Residue
Talk (Transcript)
Before I talk about the residency in any detail, I should perhaps explain a little of how I came to be here at OVADA so as to put the residency in some sort of context.
I took my first degree at Brookes here in Oxford, graduating way back in 1993, and am now currently studying for my MA, also at Brookes, in Contemporary Art and Music.
And although the period in between has been rather long, the themes which inspired me then are still inspiring me, and shaping the work I make today. In fact they’ve been firing my imagination ever since I was a child. And those themes are memory, the past and in particular the traumas of the past.
Of course as a child, the past fascinated me for reasons I could not even begin to explain. Even now, I cannot say why as a child I was so enthralled by an old cannon ball, or an old pair of shoes. Back then of course, the concept of the past was very different to what it is to me now, it belonged solely to the realms of the imagination, it was magical, as real, or unreal as goblins and pixies.
Yet, in museums, castles, in the streets of the city, tangible evidence for this magical world could be found everywhere. It was as if the distinction between what I imagined and what I could see in the real world were blurred.
Of course, now, as an adult, this distinction is sharp. I know the past is very real, and traumatic events such as those which I’ve been researching, namely World War 1 and the Holocaust are testament to that. But to access them still requires the imagination and the best way for me to articulate my imagination is of course through art.
But what is it which draws me to these events and to places such as Ypres and Auschwitz? Well, it’s a question I have been asked many times, and one for which prior to this residency I had no answer. I knew inside but could not explain to others.
As St. Augustine said in answer to the question of ‘What is Time?’:
“If no-one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I do not know."
So what is the answer? What is my work essentially about? And how has the residency here at OVADA helped?
To explain this I shall read a short extract from my initial proposal.
“One of the most poignant aspects surrounding Auschwitz, and the Holocaust in general, is that of people in transit; people waiting to go somewhere; people arriving. Today, all that remains of most of those desperate travellers is their luggage; residues of extinguished lives. The location of OVADA, so near the central bus station, makes it an excellent place in which to explore this area. Here too, people are in transit; coming and going, carrying luggage, anonymous to everyone else – just as most of those who died in Auschwitz, in the Holocaust, or in wars and conflicts throughout history are anonymous to us today.”
Now, as you may or may have not have noticed, my work has deviated from this somewhat and there are a number of reasons why this has been the case.:
One was that I couldn’t see how this line of investigation would help me answer the question as to why I am interested and, before I could go any further with my investigations into the Holocaust, I needed to know.
And secondly there was the nature of my artistic practice which has evolved through my studying for an MA. One of the things I always used to do before I started the course was, I would have an idea and within a very short while, almost instantaneously, a thought as to its finished form.
I would think of something (an idea) and say ‘that will be a video’, or ‘that will be a painting’ or a ‘piece of sonic art,’ and therefore, before I’d even explored the idea, it would quickly be constrained by the limitations (the constraints), of the chosen medium. But now, I take the idea and explore it using a range of strategies and allow the idea to find the medium to which it is best suited.
When I first stood in the gallery downstairs and looked at the space, I found myself thinking of how I might fill it according to my proposal: a few paintings here, a video installation there and I realized I was falling back into bad habits. However as quickly as I realized it, I stopped, but I knew then that I would have to have a totally different approach to this space and this residency as a result.
So, just as I did with Auschwitz, Ypres, The University Parks and even Cuckoo Lane in Headington, I began to research the area around the gallery: Gloucester Green. I researched its history and more importantly I walked.
With regards its history, one fact in particular took my interest and that was one I found in The Encyclopaedia of Oxford. The entry for Gloucester Green read as follows:
"The open area outside the City Wall bounded by Worcester Street, George Street, Gloucester Street and, to the north, by Beaumont Street. There was probably housing here in mediaeval times. After the Black Death in 1348 it became a derelict and decayed area known as Broken Hayes..."
In the 17th century, Anthony Wood called it a ‘rude, broken and undigested’ place and it was sometimes the scene for executions one of which concerned a woman who was hanged at Green Ditch (now St. Margaret’s Road) but revived prior to anatomization at St. John’s College. However as Anthony Wood describes…
“…the bayllives of the towne hearing of it… went between 12 and one of the clock at night to the house where she laid, and putting her into a coffin carried her into Broken hayes, and by a halter about her neck drew her out of it, and hung her on a tree there.”
As it was, the name Broken Hayes remained associated with the area for hundreds of years and indeed I believe one of the apartment blocks built during the recent redevelopment is called The Hayes.
But what interested me the most out of all this was the idea of an inhabited place becoming uninhabited, following the trauma of the Black Death. There was a link with the themes I’d discussed in my proposal: people in transit, people leaving the area, and almost inconceivable numbers of dead.
