Artist in Residence


 I tried to follow Kate's example and think through what it means to be artist in residence on a project like this.  On reflection I am not at that point yet. I am holding the project at arms length in my mind. It is the next thing to be getting on with, not the thing to be getting on with. Its nice to be blogging again together it is a space I have missed. In the final analysis at least you know one other person will read this writing carefully.  Also it lays testament to a history of thinking, something to return too.

I am worried about the tree project in that we have the massive problems facing the world, we have science, and we have the symbolic meaning of trees, the inherent poetics of them.  In one world an artist could just go with the poetics, of bark of sap and heart wood but that would not fit our treescapes project we are working with root and branch.

At the moment I feel most interested in dead trees Paul Nash's photographs summoning up the killing fields of the first world war.  There is a dead tree near Kate's cottage in Dorset, I intend to photograph it next week if it hasn't blown down in the wind. In the cemetery where I walk my dog there is a dead tree, the bark is destroyed all the way around by people hanging their fighting dogs from them to strengthen their jaws.  This is an everyday thing, just like the 10 people I saw this morning buying heroine through the gate.  I chatted to them and they played with the dog briefly before heading off on the march to find somewhere to shoot up. In the scheme of things you  have to let the dead trees and  heroine addicts go, you have to let it drift by.  This I think is about keeping the bark of your humanity intact enough to allow enough of something, perhaps Lacan's Jouissance to flow.  I think for Nash the dead trees were a reminder of everything that had been lost in a nightmare he would never wake from. 

Trees and life seem to go together well, somewhere between analogy and metaphor we will make new meanings and we will share them but they will not be what we plan or wish for.

Comments

  1. Kate PahlAugust 10, 2021 at 8:44 AM

    Its good to be blogging again. I think in this project we need to go beyond some of the things that happened in the past where we were trying to understand each other's disciplines and in the end we just ended up being defensive. Here there is a chance to build something together, which is why I started with Den Building.

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