is connection that we seek. Connection to the past, to one another, to the physical world, still compelling despite the ravages of technology. A picture, a book, a piece of music, can remind me of feelings, thinkings, I did not even know I had forgot. Whether art tunnels deep under our consciousness or whether it causes out of its own invention, reciprocal inventions we then call memory, I do not know. I do know that the process of art is a series of jolts, or perhaps I mean volts, for art is an extraordinarily faithful transmitter. Our job is to keep our receiving equipment in order. (Winterson, 1996:13)
Fig.13. Annie Lovejoy. where r u? Here nor There event. Dialogue, Bristol 20034
Anthropologist Tim Ingold provides an articulation of context-led processes that previously I had only intuited. Demonstrating the difference between structured nodal interaction and organic complexity, Ingold presents a deeply relational vision
4 where r u? - on a boat you could be aboard the Tower Belle on July 13th 2003 experiencing a space of the imagination between cultures & locations. A vibrant multicultural localised mix of performance, poetry & music. An audio visual experience between one place…and another, aboard the Tower Belle to Beese's Tea Gardens on Sunday, July 13th at 6:30 pm, 2003.
where r u? - on a network you could be a thousand miles away knowing that your message will be launched at sunset from the banks of the River Avon. Possibly to be discovered by someone, somewhere. (Project text. 2003) available from http://www.herenorthere.org/dialogue/index.htm
of our ‘lifeworld’ through suggesting that ‘what we have been accustomed to calling
‘the environment’ might be better envisaged as a domain of entanglement’
(2006.14). Rather than envisaging relations as interconnected individual nodes, he starts with the idea of a trail, depicted as a line with an arrow, to represent the movement of growth. Every such ‘trail’ he proposes,
traces a relation. But the relation is not between one thing and another – between organism, ‘here’ and the environment ‘there’. It is rather a trail along which life is lived: one strand in a tissue of trails that together make up the tissue of the lifeworld. That texture is what I mean when I speak of organisms being constituted within a relational field. It is a field not of
interconnected points but of interwoven lines, not a network but a meshwork.
(Ingold, 2006:13)
vital
adj. of, concerned with, or essential to organic life a limited edition ‘notebook’ of artworks that involve or reference ecological and environmental concerns
© annie lovejoy 2001
Fig.14. Annie Lovejoy. vital, title page of notebook. 2001
The book cover image vital (fig. 14) produced in 2001, is illustrative of Ingold’s
55 meshwork, as is ‘comfort’ (fig. 15) produced in 1998 as part of the exhibition return.5
Fig. 15. Annie Lovejoy. comfort. Prema Arts Centre, Glos.1998.
5 Return, Prema Arts Centre 1998. http://www.annielovejoy.net/cgi-bin/showproject.pl?title=return A site-generated exhibition, referencing the personal and community memory of the death of my child.
Situated in a former chapel, this work celebrated 'continuum' and honoured the process of grieving.
return is a glimpse, the movement is cyclic, nature completes itself. ‘The show could be sentimental &
self-indulgent. In fact it is anything but. The work is entrancing and typical of the way Lovejoy marries nature and technology. Her art is varied & what does unite her work is its sense of place, its
rootedness - in every sense' (Simon Hattenstone, The Guardian 21.4.1998).
This tangle, Ingold suggests, ‘is the texture of the world. In the animic ontology, beings do not simply occupy the world they inhabit it, and in so doing – in threading their own paths through the meshwork – they contribute to its ever evolving weave’
(2006:14). Ingold’s meshwork offers a way of thinking about responsive arts practice that is conducive to the relational aspects of a place, site, location or situation. An interconnected conceptual framework of arts practice as a process of ‘doing’, inclusive of the intuitive, tacit, practical and negotiational aspects. A process that is implicitly philosophical becoming explicit (making visible the invisible), as past
‘doings’ evolve into current understandings and explorations.
