artist blog – Page 2 – wraptheworld

2 April 2014

Hannah Brackston Residency Blog 3

Brooms

My final days in Hikkaduwa were spent trying to resolve the matter of 72 old brooms that on their return from Colombo had no home. I felt that the work should be a complete cycle, in which I had exchanged these objects as a mechanism for meeting people, building relationships and learning something of daily life here and that therefore the brooms should also be used in my response to the understanding I had gained. I worked initially with photographic work I had made, creating portraits for each brush, playing with their qualities as these slightly humorous faces with bad hair days. I was interested in the very simple connection between a mundane every day object and something that makes us laugh a little. I explored how the pictures worked printed in passport photo style and then I made a simple pack of snap cards with them. I liked the idea of returning the images back into something you might interact or play with and in a form that requires you to really look and observe the individual differences of each broom head. I made several packs of cards to distribute in the village.

I had also a chance meeting and interesting conversation with a screen printer at the very end of our road, who had learnt the skill through one of the aid projects that was offered by European organisations during the Tsunami. Like the lace maker his skill was now used to run a business with in tourism and I spoke with him about my broom images. As another experiment I designed a screen print using some of the broom portraits and we printed these onto fabric, which I then sewed into tea-towels. I was trying to play with both the tea-towel as this object that is strongly connected to British tourism and European daily household life. I gave these tea-towels as gifts when I left to some of my neighbours.

For the physical brushes I designed a few simple structures to create which allowed them to somehow infiltrate back into the community and to react to ideas that originated during my time learning about the village. I made a set of cricket stumps for the boys who play cricket at the end of our garden every day. I also made a shop sign for the lady who runs a tiny wee stall and a guest room in the house opposite us, the place is barely visible. A bundle of de-headed broom handles were bundled up and donated to the local community project run by our neighbour who was setting up new premises in one of the neighbours’ gardens. These were going to be used to create the fence for the perimeter of this dance hall. The remaining brooms were joint together to make the Skelton shape of an enormous umbrella. Shade and shelter is something I have learnt is extremely valuable in the village and the climate. For an afternoon I opened up the garden gate to invite some of the local kids and families to help add colourful fabric to this shape before hoisting it up into our tree. The location for it, was chosen to directly shadow the round concrete platform in our garden above the water supply. Addressing the space above this circle in this way completely changed the platforms function; it became a social space to gather under and to sit in a round.

These days of activity ended with an evening collaboration between the other artists, Jo and Robbie that I lived with. We tensioned a bed sheet into the space at the front of our house porch and as dusk came on the final night, we organised a projection of two animations onto this screen, very large and visible from the road and our open gate. For my animation I showed a sequence of the broom portraits and Jo and Robbie made a beautiful and fun visual using paper flip flops and flowers, accompanied by some energetic music. We also placed kerosene lamps around tables and under the broom shelter with packs of the broom playing cards and cups of juice and biscuits. Many of the neighbours came and lots of them bringing children. The young men sat for the whole evening in a circle under the umbrella structure, playing cards by lamp light. The women took up positions on the chairs, watching the animations while the children grew steadily more hyper with the sugar, but between dancing huddled around the lamps to play with the cards.

It was a perfect exhibition to conclude such a colourful intergrated stay in Sri-Lanka.

2 April 2014

Hannah Brackston Residency Blog 2

The Colombo Biennale

The Colombo Biennale, Srilanka’s Art festival celebrates its third edition this year (2014), including around 50 artists from both Srilanka and internationally. It was an opportunity for all of us to share something from our projects so far and to meet some other really inspiring and interesting people. In a way to also understand where contemporary art sits, how it is understood and represented in Sri Lanka. For me perhaps the challenge felt to be making work for a gallery context, which I have not done in the last years. Therefore in submitting two pieces for the CAB festival was a chance for me to revisit my stance on this from of representation as well as really exciting for meeting and sharing ideas with local artists etc.

I presented the outcomes so far of two of the ideas that I had been exploring here in Hikkaduwa, the brooms and the mobile museum. At this stage having spent a little more time understanding how things happen here, my ideas for the lace project have been put a little in prospective. It wasn’t interesting enough to me to just present a giant piece of woven lace as an object without the process of making it being resolved as the centre of the work. To organise, choreograph and teach a large group of children or people to make lace as a performance would have been really exciting but an enormous challenge time wise and depending on a lot of other people and teachers to assist me. I began to wonder if it might be just as interesting to keep this idea for another time, a transfer of the skill, take it back to its colonial roots and re-teach people in Portugal or Britain a skill they took over to Sri Lanka. In some way my thoughts on this idea helped me to see that the residency and potentially all the processes or activities we might engage with here don’t need to have a definite start point that leads to a continuous linear process reaching a conclusion at the end of the residency. Some ideas perhaps can drift, be carried for some time until they feed into or fall into a place where they make better sense.

Lace

I made the decision however that there was regardless of this a lot of value in continuing to learn the skill and spend time with Indra the lace maker. We were becoming friends and through the hours of sitting side by side, taking up the whole shop I was not only learning of her craft and her life, but gaining a fascinating prospective on one of the areas of life here that fascinates me, the arrival of tourism. Almost being on the other side of this, watching the interactions take place and experiencing the shop keeper’s commentary and opinion on this became really insightful. At this point I also thought about the fine or invisible line between something being art and being life or an experience in a place. I realised that what took place during the time with Indra was an exchange; I was the first tourist who she had ever taught this skill too, she was co-incidentally a wonderful teacher and she took much delight and patience in guiding me. She was one of 5 daughters who was taught lace making by their mother, who learnt from her mother, and Indra was the only daughter who worked with it still, her own daughter didn’t want to learn, she was studying a degree in Colombo, Indra’s family line of the craft was possibly near its end.

Brushes

So, my collected and well used brooms, all 72 of them by now, made their way to Colombo for the Biennale. Several of my neighbours watched them pile into the back of the van. I realised that the brooms had created a sense of mystery – where were they going? and for what? On my return one man came up to me and asked – ‘my broom – Colombo going?’ he was delighted when I said yes. I also became aware of a bigger potential for this group of brooms, on holiday in Colombo that could work in some really interesting political fields, beyond the exhibition, trips to sit outside parliament. The brooms were not just objects, they were each echoed by a family in the village who once owned them and was curious to know their whereabouts.