Oxford itself lost around a third to a half of its population during that time and the contrast between the town before and after must have been quite appalling.
One description of the site now occupied by New College expresses this very well:
“The gloomiest picture was that drawn by a jury in 1378 of a thirteen-acre site in the north-east corner of the town: the land, neither built-up nor enclosed, was a dump for filth and corpses, a resort of criminals and prostitutes..."
So taking this idea of depopulation, I looked at the square during the day when it was busy and at night when it was empty as a means of illustrating this, and when I read the following in Neil Hanson’s book The Unknown Soldier regarding World War 1, a whole raft of possibities began to emerge.
"'The reading of the battalion roll-call must have broken the hearts of all who heard it - 'a hollow square of jaded, muddy figures... A strong voice... calls one name after another from a Roll lit by a fluttering candle, shaded by the hand of one of the remaining Sergeant Majors.' Name after name went unanswered; each silence, another man wounded, missing or dead.'"
The Hollow Square was for me, Gloucester Green or Broken Hayes. The unanswered names, the names of those who’ve passed through over the centuries and in particular those names lost to time which disappeared in the mid 14 th century.
But it was the walking which was to prove the most valuable part of the residency.
Having a space here for a fixed period of time allowed me to have not only a starting point and an end point for my walks, it also provided me with a space in which works inspired by those walks could be realized collectively and in situ.
Anyone working as an artist in Oxford will know, finding space in which to work is pretty difficult and works might have to be created one at a time or in different locations. Having as large a space as I did, meant that I was able to create works together and as a result ‘dialogues’ developed between them.
With the walks, I first of all chose a route. I wanted one that would start and end at the gallery but which wouldn’t take too long to complete. I was also interested in looking at a part of the city that wasn’t so familiar and eventually chose a route that led me around the castle via Tidmarsh Lane, Paradise Street, Castle Street and Bulwarks Alley.
And as I walked I began to write down anything that took my interest, just a few words.
child's coat
discarded blanket
child cries
letterbox
old confetti
empty cycle tracks
gate slams
footsteps
I was inspired to do this by another extract from Neil Hanson’s book ‘The Unknown Soldier’ in which a soldier describes his life in the trenches:
The soldier writes:
“Decayed sandbags, new sandbags, boards, dropped ammunition, empty tins, corrugated iron, a smell of boots and stagnant water and burnt powder and oil and men, the occasional bang of a rifle and the click of a bolt, the occasional crack of a bullet coming over, or the wailing diminuendo of a ricochet. And over everything, the larks...”
The simple use of words makes this passage very stark and immediate. We can see it because in our own minds we can easily conjure objects such as sandbags, boards, empty tins and smells such as old boots and stagnant water.
So, when I came back to the gallery I wrote the words down in columns on the walls and straight away I was reminded of the war memorials I’d seen recently in Ypres. Columns of words like the columns of names on the Menin Gate; disjointed, out of context and somewhat meaningless.
Looking at those names in Ypres, it was hard to imagine them as people, just as it was hard to find the individuals amongst the mountains of possessions in Auschwitz. It was difficult to think of all the things that surrounded those names, or lay behind those names, the families of those who’d died, their friends, the towns and villages in which they lived, their hopes, dreams and so on.
And trying to fill in these gaps led me to make prose versions of the words I’d collected on my walk. So:
child's coat
discarded blanket
child cries
etc.
Became:
A child's coat hangs on a bollard and nearby lies a discarded blanket. Up ahead, a child cries. I look; a letterbox takes my attention for some reason. On the pavement, old confetti appears stuck down. There's a row of empty cycle tracks. The street is quiet, a gate slams and I hear footsteps.
This ‘filling in the gaps’ became vital for me in order to answer the question I posed earlier: that being ‘what is it which draws me to these (traumatic) events and to places such as Ypres and Auschwitz?
So I’ll conclude by reading from an entry in my residency Blog which I hope explains things at least a little.
The entry is titled ‘From Dinosaurs to Human Beings’ and reads as follows:
“After yesterday, I began to think about the works I've produced so far on this residency and what it is that links them; not that there should be a link - I just know that there is one. Despite the differences, there is an underlying theme which unites the drawings, the text pieces, the deckchairs and the paintings. So what is it?
In answering this I have started to think about... dinosaurs. Not something which first springs to mind when looking at my work and if I mention Jurassic Park, then it might seem that I'm losing the plot altogether, but there is a sequence in this film which is relevant to my work.
