A review of the summer, the aspect of change. New job, new thoughts, new activities.
moving from making to walking to running. Towards the end of the 2nd year, I experienced a number of transitions both artistic, personal and professional. I began to seek space by walking in the evenings, alone, in my neighbourhood. There was no reasoning behind it but one day I ran instead, and I never stopped. I have spent the summer running through the varying degrees of heat and humidity, finding a quiet space in the pounding of the pavement. The experience of running in the hostile Middle-eastern climate was visceral, the air so dense with moisture it bombards the skin, filling the lungs weighting clothing with its dampness. The tactility of the experience lead to an anticipation of event. The longing to get out of the cool ac and the freedom of exposure to extremes. Hot air has a smell, its violates your nostrils, occasionally bringing with it the fragrances of evening pollinating tress and smell of over heating cars and hot tarmac.
I moved out of teaching in to a position at an arts institution/gallery space in Dubai. The summer was spent getting to grips with the new role and facilitating workshops for adults and children to while away some of the hours inside out fo the Dubai heat.
On the personal level, I have been questioning and exploring the affects of cultural conditioning, the expectations of both society and the self, as imposed by cultural conditioning. How much influence our upbringing, relationships and circumstances have on our attitudes, values and beliefs. Its been a tough and highly personal journey but I do feel like I have grown and opened as a being to wider options.
I have spent a large potion of time reading and writing, mainly poetry alongside fiction works and some theory. Exploring the sensations of touch, longing and anticipation. Poetry tends to cover topics of romance, heartbreak: effectively its a way of expressing intense emotions. I found myself anticipating these emotions, desiring them or considering how they effect me as the reader. The words evoke a sense of empathy, stirring memories of similar experience. shared experience.
I began to consider how art works create the shared experience, but how many audience members are not aware of the shared experience in the moment. We tend to move daily, consumed by our own experience, considering our next move, our needs, wants and desires. Occasionally we are aware of the requirements of our loved ones and friends, the basic needs that we may facilitate or them, I'm thinking of those of my daughter or my husband. The reality is that these are my assumptions of their needs and desires, they are informed by snippets of conversation or by my own needs and desires in the case of my daughter.
Living is a shared experience, we share space and breath, but how often do we actually acknowledge the community aspect of living other than to complain about interacts or lack of space etc.
With the growing debate on climate crisis there has been heightened awareness of the shared experience, pf the shared responsibility of humans. We are more aware of the act of consumption. It has been argued that to live is to consume. I am intrigued by the way we consume space and art.
The consumption of art in institutions tends to be a shared experience, in the larger museums and galleries it is rare to be alone with a piece of art work, even in the smaller spaces there will be a security officer, gallery assistant or even a cleaners present.
Public artworks are created and placed in spaces where consumption is shared, the experience of the work is shared, it is effectively designed for the shared experience.
The artworks that have struck me the most, and I keep coming back to are those of James Turrell's 'Deer Shelter' and Miroslaw Balka's 'How It Is' as they were inherently shared experiences, Balka's piece commented on the shared experience of the concentration camps in Poland, but as an individual entering the spaces the experience is purely internal and personal. The shared space is experienced and consumed in an entirely different manner given that the way we consume and interpret experience is dependent and informed by our preexisting memories of space, art and experience.