I felt consistently throughout the exhibition that Colombo was just a pause, a chance to share a sense of prospective with a different audience, a short period of time to stand back and observe the brushes simply as they were, a collection of objects before they returned to their village. I wasn’t interested to make anything with them in the gallery, just to let them rest, to stand strongly together as the community they represented, some young, some old, a few resting on others.

I am often think that it is important for public art and socially engaged art to find ways to re-present themselves with in the institutions of art and have a voice with in the larger question of what art is today. However I did not try to tell the story of the brushes and perhaps this was a weakness to my point on having them there. However I was interested that it allowed people to make their own connections and narratives, which was relevant in the context of Sri Lanka where these objects are so familiar.

I enjoyed working more sculpturally with these sticks and their bristles, to stack them in a way that created a sense of movement and to take time to consider the finer details of presenting them, however although I still hold no regret at not building or making something more of these in this place, I was consistently aware of my own inclination that they should have some form of interaction. I did witness two moments of interaction with the work, one was a beautiful piece of improvised dance, by Tom one of the other resident artists which to me addressed the energy I was trying to capture in their configuration as a group, posed in sweeping position. The other was during install when I was informed that the ‘minor staff’ would come to sweep the gallery before the opening, two ladies came in with brushes identical to mine and myself an couple of others joined them with my brushes to clean the floor, everyone was smiling and laughing.

I realised many things that as a piece in a gallery the brushes gave a chance to reflect on, connotations that within the community context were harder to observe. Their relationship to class, to female roles, to the immediate natural environment they were created out of.

Washed up object/a mobile museum

An experience I shall never forget was the making of the mobile museum. A structure to contain the objects I had gathered from the beach, but also a prototype or design idea for an object carried on your back, that could function both as a space to collect and interrogate the landscape, and also present a temporay museum display; on a road side curb or with in a community setting.

I was really lucky to be put in contact with a Tuc tuc driver who also had a very small workshop from which he ran a metal and wood working business during the off season period. His name was Anil and he was happy not just to make the piece I had invented but to let me be part of the making process. It became apparent later that this was a strange territory as although local women are often engaged in very physical manual work, it was not wood or metal work at this scale and for a westerner to be doing this was even stranger. Together we collected pieces of wood and metal that we strapped precariously to the roof of his tuc tuc. When we went to his friends who had machines to cut pieces, we found they were sitting through a power cut and so the museum was hand cut and hand assembled. We invented the mechanisms and attachments together, adapting pieces from his wonderful pile of scrap metal and off cuts. The process was punctuated by regular trips to his home to have cups of tea and lunch with his wife and children. Although I never imagined it from the onset, again, like the lace making, the relationships and social experiences that derived from this process became as interesting and special to me as the outcome. I was invited to spend Independence days with his wife’s whole extended family, where we swam in the sea together in Galle and showered then all in the street under and stand pipe before dinner.

The other piece I presented for the Colombo Biennale festival was therefore this work. In the Garden space of Lakshman Kadirgamar Institute for International Relations, my resistance to working indoors and my original design for the mobile museum to be a work encountered on the street led me to choose a space here at the side of a small road under the shelter of a tree. I presented my collection of objects salvaged from the beach outside Hikkaduwa, in a particular way that played with colour and partnered pieces of similar form that were natural and manmade materials alongside each other. I was interested in exploring the processes and order we try to give to the natural world as a means to make sense of it, or to find beauty in landscapes that are about a persistent destruction, such as life was for these pieces in the tide. I realised that this project reflects on the similarity between my methodology as an artist encountering a new culture and the comparable inquisition of early explorers. Examining and excited by all of the virtually invisible details and fragments of place that are so unfamiliar, vibrant in colour and wrapped in social, environmental and historical layers. Interested in landscapes that often contrast with what today is expected of a tourist to find beautiful.

I also realised, looking at the work with a distance to its starting point, that the work was inescapably referencing my reaction to what I learnt and observed of the Tsunami. Trying to create some kind of order and narrative to understand the kind of power, well and beyond our control, that is contained in that incredible ocean. Considering the piecing together and re-building of physical and emotional space, searching and re-structuring that has taken place for the 10 years following this disaster. The presentation of the idea as a museum was about my thoughts towards our relationship to history and to knowledge, how we preserve and also connect the present day with what has taken place before. This museum and collection attempts to operate outside of the institutional walls, as a display space it is open to the elements and to constant re-configuration, no glass and no fixtures. It is not an attempt to preserve but to momentarily capture and reflect. As an idea it is about the potential for different people in different times and places to use the materials gathered from their space and environment to curate and tell their own histories through an exploration of what remains today, opening this up in public spaces for wider conversations.

On reflection of this connection to the Tsunami I felt that the work was perhaps a little too sensitive to display in Hikkaduwa or the place that the objects originated.

19 March 2014

Hannah Brackston: Residency Blog 1

The place: Hikkaduwa

My 10^th day in Sri Lanka ended with spicy chickpeas wrapped in newspaper, a procession of flaming coconut torches, and thirty or so elephants rather uncomfortably dressed in elaborate textiles and twinkling blue fairy lights. We had joined thousands of people for the annual Kelani Duruthu Maha Perahera festival, unforgettably colourful and musical, elegant dancing and hundreds of performances with fire, ribbons, peacocks and spinning plates. This was followed by a hilarious three hour comedy sketch as we tried to navigate our way home, completely trapped by the parade and thousands of people and families. It was an incredible introduction to Colombo which followed an exciting meeting with the team for the Colombo Biennale and an exploration of some of the venues with them, beginning to map out possible outdoor sites and gallery spaces that could suit our art work for the festival.

