This INKLINGS voicenote contains:
✺ Sharing about the process of making place-based installation work adverse camber for recent exhibition
✺ Visiting COMMON GROUND exhibition at Cheltenham Wilson Gallery.
✺ Embracing grief, tenderness and the weird in artmaking and practice.
adverse camber
There is this valley...
An installation exploring relationship to place, love, loss and the matter of things.
- Sandstone (Stepaside bypass/Wooden, Pembrokeshire)
- Hawthorn (Wooden, Pembrokeshire)
- Copper Pipe (Wooden, Pembrokeshire)
There is this valley.
Where he was born.
Where he worked when I was born.
Where she died.
Sandstone blasted in the name of progress.
A cairn in honour.
Salt to wash the sins.
Hawthorn to tend the heart.
In this tender and tangential INKLINGS voicenote, I share more of my practice of working with place and how I brought together the adverse camber installation for recent exhibition Tir Cwiar//Queer Land.
As a process-led artist I love to talk about the happenings that occurred when making artwork, but sometimes these happenings are tender.
I believe that the world needs more tenderness and any form of tender creative expression, but it isn’t about harming ourselves by being too raw or vulnerable when we’re not ready. Flexing with that boundary and comfort zone is all part of this process. Goldilocksing the beejesus out of it… too much, not enough, too sweet, too salty. Like the rocking from side to side on a boat.
There is a deep compassion for self and others I feel in this tenderness, and often this compassion has a fiercer flavour. These days are full of fierceness and tenderness and I am in a constant practice of trying to allow this. To welcome this humanity at a time of rising political fascism and social inequality. Unravelling from all I have learned about ‘pulling my socks up’, about ‘growing up and getting on with things’. All that has been ingested from those around me who have themselves ingested systems of inhumane and dissociative harm. This is a constant practice and one I worry that by questioning and unravelling from I make myself more unsafe. Moving from “i’m the problem, I should just try harder” and “shit, the systems are causing so much of this and I can’t change them on my own” to a focus on community is what is present for me right now. How to do this more proactively is coming with many questions.
To speak of tenderness and fierce compassion, to name harm in places and to make space for sitting with own grief and loss in places and lands that are blasted, ignored and abused is to keep alive and awake. Waking up brings a radicalising. There can be no other way. To unravel from that which has kept me numb with fear for so many years scares me still, and I also wish to live my life from this tenderness. With this tenderness. This is what makes me reach my hand and eyes to others and not keep simply trying to spin my own wheels in anxiety for my own survival.
As I write this my heart hums with heat. My solar plexus burns with a warmth of resonant connection.
We have each other. We need each other. This tenderness tells me so. This place, these losses, this breaking open to the unknowing of life tells me so.
COMMON GROUND
A happy converging of right time, right place came recently when visiting family in Cheltenham. Time spent at the Common Ground exhibition @thewilsonchelt inspired and fed me. Seeing this creative and community-centred work happening in another place with the same people, land and folk-rooted values was a balm.
The exhibition explores the tension between that which is wild, local, natural and cyclic and society’s focus on control of nature and people for profit and perpetual growth.
As I greet the second spring back in west wales I am deepening the rituals of my practices in relationship to land and place through exploring folklore, story and community. Emerging into the lighter half of the year with a hunger to immerse in that which through time has brought a togetherness with the human and other-than-human world.
1: The superb @boss.morris ‘Land Beast’
2: Two of four bronze pieces from @timshawsculptor ‘THE MUMMERS TONGUE GOES WHORING AMONGST THE PEOPLE.’
3: Close-up of ‘Ebb and Flow’ from Richard Long, screen print materials and image inspiration from local River Avon mud.
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