In the film, the visitors to the Park are shown an animated film, which explains how the Park's scientists created the dinosaurs. DNA, they explain, is extracted from mosquitoes trapped in amber and where there are gaps in the code sequence, so the gaps are filled with the DNA of frogs; the past is in effect brought back to life with fragments of the past and parts of the modern, living world. This 'filling in the gaps' is exactly what I have done throughout my life when trying to imagine the past, particularly the past of the city in which I live.
As well as reading about and drawing dinosaurs, as a child, I liked to create and map worlds; countries which I would build from fragments of the world around me; forests, mountains and plains - unspoilt landscapes. And in these worlds there would exist towns and cities, created from 'the best bits' of those I had visited.
These invented worlds became, as I grew up, the 'invented' or imagined landscapes of Oxford's past; landscapes that were - just as they still are - created from fragments, parts of the past which are still extant in the city; old buildings, walls, objects and so on. Between these structures, these fragments, I would fill the gaps, with my own imagination, with thoughts derived from my own experience. The city's past and the past in general, as it exists within my mind, is then, to use the metaphor of cloning in Jurassic Park, a cloned dinosaur. The extant buildings, structures and objects within museums, are like the mosquitoes trapped inside the amber. They are broken strands of DNA. All that is required is for me to fill the gaps, and this I can do with my own DNA. I am in effect, the frog.
This metaphor is interesting in that DNA patterns are, of course, unique to everyone. My DNA is different to everybody else's as there's is to mine. Therefore, using my imagination to plug in the gaps of the past, means that the 'past' will comprise large parts of my own experience; my dinosaur will contain elements of my own being. But although my DNA is unique, it is nonetheless derived from my own past, elements have been passed down by my ancestors from time immemorial. The code which makes me who I am, comprises parts of people I know now (parents and grandmothers), people I knew (grandfathers and great-grandmother) and people lost to the past altogether (great-great grandparents and so on). What interests me about this, is that, through stating above how 'my dinosaur will contain elements of my own being' I can now see that it will also be comprised of elements of hundreds – indeed thousands - of people, the majority of whom I will of course never know and who have been dead for centuries. I like to think therefore, that 'my dinosaur' and my imagination aren't entirely unique.
The philosopher Henri Bergson says of the past:
“I believe that our whole psychical existence is something just like this single sentence... I believe that our whole past still exists.”
Given that DNA strands are made up of letters I found this quote particularly interesting.
And this leads me to look at paths - not the route I walk around the castle, or those recorded by my GPS receiver (although these are entirely relevant) but to the paths taken by my ancestors so that I might be brought into being. The chances of any of us being who we are is practically nil. In order for me to be born, I had to be conceived at the exact time I was conceived, any difference in time - even a split second - and I wouldn't be me. Also, everything leading up to that moment had to be exactly as it was; anything done differently by my parents, no matter how small, how seemingly irrelevant, any deviation from the path and I would not be me. This is extraordinary enough, but when one considers this is the same for my entire family tree, again, all the way back to time immemorial, then one realises, to quote Eric Idle in 'Monty Python's Meaning of Life', 'how incredibly unlikely is your birth'. We are all impossibly unlikely. The chances of all our ancestors walking the exact paths which they walked through their lives is almost nil.
Therefore, my walks, my mapping, my identifying (seemingly irrelevant) objects, my recording them, my palimpsests, are all linked. Memorialising objects (disposable or otherwise), snatches of conversation and so on, inscribing them on a slab, shows how vital these fragments are to future generations and to me in terms of my own past. But how does this fit in with my work on Auschwitz-Birkenau, death camps and World War I?
These 'arenas' of death were constructions (although the carnage of a battlefield was often random, the battles themselves were always planned, 'constructed' for the purpose) in stark contrast to the rather arbitrary paths our ancestors took so that we might each be born. Death in these places was designed, it was planned, particularly with regards to the horrors of the death camps and by looking at these places, by visiting them, by looking at the seemingly irrelevant, everyday objects left behind, we can fill in the gaps, each using our own experiences so as to imagine the lives and the deaths of others. We understand what it means to be human, the near impossibility of birth and the absolute certainty of death.
Imagining a group of a several hundred people walking to their deaths, whether down a path to the gas chambers, or on a road to the Front, we can easily imagine the route; we can in places walk the route today. But imagining the paths walked by thousands of people through time, to bring each of the individual victims into being is almost impossible: I say almost impossible, but, as I've written above regarding each of our births, it's possible in the end.
Looking at death therefore is to look at life and its inestimable value, whoever we are and wherever we live. It is to understand what it means to be human and to cherish the lives of others.
This residency has therefore been vitally important for me in providing space in which not simply to create artwork, but, more importantly, to consider the reasons why I’m doing it. It is a step to the next phase of my artistic practice and I’d like to thank OVADA for giving me the chance to do it.