Now I have returned to the slightly more peaceful Hikkaduwa by climbing on and standing a little too cosily, just managing to balance on a busy commuter train. These first 10 days have brought an incredible overload of experiences, from kind and warm people, to the sweet young boys playing cricket practically in our garden, to the string of wild dogs lining our road, to eating 10’s of miniature bananas, battling with the mosquitos, visiting temples and budha’s, asking questions and answering smiles, holding difficult conversations about the Tsunami and drinking many delicious cups of tea. Not to mention sleeping to the rattle of monkeys on the roof.

Hikkaduwa where we are all staying is a small town on the beautiful sea, stretched out along a hectic strip of the Galle Road, saturated with shops and stalls, rusty red bicycles and eager but friendly tuc tucs. For its most part every commercial window and doorway is cluttered with garments and objects for sale, locally made and run by Sri Lankan families, but existing exclusively to service the 4 busy winter months of the tourists decent. There is a lot to adjust to and quite a loud and vibrant contrast between a modest local culture and this roads ample supply of contradiction to this, regardless we are inescapably tourists also. The last days however it has been inspiring to meet some folk that integrate with the local community and to begin to have conversations and find moments and mechanisms to form the start of friendships with some of the beautiful Sri Lankan people, which hopefully muddle this line between the two cultures existing here.

We are all in quite a special position because the artists are split between two houses but located ‘jungle side.’ This seems to refer to being the opposite side to most of the hotels, away from the ocean, over the railway track and 10 minutes down a wee and fascinating road under a great green canopy of banana leaves. Each home we pass if you catch someone’s eye you find a lovely smile and in between the glimpses through bushes and doorways a peek into daily village life. Three of us stay in a simple and brilliantly spacious house a fair way along this road, it is raised up a little where the land inclines and is surrounded by a hot green grassy garden. Working outside the front of the house which is a really bright and refreshing treat (most of the time) it feels as though we are on show to the whole street and equally we are spectators of it. The other side of our fence a family of stay dogs defend 4 newly born puppy’s and at 5pm the local boys prop up a broken bit of a palm tree to play jungle cricket, (we can field from our garden) while the kind shop lady opposite waves and greets us constantly. I have begun to find a rhythm to match these surroundings enjoying early mornings at sunrise and the abundance of sounds that accompany it.

Initial Ideas and reactions: Work

I had proposed and imagined to research one starting point here that would take me through to some kind of outcome that stitched this time here together. However finding myself in this incredible situation where removed from the juggling of daily life at home your sole focus is on the development of ideas, absorbing and questioning everything about this new and completely fascinating culture, it doesn’t feel that easy, or necessarily important to fix my focus on just one idea. In the opportunity to live completely submerged in the culture I find my head constantly buzzing with little ideas, details that I feel really inspired by and I get really excited by a whole multitude of things around me. According to this I am allowing my creative process here to follow many of these threads of interest and to play in simple ways with them that respond to my immediate reactions and thoughts about life in Hikkaduwa.

Lace

I was looking forward to concentrating my work here on the role and intricacies of local crafts, in particular I expected to engage a lot with the local tailoring community and the unique situation that exists working in a country like Sri Lanka where you can actually meet the people who make some of the garments we import and wear in the west. The disconnection between maker and consumer is universal but I am interested in the moments of visibility where a connection might be possible. I spent a couple of my first days here mapping and learning about the spread of local textile based activities.

The majority of the shops on our end of Galle road sell westernised summer dresses, trousers, hats, bikinis and board shorts most made from either imported Indian fabrics that offer the silky ornate trim that is popular of Eastern garments, or foreign swim wear cloth. Speaking with some of these local seamstresses in the tourist shops I understand that here there is something quite special existing purely through circumstance, in that these women work in the same place that they sell and therefore the foreign visitors on entry to the shops are met by potentially the same machine and lady that made the garment they are interested to buy. The stitching on old sewing machines, the pattern cutting and wee pile of scraps is entirely visible inside and we even have the opportunity to request something customized and made to measure, through this the local process of tailoring is very tangible. I began to feel that despite my own interest in sewing and it’s wider function socially and economically, in terms of interaction and visibility, there is a system of sorts that is already facilitating some sense of this interface between the local maker and the visitor. What therefore became more of a curiosity to me were the steps in the process that were not so visible; the production of the fabric itself.

To look at this I took myself to see some other local aspects to the textile industry. To see handloom weaving, batik and silk making, even rope makers; beautiful and patient people using extremely delicate processes, the outcomes they produce are stunning and there is something very special about seeing this. However for all the time it was possible to watch these craftmen at work, the trips to these shops or centres were monopolised understandably by far more time dedicated to a detailed tour of their showrooms. Perhaps it was unusual for a visitor to be more interested in how something is made, than buying the perfectly refined outcome. Each of these visits made me more increasingly aware that not only were these venues tailored towards foreign visitors but these textiles were incredibly expensive for local people and high end products that would never find their way into the majority of local homes, they were luxury items for export. Furthermore the garments that Sri Lankan people wear are often stitched here, but the fabrics are imported cheaply from India, China and Japan. The official white school uniform cloth for example, worn by every child in Srilanka is not made in the country.

In trying to articulate this quite complex international network of buying and selling, importing goods, ideas, western designs etc, I stumbled across one tiny shop that stands out a little on the street as it is the only place that sells entirely white garments; the lace shop. The lady here had such a great smile and perhaps I was just at that point in my thought process, trying to articulate these incredibly labour intensive crafts such as hand loom weaving and their relationship to wealth and then to find this tiny machine for making this detailed and perfect lace by hand somehow seamed to encompass many of the things that fascinated me about crafts, economy and labour here.

Lace making in not an indigenous craft for Sri Lanka, nor is handmade lace worn or used that much here, in fact colonial rule during the Portuguese period brought this skill to the west coast of Sri Lanka and shared it with local fisherwomen, who produced impeccable lace that found its way to the royal and rich garments and interior decors or the western world. The craft has remained today, passed on by mother to daughter but the number of practicing lace makers has of course decreased dramatically. Perhaps my curiosity also lingered here because unlike weaving or batik the shear miniature scale and speed of the lace makers left me feeling like there was still a mysterious edge to this process and a labour of incredible patience. My immediate reaction was to want to unpack that mystery, to imagine how this lace might look on a huge scale or as a game like maypole dancing where each person became a bobbin, ducking and diving between each other.

