'Woody Woody Woodpecker
I wish I was you...'
I am writing and posting a lot of these blogs a few days after the events I am describing as I am finding it hard to talk about people. The residency has all been about people - trying to spend time with people who live here without always wearing the hat of 'engagement' or work. But in the event of stripping back toward that intimacy, lines are blurred and it is overwhelming. It will take some time to piece together my new understanding of what it means to be here at Northbourne and understand how it will impact my ideas about art and my approaches to making and talking about it. I do know that more than ever I feel driven to question cultural attitudes to materiality and material as evidence of existence. The war memorial in Low Fell high street is more visited, venerated and embraced than the living people whose lives surely are the only reason a statue like this matters. In the context of 'seeing' people; bearing witness to their lives and personalities, as well as alleviating boredom, making something in the moment and shifting moods and environments, art is a tool of engagement, and it is more than that. When Gemma and I were reciting poetry with Mary I felt I gained a deeper understanding of the Rabbie Burns poem - that you could love a poem all your life, and carry it around within you, ready to use and share whenever you need lifting out of real life. It does leave traces, material ones. But it also leaves intangible ones and private ones - affects that are hard to testify to without changing them, lyricising them and ending up hiding them within versions, objects, images and words made about them.
After doing a group painting like this is, there is an object that exists. Many of the people who painted it won't remember doing it. What happens to it next is a difficult question for me. Having lived here and sat in people's rooms, I know from talking to relatives that most of the resident's belongings are either still in their house with their family- their favourite chairs, duvet covers, crockery, rugs, kettles, plants etc and what is here is a sort of bare minimum - Elizabeth has hardly anything - just a photo in a frame, but her husband comes every day from 10am to 6pm and they go out. I think he probably doesn't bring much stuff in order to avoid the reality that she permanently lives here. Others have more personal items - Hazel has many photos, hankies, ornaments, knitting, 10 pairs of glasses, all continuously folded, moved and arranged - each acting as a conduit to a buried, or half-remembered memory. She has a brooch she says her mother gave her, that is 80 years old, 100 years old, older than she is. Obviously if people express an interest in keeping things made with us - pictures or photographs, that's fine, but this canopy painting is 4 metres long. So we have cut it up and put it into 35 frames. On Friday, at our little celebration day, we will put them all out and offer them to people. They are either new, never seen before gifts from Claire and I, or they are mementos of our time here. If they are not taken, or wanted, I do understand why.