Performing to no one and yet with everything
Walking in quantum fields
“Physicists tell us that our reading of time is crude, but artists have always known this; they constantly mine the past even as they’re imagining possible futures. How can change — be it new machines or new ideas — be visualised if it can’t be first imagined? And who would ever assume that imaginations run along straight lines. Most artists are, in some shape or form, time-travellers and ghost-whisperers.” Jennifer Higgie, The Other Side.
I open the front door to be greeted by a blast of cool air and the darkness outside.
I take a breath, psych myself up, and step out into the early morning. I have my camera bag slung over one shoulder, a bag of neon fabric slung over the other shoulder, and my camera tripod in my hand.
I’m heading for the unknown. At this early hour, all I know is that I’m looking for an adventure. I want to discover something. I want to connect with a new sensation.
There is no one about, and I’m amazed at myself, that my curiosity is greater than my fear.
Months ago, I started visualising neon forms moving through the landscape. When walking in the woods, strips of neon would leap out at me from the trees. Marks left by the foresters, in a language of symbols I didn’t understand.
This is where the humans have been, those neon flashes told me. This is where man chops down living trees to create an easier path through the woods. Get out of my way, these signs say.
Leaving the audience behind
How do ideas come to me? Slowly dripping into my consciousness like a leaky tap that, with rising irritation, keeps me distracted.
Until one day it is present, fully formed, undeniable, and I find myself buying three bolts of synthetic chiffon in a fabric shop in Shepherd’s Bush.
These three colours, pink, green and yellow have morphed into many forms in my work over the last few years. They are my fellow performers in the field.
I bring the synthetic chiffon, from its natural urban habitat, to a foreign landscape, full of brambles, branches, and mud — all threats to the threads of this delicate weave. Not unlike myself, another urban transplant, there is a brash absurdity to the culture clash.
For two years of my life, before moving to Somerset, I had been training myself in an elite institution to withstand the gaze of an audience. People watched me perform rituals in mark-making and movement, as I tried to articulate the various ways in which my body makes an impact in the world.
Now, in the summer of 2020, with the virus multiplying its way through the population, I was left with me, 3 bolts of neon, the birds and the trees.
It was a relief. Leaving the audience behind.
Being seen has always been a tension for me. Something that’s both a desire and a revulsion. I live on a spectrum between hiding and performing.
I empathised with Bjork when she said…
“In my most natural state, I’ll be introverted for say, 6 days in a row, and then on the 7th day I’ll become very extroverted, completely inside-out. Then I’ll have to go back inside myself. Sometimes the change can be quite forceful — it’s something I can’t really control. It’s a bit like the ocean and the tides.”
Learning to perform during my MFA programme at Trinity Laban meant withstanding the gaze of artists much more experienced than myself.
There were times I thought I might melt into nothing under the harsh light of exposure. Other days, I just had straight forward panic attacks about the prospect of being seen on stage.
Now, in Somerset, in the middle of a Pandemic, everything was upside down and turned around.
There were no people to dissolve me with their acute reasoning. I was dealing with a new spatial dynamic, and I found I can be entirely extroverted with no audience around.
For someone who purports to be in hiding, people are quite rightly astonished that part of my creative practice is going out into the middle of a field, taking my clothes off and leaping and twirling while taking photos of myself.
It’s an absurdly exhibitionist pastime and it feels like freedom to me.
Surrounded by life
As with all my creative adventures, the journey starts in the dark, feeling my way forwards step by step. I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing, but I do have some visions in my mind.
A ghost story had been brewing in a shadowy corner of my imagination. Neon forms floated alongside me on my many walks through the countryside.
When the dripping sound of the leaky tap in my mind doesn’t let up, I know it’s time to do something about it. Looking back now, it’s amazing to think that I had this idea, let alone acted upon it.
Is something/one else directing me? Because, how did I know what to do?
I bought a remote control for my camera, popped in the battery and packed my bags. It was time to go.
I didn’t know how I was going to create the vision in my mind, but I went out to experiment.
I think I knew I wanted to experience or perhaps translate a feeling. Something I’d been sensing on my walks. That despite being alone, I was in fact surrounded by life.
In getting older, having spent most of my adult life as a single woman, it has been very important not to overly centralise human company. In the pandemic this inkling, that had been dawning on me for sometime, crystalised.
Now, when I’m walking by myself through the fields, I can feel the company I am keeping in the plants, the trees, the birds overhead and the critters underneath.
The great futurist Donna Haraway writes in her book Staying with the Trouble about making kin, and being tentacular, not just with other humans, but also with other species.