I felt very much that I wanted to learn and engage more with this subject before refining these early excitable ideas and also there were so many questions and subtleties to this whole industry that couldn’t be derived from one or two conversations. The lace maker agreed to teach me, I would come for an hour or so each day and sit inside the shop with her and learn to make lace…

Brushes

There is an absolute abundance of local products made from some part or another of a coconut tree and these are both displayed outside every local shop on the jungle roads and found in all of the Sri Lankan homes. The most common of the coconut items is the indoor floor brush, many families owning more than one and using it at least once a day. The need to brush these concrete floors is evident; the jungle spends all it’s time trying to get inside. We have at least three varieties of ants discovering invisible crumbs and Sri Lankan people take incredible pride in their homes. Many times it is remarked to me ‘how clean is Sri Lanka?!’ The sweeping is a relentless cycle.

The brushes themselves are beautiful objects, a wooden pole with a range of plastic and recycled tin components that hold the coconut fibres into the end, resembling a moustache. I decided to buy one from the local shop and carrying it home I was astonished by how much this made the local people smile. Tourists don’t buy sweeping brushes. But the reaction was such a warm one that I began to think of how actions like walking down the road with a broom are so simple and yet so effective as mechanisms for conversations. Interesting considering the Galle road is so packed with things that are trying to get your attention. I decided to buy a couple more brushes, slight variations but the same indoor natural fibre and whilst wondering how these might look in some form of kinetic sculpture I realised that perhaps since these objects, are quite so local and familiar to my neighbours it might come across to the street of spectators as pretty wasteful and strange to be cutting them up. I also had a really strong feeling for wanting to further my interaction with all these people who live around us in the jungle. Inspired by the quite simple set up of the local shops in the village, window ledges or sheds with items, I placed a sign indicating ‘Broom Swap’ and I made an ordered pile of brand new brooms in a visible place outside our house.

The first exchanges took place with people I had already met, immediate neighbours who found it all quite funny but who were more than happy to make the swap, for a couple of these it was a chance for me to step inside their house or sit for a cup of tea and learn a little of their lifestyle. I chose to use the interior brooms because the interior spaces of these homes are still something of a mystery most of these buildings are penned in by fairly substantial walls or fences. As a few more exchanges took place and word began to spread I began to think more again about these walls. One lunch time 3 women separately came to the big gate of our garden and despite our language barrier they understood this swap and began pushing their old brushes through the fence to me on the other side.

I met one lady who lives in a small and beautiful little house alone as a full time carer for a handicapped daughter; her home is completely cut off from the community by the strong tall walls that surround it. She told me, over a cup of tea how Sri Lanka used to be different and she felt better, only tiny fences or bushes between homes, everything was open and space and life was shared and social. In the 60’s under new leadership the government encouraged many people to go abroad, particularly the Middle East to find work and in the process people saw how we were living and building public and privatisation of space in the west. On return these influences were transferred and the built landscape began to change and the walls and property boundaries became more defined.

Word of the broom swap somehow spread through this neighbourhood like wild fire, a true testament to the close communication and travel of person to person news that still exists here. On one day I even ran completely out of brooms to exchange, I started to buy the brooms from the two closest little shops and when they ran out I noticed they made a new order, these tiny micro economies are fascinating and I felt essential that the swapping supported this. After 5 days I have 22 swapped brooms and have met many new and friendly faces who have shared a bit of time or an invitation into their home with me in the process.

The used brooms are wonderful weathered objects, totally reshaped by the repetitive action of daily brushing, somehow as a collection I no longer want to cut them up, they each have a great presence and identity. I am beginning to experiment with them like giant sticks, thinking about their properties for play and the relationship they might have to simple skeleton structures, the constant building and construction here or the lost presence of a basic garden fence.

Washed up objects

I have always loved collecting pebbles and shells along shorelines and the process of getting totally absorbed in scouring grains of sand, barefoot after barefoot. On one of my first days here in Hikkaduwa I visited the Tsunami Photo museum a few kilometres from the town, assembled in the remains of a ladies house, which had been completely destroyed and slowly rebuilt. There were two things that stayed with me a while after leaving, one being the scale and impact and sheer sadness of the destruction and the second being the approach to the definition of the space as a museum. It was precisely a museum in fact, but with a completely homemade, wonky, hand written style of assemblage that made all the terrible images and descriptive text even more powerful and far away from the expectations of western ordered and graphically designed displays. The exhibition contained not only photographs but letters, objects, fabrics and a glass case with an example of the debris and rubble left over on a tiny piece of land. Speaking to the lady who ran the museum, I also learnt of the changes brought about by this disaster, she explained how everything was put into prospective for a lot of local people, that material pursuits and the whole relationship with possessions and objects changes when you lose everything and yet remain in a place where this could potentially happen again. We also talked of how so many people left this local area and moved inland, they are still afraid and they cannot live by and look at the ocean.

I left the museum which is right at the ocean’s edge and I also changed for some moments the way I was viewing it, I was somehow completely compelled to wonder a bit up the shore here, staring out at this mass of water, trying to imagine what had happened and to articulate the incredible and unstoppable power it contains. At some point the clean and perfect beach was broken by a rock barrier, part of the coastal engineering, on my side of this there were suddenly lots of ripples and clusters of debris washed up in various tidelines, the assortment and fragments were sort of beautiful and ironic and as I couldn’t help myself from picking some out, I realised how much they played sculpturally with each other, the fine structure of piece of broken coral that mirrors in size, shape and colour the bleached plastic dislocated dolls arm. The natural and the man-made, blending into one another, where some objects were literally impossible to categorise, totally unified and at the mercy of the waves and the sea. I almost left my gathered collection on the beach, the connection between these pieces and the larger broken materials left behind by the tsunami at first felt insensitive and inappropriate, however I knew that it wasn’t the destruction of these objects in a negative sense of the term that interested me, rather the beauty in the simplicity of the shapes and colours that these became. These were also from a much more recent time period and talked to me more directly of environmental impact and consumerism and waste.

