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Yesterday I participated in a performance in the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, as part of Christine Macmillan’s installation, Gathering.
Recorded onto video, the performance was at once a response to and documentation of her work.
Christine wound me up with surgical gauze, connecting me with another performer, Kerry, to make a screen between us. Animated grass seeds projected over us. The seeds moved from a symmetrical grid pattern on paper towards chaos, in response to the gradual addition and subtraction of moisture. We saw in close up the effect of recent swings from rain to drought on a native grass.
We moved – slowly at first, exploring the possibilities of motion between us. Then with Christine, we formed a triangle of taut gauze. Moving in response to each other and to the movements of the seeds, we improvised, connecting with the fact of water bearing life.
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This is the start of my work with Christine, finding ways of responding to Jack Ward’s journal, to animate changes he observed and experienced in Antarctica through a year.
Listening to someone talking at the Sydney Linux User Group (SLUG) last Friday, and not understanding the technicalities, I started to draw the sounds and rhythms of the words…
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…then drew Jack’s words.
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The difference between the two drawings reflects the different subjects and perspectives of the speakers.
The first is a logical/mathematical analysis of a computer system.
The second is an aesthetic response to an other-worldly landscape.
Dear Lisa
If you hadn’t written grass seeds I would have thought sperm. Quite a beautiful image full of movement. What did you draw when you drew the sounds and word rhythms?
I agree Simon. They do look like sperm, and they move beautifully.
I’ve added scans of the drawings (above).
Hi Lisa,
I found the performance very meditative, building quietly and then subsiding. It was a beautiful way of moving through an experience of art and nature rather than just watching it. In one sense I was just watching, but recording it on video made me feel I was participating in the movement. I’ve put a little excerpt on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiZd-QhFqhw
I enjoyed reading Jack’s words at the gallery. They made me think of the poetry of Rumi and a wonderful book called Twelve Came Back by Peter Lancaster Brown – an account of the 1952 Australian Antarctic survey.
Regards,
Tracy