“Sympoiesis is a simple word; it means “making-with.” Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing. In the words of the Inupiat computer “world game,” earthlings are never alone.¹ That is the radical implication of sympoiesis. Sympoiesis is a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems. It is a word for worlding-with, in company.” Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble
And so it is that I set out on a mission to get closer to all living things in my natural environment, the more-than-human world. But in my imagination I have lost all sense of time.
I am not only making kin with what is alive now, but also what is alive in various timelines.
Performing with everything
As I walked through lockdown, very rarely seeing any other people on the paths around my town, I began to imagine that I lived in no time and in every time.
Not only was I accompanied by every living thing, I was accompanied by generations of walkers past and perhaps even walkers future.
I walked in quantum fields, where everything was present all at once.
In this reframing, rather than being alone, I had created an audience of thousands. I moved in my mind from performing for no one to performing with everything.
That slight differential between ‘for’ and ‘with’ seems important.
I trudge up the hill in the dark, slipping on patches of mud, and grabbing branches to stop myself sliding backwards. Once in the field, I look up at the stars and wonder how long it’ll be before sunrise.
I start unpacking my camera in the field. Always a tricky job in the dark, knowing the ground is wet. The light is changing all the time.
The dark turns into a dusky dawn and I feel as though the orchestra is tuning instruments in the pit.
The stars fade as the curtain comes up.
I know now is my time. The misty morning air tells me that my co-stars have warmed up and are ready to dance.
The image I want to create is emerging and the lyrics of a Karen Elson song comes to my mind.
“The ghost who walks, she’s on the prowl, wanders in the moonlight.”
I drape the yellow chiffon over my head and imagine myself as a stone statue in a graveyard animating, moving off its pedestal and going for a walk.
Through the mist I walk forwards, feeling the split mind of an actor/director as I embody the scene while pressing the remote control button to release the camera shutter.
I’m not alone here. There are so many elements at play, the mist, the trees, the chiffon, the grass, the light and a shrouded figure moving silently across the frame.
Am I the shrouded figure?
When someone describes my photographs as self-portraits I gently correct them. These figures are not me. They are a body in the landscape, a generic body, it just happens that it is my body, but not specifically so.
How can I break that idea down? My body is a research tool. This is the language I use in my embodied practice work with creatives.
When I am out in the field taking photographs, what I’m interested in capturing is not a portrait of myself, but the feeling of a human body communing with everything.
Is it too grandiose to say this is less about me personally than it is about the experience of being human?
I use my body, because it is what I have to work with. Like a ball of clay, or a chunk of wood. My body is a creative material. It’s malleable, moveable, and full of expression.
It is about the sensation of movement, the lived experience of moving in a human body. Capturing or distilling an essence of what I encounter outside with everything around me.
I improvise movement after movement, repeatedly pressing the remote shutter release. It is a rehearsal for a performance I will never realise. It is a physical experiment. It is a melding of time, form, and rationality.
I can’t see myself. I can only feel myself.
When I go back to look at the camera screen to see what the lens has captured, I can barely make it out. Strange morphing forms that become translucent with speed.
It is me? No.
These are trace-forms, where the lines of movement have joined with the trees, the horizon, the skyline, creating a new composition.
Embodying polarities
On the first morning’s experiment I put myself in front of the camera, but then I removed myself again. I’m hiding in the performance.
Sometimes it is a duet between me and the fabric. Sometimes the soloist needs a breather and the neon takes central stage.
Abstracting the human presence further, I throw the bolts of chiffon from behind the lens like tea leaves. The neon markings on the bark of the trees in the woods echo back at me, as the colour flies through the air.
Present and not present. Loud and quiet. Peaceful and destructive.
These floating forms embody polarities. I am here and not here. It is this time and it is no time. Presence and absence. Performing to no one and yet with everything.
The light in the sky tells me it is nearly time for the dog walkers to take over this experimental scene, clearing the stage, returning it to a more classical narrative of man’s best friend.
I don’t want to be caught short. I pull my layers back on, fold up the tripod, and pack away the camera.
I feel exhilarated as I make my way home. Down the muddy slope I go, trailing neon and creative hopes.
The birdsong rises in the air, the only applause I am going to get today.
With tea and toast, I sit at my desk and put the memory card into the back of my machine. Files float across the digital divide.
As I open up the JPGS, a familiar flower of expectation unfurls in my belly. I live for this quiet little thrill. That feeling of excitement, wonder, trepidation even, at what I might have captured out there.
A blur of colour, movement, and energy fills the screen. I am lost in time and space. How did I make something out of nothing?