I went several times out to this section of the beach to gather a handful by handful of these unusual washed up bits, I had no plan for them but this process of gathering became really reflective on this completely empty beach. I guessed that this wave barrier meant that this particular tide line was rounding up a combination of the local litter that dogs and weather moved away from the curbs as well as the inevitable scraps of rubbish from Hikkaduwas beach tourism. In my continued pursuit to understand the relationship and impacts of tourism on this town I found it fascinating that in this very concentrated place evidence of the culture and consumption of both Eastern and Western lifestyles was lying out together here peacefully in the sun in a place completely ignored and unused.

I began to plan to carry cut away bottles and bags for my collections it was becoming almost methodical and I was increasingly aware that my activity shared something in common with the rubbish collectors and range of inventors and resourceful individuals in Sri Lanka that gather, reuse, recycle or recreate objects out of discarded stuff. The only difference which I enjoyed was that I was perhaps at the end of this cycle of gathering and re-making, collecting objects that no longer had any capacity for a future use.

Back at the house it was impossible to resist playing with the finds and ordering and arranging them in different ways. Colour was absolutely key to this because the subtle shift in shades seamed to span precisely the colours of the ocean and in little group’s assortment by tone made the collection really intriguing visually. I decided that I might also like to play with the definition of a museum as an attempt to find an interesting space or mechanism to make this collection public. I was interested in how this whole process of collection and display could become a performance or a mobile process replicated in different places.

12 March 2014

Lindsay Sekulowicz Residency Blog

The last bus turned away from the coast, leaving behind the bright white light. The windows became greener and greener and plastic flowers swung above the windscreen as it flew along the turning roads. After several hours it stopped at the bottom of a long steep track and I got off and walked up slowly, past wary eyed dogs sleeping in patches of shade on the path.

I was shown to a dormitory building near to the reserve’s office, and Mr Chitra Sekara arrived shortly after. We didn’t have a big introduction – he just nodded and gestured towards the forest. I put my bags down, put on my boots and we left immediately.

We walked through the dense green almost in silence, with Chitra stopping continually to point out plants, usually calling them by their Latin names as well as Sinhalese. He picked up leaves to put in my book, which became quickly covered in notes and markers so I could find the locations of the plants again. We saw many lizards and a large scorpion, and crushed and smelled the leaves of Cinnamon Zelanicum and Aristolochia Indica – a vine containing aristolochic acid, critical to the survival of some Birdwing butterflies. At some point he turned abruptly and we headed back, and I remembered how quickly the light falls in the forest.

Later, I walked round the edges of the forest close to the dormitory, and sat to draw Osbeckia octandra, a purple-flowered shrub used in the treatment of liver disorders. I stayed there to work for a while but at some point, looked down to see that the tops of my trousers and the ground surrounding me was soaked through with sticky dark blood. I realised that leeches must have gotten inside, and ran back to the dormitory and find the salt that my friends had packed into a paper triangle from the breakfast table that morning.

The dogs here have their own realities. All day they sleep in their shady hiding places, and only in the hours before sunset do they start to appear. As the light faded I washed my clothes clean and they emerged on all sides and took their places on the path towards the forest – stretched out, heads up, relaxed, considering. They leapt up at intervals and begin to fight, all joining in and then settling down again.

Everyone left to bathe before sunset, washing in the river that runs through the forest. The water was clean and we drank from it too. A brother and sister were swimming and washing and as I walked by they saw me and started a diving competition. Flipflops were left on the river bank and on the rocks a collection of belongings: A plate with five small piles of red spice, a plastic bag filled with banana skins, a pair of white trainers with Velcro, a white bucket with a bar of soap beside it on a dip in the rock. I heard a kitten behind a wall and as I peered over to see it a man pointed into the trees and I saw a small black bird with a red beak crying instead.

The sky between the trees turned pink then black like shutters closing. After dark dogs ran laps around and around, panting heavily, sniffing the ground and growling. I fell asleep under a pink mosquito net and they fought through the night.

Each time I entered the forest with Chitra, I found that the mental markers I had constructed were almost entirely useless. The landscape I am familiar with is based on rocks and hills and solitary trees and the density of the forest made it impossible to find such points. Instead I looked at the sky and tried to memorise the patterns that the leaves made against areas of lightness.

First, Elytraria acaulis – small, dark, bluish leaves growing close to the ground. Then we walked further inside the forest, moving slowly and placing our feet carefully, and found Anoectochilus setaceus – an endemic ground orchid with finely veined velvety red leaves, traditionally used to treat snakebites. Chitra placed a protective border of leaves around each plant we found before we left.

Into another valley we were surrounded with Mandura, the pitcher plant Nepenthes distillatoria. It flowered above us – tall stalks of greenish pale flowers, with the huge pitchers beneath, tangling all the way to the ground in various stages of growth and decay. The ground was covered with leeches that make their way up my boots with each step. We both said its name like a mantra as we walked, “mandura, mandura, mandura”.

The light had already dropped on the way out, and as I walked I felt a little curl against my foot. I half turned back and just see a flash of an outline – a tiny snake with its blunt little head raised up. I stopped Chitra and he tutted and pulled me back. Hypnale Hypnale, hump nosed pit viper, it’s colouring was so perfect, that even as I looked directly at it, it seemed to disappear into the path. With its head still reared, Chitra hooked a stick under it, body twisting, and threw it far into the trees and we heard the sound of its body fall in the leaves.

The animals preparing for sunset marked our route out; hornbills and purple faced leaf monkeys and an intensely loud sound of cicadas, like motorbike engines revving in the trees. We saw the marks of a wild boar on the path.

Outside the dormitory after dark I sat with my headtorch and read with the insects and bats swooping at me. Mongooses slept in the roof. The dogs ran, the monkeys were asleep and the sky was filled with green fireflies.

