Well then – this is long overdue…
I thought I’d post up the work I did over the weekend – the group from We Haunt ( http://www.greycontent.org.uk/wehaunt ) which unfortunately I’m not a ‘regular’ member of this year…However, I went along to a group excursion to Susie’s farm in Pembrokeshire over the weekend – and got involved in making some work and some photos.
On Saturday night we all got involved in Michal’s (www.michaliwanowski.com) photography around the farm with his technique of using a high-power torch and long-exposure. The results were really amazing…Here’s my ‘portrait’:
For my part, I found it quite overwhelming being in the space as I don’t usually work in site-specific performance of the kind the other artists are perhaps more well-versed in. But I forced myself to go round and do some automatic writing on the Saturday and then boiled it down and did a roving performance on Sunday – in the same car but covered in feathers.
After my initial writing, I decided on three loose ‘rules’ for the writing, which were:
1. The birds are in control.
2. The farm is a machine.
3. I am a cog in that machine, but I do not know what I am for.
Here’s what I wrote:
I: (by the barn at the top of the hill)
On the roof here too, loudly. Spare barbed wire, coiled in crowns, slithering. To keep them out – not me in. I think that’s it. It seems to be growing. The vines on the back wall pierce brick like skin, growing. Coiled, ready for a meal of something. There are tools, but not for anything I can do; shaped for elements I can’t see or touch or harvest. Symbols which might be language. I recognise the skull at least, and the X, but it doesn’t translate. Arrow-shaped bodies dart past, taking lives in their mouths without chewing.
II: (by the dairy)
I know they need fluid, but not which kind, or if I am the right part to offer it. Sounds through pipes, instrument-light, flutter-roof, bangbangbang low- rumble corrugated doors in stereoscopic sound. They want it, the gauges are their eyes above and they might never come down unless I find my part. It is rusty and the roof is scratching at my scalp again. In the other room duracel-manic-flap, back and forth, one is here and here is not the sky. There’s a code and it must be one I have inside me if they need me, here.
III: (by the branding gate/machine)
It is inviting, high enough for me, but my horns were lost among the grass some time ago where they took root and sprouted more of these devices. But they are not ready yet, still waiting to flower; cog-bloom, bolt- sprout, mechanism rooting. My feet are soft in the concrete, wet with dew and I want to go through but my nose does not have a ring to it and I cannot sing like the trees, my instructions. I want to go through but I don’t know who this is for, or what it did the last time, or the time before, or the time before.
IV: (in the shed with the caravan and the horse-box)
There are eyes from the slot in the box and at the other end a tail, geared and hydrolic. A lolling tongue, patterned and floral, panting. It must be tired from all the running and from having people stepping in and out of its ribs. But at least, I think, it knows what it is. It does not have eyes like mine, its ears are pricked up and signalling. It sings with the fluid machine as I must, or else the clouds will scatter, tatter, pillow-fight blizzard will bleed from above. I am a water-boatman skimming milk, an earthworm flying in the silt.