypole, as I wound him with foil. It had felt like an abstracted, dance-like ritual.

Marco, his back flat to the ground, his legs outstretched, was now entirely encased in foil. His body became an object – a crescent, a silver-moon-crescent. An absurd toy, improvised moon. Man in the moon. I took hold of his legs and guided them to the floor, stretching him out flat, almost feeling like I was breaking him in half. No longer the moon crescent, now a body, a 'mummy', a light and heat emitting presence. John said it felt as if Marco was emitting radioactivity, that the audience should be protected from the energy – that the foil was to protect the audience from radioactivity, like a special suit. I was conscious of Marco and my heat, from the activity, the circling, the wrapping, the reflectivity. I had the impression of a piece of salmon or meat wrapped for baking. Geraldine commented that ‘You trussed him up like a kipper’.

Once Marco was stretched out I took the folded flag and shook it out, like shaking a blanket or duvet. I laid it over him like a bed cover. I felt I was putting the moon to bed, completing a point in a cycle. The moon going in. I felt caring, patient, protective. I sat at his feet, crouched, like at the foot of a bed – watching, guarding, paused, waiting. Though the pause was brief – necessarily as Marco was too hot and the audience distractable – my moment crouched at the foot of the moon was a clear, weighted punctuation.

I rose from my post and pulled the flag-cover from the sleeping moon and cast it aside. Then, I held up Marco’s legs back into a crescent and began quickly to unwrap them. I roughly unwound the wool binding, tangled, and tore off shards of foil, ripping and scattering them like sun-moon-light across the floor. I held his legs, revealed now to the innard of silver and gold suit and gold trainers, and pushed the legs down as I guided his body up to sitting, into the ‘L’ shape, his torso still wrapped. I continued the reverse process, of unwrapping, tearing the foil from his body, feeling the heat beating out. When I pulled the last pieces from around Marco’s head, his face emerged, red and streaming with sweat, having endured the intense reflective heat, basted inside the foil shell and in the thick wool suit. He was the heat emitting core. I squeezed and gently shook his shoulder to ‘wake’ the moon, a gesture of ‘time to get up’. He opened his eyes, and I helped him to his feet, the silver core now animate, amidst the scattered foil shards.


More crumpled foil and flag, after the performance


The performance ‘proper’ came to an end here, but after a minute or so I returned and began to gather the foil shards and compress them into a ball, in a gesture of tidying. Marco joined me, scavenging on the floor for foil, to create a huge sphere of foil, a ‘full moon’, from the remnants of the performance. The foil-moon-ball was later placed, by Marco, on top of one of Micalef’s sculptures, to become a final element in the sculpture, a full moon hovering above a Loovah-lampshade.



The foil-moon on top of Micalef's Loovah-Lampshade sculpture

To read about other performances I've done, including more with Marc Vaulbert de Chantilly, please click here.