Finally, with some persuasion, I was allowed to go into the forest by myself. But not further than the second Weniwel tree. I found a small stream next to a big mahogany tree that was always filled with the leaf monkeys, and drew the damp earth covered with Acranthera ceylanica and fallen leaves. The day passed with only the monkeys and birds. When the cicadas began I knew it was nearly time to leave.

For several days there were rainstorms in the afternoon, which often stopped work. Once a monkey warned me first, by pissing on me and very nearly on my drawing. When I looked up it was staring down at me. At that moment the sky broke open with a rainstorm and I slid down the paths out of the forest, passing Sunil on a motorbike going up the main path back into the forest to gather leeches – the yellow skinned ones for medicine.

In the early evenings I sat with sugary Nescafe and watched the birds. They appeared during the pauses in the rain, metallic blue flashes against the grey sky and dark trees. Black and yellow beaks, red beaks, a bird of paradise with a long black and white tail – I had no knowledge of the species so everything was reduced to movement and colours. Once the director of the reserve came with his family, and we played badminton at sunset as it rained down until we couldn’t see the shuttlecock in the air anymore.

After dark at night, we went back into the forest again. Chitra, Sunil, myself and another forester who wanted to find snakes. The shadows of the trees were lit only by fireflies and we moved very quietly using red light head torches. Chitra stopped us, pointing to small set of red spots shining back from the trees. As we walked, the trees revealed many more small shadows. Sometimes we shone our torches on full beam and saw huge round eyes illuminated. It was the endemic slender loris (Loris tardigradus), tiny and exquisitely beautiful, clinging to the trees and turning their heads to stare at us. A small owl sat close to us for a long time – the rare endemic Serendib Scops owl, Otus thilohoffmanni.

On the leaves of the trees sleeping kangaroo lizards, Otocryptis wiegmanni, hung suspended. They held on tightly with their hands, with their white bellies exposed and legs and tails gently swinging below. I kept shining my torch in the ditches to look for frogs and insects. We found another snake, pale orange and shining, too fast to catch but we watched it climb far into the trees above our heads, then walked slowly out, with our torches off then because our eyes had adjusted to the light.

31 January 2014

Tom Pritchard Residency Blog

Two and a half days here and 3 and a half since leaving Glasgow I am settling to the task at hand. This residency poses a number of possibilities that are somewhat outside of ‘normal’ residency practice:

The place: a hot, sunny, beach side tourist mecca so while the tourist element does little for me, the idea of working facing an ocean in shorts evidently does.

The climate: a hot, sunny 12 hour sunshine kind of day where working between 11am and 4pm is of the static under a fan kind.

The Biennale: In the middle of my time here will be the Colombo Art Biennale, a great opportunity but gives a sense of target to many working here.

The material: I have come here, primarily, to write. So, joyously, I am. But this element of my practice is still new enough that it is and will take some negotiation as I dedicate these weeks to it.

My proposal to come here was so: I am interested in exploring how working with the Sinhala language might introduce elements of abstraction and sound-emphasis to my writing. This may come out in song, physical exploration but most of all I hope it will be largely in writing, as I think this will pose the strongest challenge to me creatively. Today I bought and English-Sinhala-Tamil dictionary and listened into numerous conversations on the bus and as friendly chaps chatting to me as I walked fielded phone calls in their native tongue.

However, arriving here, I also want to write through listening to the space, understanding how I can write with the ‘heat’ of performance throughout the day, carry the fire. Find a practice. Aim at poetry. Land wherever the experience takes us. I have begun this by devouring Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down The Bones as a way to ground myself into the idea of practice. If you haven’t read it, you really probably should as it’s very good!

And so I have been beginning to fill notebooks (I find it hard to settle to one at a time) and writing in different places. I am recording a lot of the sound in the environments where I’m writing, maybe there will be something emerge out of that in time as source material for the work…who knows, it’s all very open for me right now.

And for the Biennale I will be performing a couple of improvised solos at the opening nights as part of the ongoing As Yet Untitled series which began in 2011. this one, Making History will be part response to the space as I find it (full of art works so hardly bare of inspiration!) and part exploration of ideas of death as a part of positive history, the necessity for it and the rituals we place around it. There might be some local performers joining me too, which would be nice. Anyway, I am tracking my time through sunsets so here are the three thus far and a little scribble from yesterday…

A lone dog stalks the beach,
Sniffing, wearily, near sizzling bodies,
Burned brown by the tropical sun and
He thinks Stupid Bastards.

He thinks I am hungry,
I am ragged, I am hurt,
I know this because he limps and
As he does his head jolts.

The action misses the
Sharp intake of breath it deserves,
But maybe he’s braver than us or
Just accustomed to the pain.

His tail hangs of itself,
no great flag to his self-esteem,
It is behind him like his past and
Appears gladly forgotten.

Stalking the beach I wonder
What is he looking for?
Scraps discarded, a chunk of passed
Life presented by the future willing sea?

Or perhaps he’s on holiday too,
Enjoying the peaceful repetition
Of the water spilling but never quite
Reaching us until we’re ready.

There are many nearby on the road,
But here he is unique among all of us,
He stands out. He limps and
Disappears before the sun sets

28 January 2014

Sita Pieraccini: Beyond – Last Days at Sura Medura

Commercial camouflage, industry, hand made fakes, recycling and a culture of offering – processes of change, money making and everyday life. The last few days of the residency were spent realising two main projects – a photography/video documentary of costume pieces staged in everyday spaces and the creation of hilly structures in wood and paper.

Industrious Bodies

I’ve been using photography and film to document people at work. The abundance of materials and colours, both man made and natural, have been a constant inspiration to me visually. I’ve found myself wanting to work with a combination of found objects, man-made materials and organic material like wood and banana leaf.

I’ve been looking particularly at the different physicality’s of the people I’ve seen in both urban and rural environments. I’ve been interested to see how the person doing the craft or labour almost completely physically embodies what they are doing through the sheer repetition of the action.