Fig. 16. Annie Lovejoy and Harriet Hawkins. Insites: a notebook. 2009
57 3.2. The Loss of Mystery: a work by John Newling
The artist John Newling provides an example of a deeply reflexive approach to the
‘ever evolving weave’ (Ingold, 2006:14) of inhabited site-responsive practice. His texts eloquently address notions of site, place and his venturing into new work as a liminal space, a twilight zone, a place of uncertainty, of dreams and knowledges, a threshold.
When I cross the threshold of a place that might house a project, I am aware of a transition of thinking. The relationship between the threshold and what the space could hold is undetermined, open and ambiguous. There is a sense of entering a place that will open the way to something new. The event can be disorientating, it is to experience liminality that is, for me, a constituent of making projects. (Newling, 2007: 38)
Newling’s work starts with research resulting in an essay or text. For the Loss of Mystery project at Preston Market he returned to his previous writing Transactions and Agreements that outlines the effects of regeneration on communities, including the loss of local shops and the familiar transactions that were part of our lives.
Fig. 17. John Newling. Loss of Mystery stall. Event 1. Preston Market. 2006.
As a starting event for the Loss of Mystery project in Preston market place, Newling established an insurance stall (fig.17), explaining that ‘in a society that has
profoundly moved towards the audit of our activities the market place seems a fine context to sell insurance against loss of mystery' (Newling, 2006: unpaginated).
Contributions of mysteries were exchanged for an insurance certificate (fig.18).
Fig. 18. John Newling. Loss of Mystery. Insurance Certificate. 2006.
The follow-on event, Voicing Mysteries, took place in the twilight (liminal) space of the closed market. Newling stood behind a bespoke gilded lectern and read aloud each of the 280 mysteries that had been contributed to the insurance stall, at designated points along the central axis of the market place (fig.19). Amplified, these mysteries suffused the surrounding space of the market and beyond.
59
Fig. 19. John Newling. Voicing Mysteries. Preston Market. 2007
A few days later, he held a banquet for the people who had donated mysteries to his stall. The Mysteries Meal took place at the end of another busy day of transactions at Preston Market. The stalls had been stacked away and the preparations for a meal began. The table was clad in white linen and laid, the food was prepared and cooked on site for the invited guests (figs. 20, 21)
This was more than spectacle, it was the hospitable and convivial sharing of food with people that had contributed personal insights to the project, previously revealed on the same site. Newling explained that the Mysteries Meal ‘sought to engage in conversations that view new knowledge through the prior events. In this manner it is 'knowledge' gained as a post liminal event’ (Newling, 2007: unpaginated).
Fig. 20. John Newling. Mysteries Meal. Preston Market. 2007
Fig. 21. John Newling. Mysteries Meal. Preston Market. 2007
Applying Ingold’s ‘animic ontology’ to this meal project and the one produced by Jorge and Lucy Orta, reveals parallels in that they both involve structure as a vehicle for the work; yet the subtle difference is that Newling inhabits the space and lingers on the threshold of uncertainty as he attends his stall, awaiting contributions from the passing crowd. These contributions become the dynamics of the work, the unveiling of hidden secrets and personal histories. He then presents these back to people already involved in the process. Through drawing uncertainties into an explicit shared arena, he invites new understandings within which the project can unfold. He sees this work as having a duration of several years, and due to the depth of his process writings we can understand the work as an evolving field of relations ‘of interwoven lines, not a network but a meshwork’ (2006:13).
3.3. Of flowers and temporality6
This deeply relational approach is also evident in Rite van de Lente by Jyll Bradley, located at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens, a rural environment and former flower
6 This text on Jyll Bradley’s work is an excerpt from of flowers and temporality a critique of two public artworks created in 2006 by different artists in different locations – each of these works were
concerned with investigations into the commercial cut flower industry. Whilst the materials and issues that inform these works are similar, the context and processes of engagement are significantly different; on the one hand exemplifying a staged spectacle applied to a place and on the other a responsive outcome that is emergent of a place. The full text is available at
http://www.annielovejoy.net/research/wp-content/media/of-flowers-w.pdf