This led to the creation of a series of staged images entitled ‘Keep Moving’ which incorporates costume. The images look at visual expressions of flights of the imagination and perhaps an insight into the more poetic world of day dream, imagination and play. Focus was given to the idea of the outdoors seeping into the everyday and the notion that if you stop moving, nature or society will catch up and consume you.

As documentary style snap shots or portrait shots, the photographs are an attempt to create and ‘capture’ a heightened expression of the physical experience of being in that place. I’m interested in people and their relationship to their surroundings, the materials and structures around them, as well as their individual personalities and how I can use a staged image to present both worlds as one. In another way, they are almost like alternative holiday snaps of the familiar places and faces I’d encountered during my time in Hikkaduwa.

Inspiration for one of the costume pieces – a large plastic rucksack – came from the industry of replicas and fakes I saw everywhere in both Hikkaduwa and Colombo. Garment making is the biggest industry in Sri Lanka but it was the much practiced process of copying designs of popular items to create fake or imitation pieces which I found most interesting. I bought a fake branded rucksack in Colombo and I was charmed by how ‘almost’ perfect it was – it was nearly the same thing, but not quite. It was familiar but as if it was something else in disguise. It became a popular piece for the youngest of those featured in the series who likened it to a large, colourful school bag.

Everyday routines, the environment, transformations, materials and the staged image, continually feed into my practice and play with performance. The opportunity to develop a new project using new mediums like costume and photography with people from the local area has aided a clear development in my work with narrative.

I’m interested in creating an open space for the poetic and absurd to coexist. For the photography/costume project I tried to maintain a minimalist approach to the materials I worked with, following my instincts and my own curiosity into the world surrounding me. I then worked with the people featured in the images to create compositions that were a mixture of their everyday routine as well as something more fantastical based on the theme of ‘Keep Moving’. In this way, each image was a communication, a play with the person featured in the work. The live staging of the shots with people wearing unusual attachments to the body was a fun and interesting process. Their staged presence within the image presented the live experience alongside the more cerebral or imagined body experience of what it is like to physically be in that space and what the environment means to that person in their everyday life and routine. All of them invested in the play of the work in their own way and I enjoyed seeing and hearing what they thought of it all. The first response to the images and the costume attachments was often ‘lasani’ which means ‘beautiful’. I liked that the strange costume pieces, which were often uncomfortable or restrictive to wear, were embraced by those who wore them in the pictures and that they felt they could take some ownership over them or relate to them in their own way.

From industrious bodies to industry itself.

I visited a tea factory just outside Galle which still uses old victorian machinery to process their famous ‘white tip’ or ‘silver tip’ tea. The visit left a big impression on me. The machines were old, with mechanisms showing and they were full of character. The female operators who fed the machines tea leaves and shifted processed tea to different parts of the factory were also interesting.

I was intrigued by the implication of physicality and the body in a duet of forms I saw being created by the factory. The tea mounds seem to sit back silently, born out of the continuous spewing out of rich, black product from the large, victorian machines. I instantly liked them and their character and began to create manifestations of their form and shape, translating their weight and texture in different medium.

They sit in a never-ending down pour

– an automised environmental catastrophe.

The weight of waste.

The guilt of too much.

The constant feeding,

blinding all the senses.

The machines produce,

and the people consume,

and we construct our lives

as dictated by those who

want more

and those who

can produce more.

All the while the thinning hands of the feeder of machines grow stiff like bark.

The work is still ongoing and I am currently collating all my visual and audio material to aid in the creation of a performance piece which will be presented at the end of February in Glasgow. More details to follow soon….

…On further reflection, I see that throughout my work I’ve been looking at ways to bring the body and person closer to an experience of something. Immersive in someway but I aim to capture the imagination, pausing it at the point where both worlds are in shot. Being escapist is freeing. Operating only in the imagination is dangerous and can sometimes aid in a masking of the world and self delusion. But when things are not fair and we don’t understand, where can we go to find something that is stronger, wiser and more comforting than anything else? I think it is in our connection to each other and to the earth. I realise that everyone I met on my residency already have a close connection with the environment and with their daily work and practice. There is a culture of offering which seems to influence a balance for many people – a balance between themselves and the world of abundance which surrounds them perhaps. People are very hard working and determined in lots of ways and sometimes being imaginative, creative and playful gets set aside as not as constructive. However, when creatively engaged, as were those in the photographs, there was a clear mindfulness and focus which I admired. It’s an honesty, which, as a artist I both crave and fear. All in all, I want to say Thank You to those who played with me, to those who showed me their beautiful country and to those who helped me on the residency. My imagination has been well and truly captured.

24 January 2014

Jo Hodges & Robbie Coleman: Residency Blog

New Years Day

We flew out of a monochrome ,rainy, cold, windswept South West Scotland into a full colour high definition Sri Lanka and were immediately knocked sideways by the humidity and temperature. It took a few days to recalibrate our bodies and our thought processes are still being worked on.

Our house is a bit further into the jungle than Sura Medura, the main residency house, and this location has become more and more valuable to us. As we have got to know the area a bit better we are realizing how great the divide is between our side of the train track and the beach side. The beach and the road that runs alongside it is a continuous strip of hotels, shops and bars that are servicing the surfing/tourist community. It provides a huge amount of employment for the village, which spreads into the jungle on the other side of the tracks.

This uneasy, though vital alliance provides us with much food for thought, especially as we are provided with food at one of the beach side hotels and so regularly dip into it. More and more we are drawn back into where we live and our lovely neighbours. Waking up at this house is a fabulous experience, the dawn chorus is a totally exotic mixture of monkey arguments and bizzare bird calls.

The heat and humidity have been a real challenge with the slightest exertion leading to being covered from head to toe in sweat. This affects our brains too and we feel that we are constantly thinking underwater, trying to get some clarity, if only the surface could be reached. The occasional time that we end up in an air conditioned place has immediate effect, we get lively, start chatting at high speed and feel an instant relief. The heat and the pace of life here have a knock on effect when trying to get anything done – everyone wants to help and will give you an answer, that often turns out to be some semi version of reality. By the time we have got on a crowded bus to the town down the road, negotiated the barrage of traffic, tuk tuks, trucks, buses and mopeds all belching out fumes, and have gone in and out of endless dusty shops, trying to locate a few materials, a whole day has passed. Making work here it seems, will require constant adaptation both in the form of the work and in the timescale it will take to make it.

A further impact of the climate is impact it has on our sleep. We are mapping these sweaty and disturbed sleeping patterns in a series of photos of our morning sheets.

We have become fascinated with the bags that the street food vendors use. These are home made, usually out of children’s homework or office paper waste, so you can be standing on the corner having a snack and reading some childs attempts at maths, though our favourite has been a list of spare parts for a Sri Lankan military jet.

This is leading us into developing a series of our own designs which we will copy and make into bags to give to vendors to use and become part of a new ephemeral communication system.

Other work we are developing includes a video piece, based on a local woman who runs an informal and unofficial Tsunami Museum in her own house. The house is on the coast and was mostly destroyed by the wave. She has moved back into part of it but uses the rest as the museum. It consists of hundreds of unframed and informal photographs, drawings, press clippings and personal testimony as well as her own philosophical musings. All pinned up on walls without any sense of design or order.

Kamani is there every day to talk to the visitors, telling her story and listening to theirs. Because she lives there too, she cannot leave and feels a powerful obligation to stay there as long as there is someone to listen. This open ended commitment to what she is doing is both moving and troubling, will she stay for ever, reliving and reinterpreting a catastrophe? Or will she somehow escape it and be free and let her house be a home again. She is very articulate about this side of her project, but has no easy answers. This strange sense of entrapment will be the focus of the work.

The vitality and optimism of the people here are a source of constant wonder and inspiration. It seem to us that in most parts of the UK we seem to have lost that sense of adaptability, resilience and ingenuity that runs through society here.

We stand, flat footed in wonder.

18 December 2013

Sita Pieraccini: Residency Blog

Last week of the residency at Sura Medura…

My coloured notepad is almost full. The studio looks like a children’s arts and crafts workshop. I’ve been making. Dilani’s children have been helping too.

Our final presentation is this week on Friday. I want to update my blog prior to this to keep a more formal record of beginning, middle and…beyond.

I’ve visited a lot of different places over the past few weeks. I’ve walked and talked, surfed and safaried, ridden on trains, tuk-tuks, jeeps and bikes – dripping sweat surprising new parts of the body. The heat and humidity can be oppressive but it’s not kept me down. I’ve been all about the intensive touristing.

Our expedition to Tissa for the Yala and Bundala Safaris was an incredible experience. It was trying physically, my body being bounced, projected and rattled by local transport as well as by the safari Jeeps over the course of our three day visit. However, to sit in and witness some wonderful small moments of wildlife was mesmerising. Yala is a vast park. You don’t see much apart from land and trees and maybe the odd bird at first glance, but with the tracker spotting a large variety of species throughout the day, your awareness becomes heightened and you start to notice more and more. The scene that unfolded in one murky puddle between a pair of terrapins, a stork and a frog was like an epic tale of life, death, love and survival – all encapsulated in the form of a well played game of hide and seek.

The past week I’ve stayed at Sura Medura, gathering materials to work and experiment with. It’s nice to be ‘home’, my being nurtured by Dilani’s wonderful food and her playful children with whom I’ve had the pleasure to create with. I’m working on a structure made from wood and paper which takes it’s inspiration from the tea factory experience and the heaps and mounds of tea I saw being created there by the old Victorian machines.

The mounds of tea at the factory made an impression on me. The continuous outpour of this textured, valuable product was a feast for the senses – rich, raw and somehow feminine. The smell, tactility and mass implied a simultaneous density and lightness, while worlds of process, environment and consumption were somehow manifest in these humble sitting heaps. In a similar way in which the man from Close Encounters can’t get the image of the mountain out of his head, the shape, form and texture of these mounds kept coming back to me and I’ve found myself creating my own models of the structures.

As I create more and research into potential materials for the piece I find some interesting crossovers highlighted by the locals I’ve shared my idea with. For example, it is a tradition in Sri Lanka for a new house to be blessed by a ceremony which is conducted inside a paper house, constructed by a local craftsmen. The decorative paper house sits inside the new house and is where the monk carries out the ceremony. I visited a paper factory near Hikkaduwa and discovered hand-made paper made from tea dust. Apart from being inspired by the stacks of hand-made paper created from recycled materials, including elephant dung! I felt immensely inspired to be in a working factory where the recycling and reusing of waste materials was being so passionately and industriously manufactured. The owner was very nice in showing me around and explaining where he gets his waste materials from and how he makes the paper. I find the recycling of materials and the initiative and energy of the people who do so very exciting and infectious. I’d love to see Sri Lanka becoming pioneers for sustainable living. It’s already incredibly inspirational on that front the way it is I think.

In between my work on ‘John & Yoko’ (my nickname for my tea mound structures because they resemble the image of the long haired couple from their bed in days), I’ve also a photography project on the go featuring pieces of costume I’ve created in response to the environment and stories both imagined and real. I’ve been inspired by the ever fading folk culture and traditions of folk songs and poetry amidst people from varying labours. Song is an important part of life and culture here it seems – many love to sing, and so do I. Kavi songs or song poetry can be heard online but there are not many english translations although I’m aware they are often about the land and work and the feelings of the worker etc. I find it interesting mainly for the area of voice and environment and how song is very much a way of connecting to the environment especially when also incorporating working with the land whether it be in the paddy fields or in mining for gems. I’ve yet to include song in to my work, but at the moment, I’ve been using imagery and costume to create a fantastical expression of an experience in a particular environment. I hope to take this out into the local community and stage such images featuring some local residents of Hikkaduwa.

I’ve also had a play with the sounds Mark has captured over the past few weeks. Real recorded sounds are great to work with. I also have memories of most of the sounds Mark recorded as I was often with him so it has been nice to listen back to these and recall experiences in my development of new performance work and narratives. Our first improvisation was two days ago and we created a sound score together then I used my own memories and associations with the sounds to generate movement sequences. It’s all happening.