Itinerant Actions – a review

Here I am. A boulder transported in from afar, an active mass of volume and weight – fixed to perform the erratic. I am considering my position carefully, from the edges – around, shrub structures, trees in grids, and among, grass tufts, delicate weeds. All together, we thrive in textile ruin.

This morning my boulder premise is set, and fluid – the placement of weathering – to discuss a subject becomes a question of language and interpretation. Rocks, a plant, 3D printing, a ceramic fragment and thin air are introduced as the sun reaches its midpoint. Erosion, disintegration, collapsing structures – all actions in the natural and built environment. Surroundings imagined, weathering actions become performed through writing and the haptic exchange of words becomes important – expression and details, all surface. When weather is effectuated, the dynamics of reciprocity reveal imperfections and in that moment the object becomes whole with all its characteristics. To be flawed is natural. These scripted images of cracks and fissures, materials and matter collected together for closer reviewing, at other times – unspecified, for now. What then is crumbled, smashed or dissolved? The mass, transported and transformed, contains light and heavy elements – and weakness reveals strength.

It’s late. Waiting becomes an act that must be performed in cold light until the true dark of the black box is triggered. We are here in this space. We are all together. Presentations become apertures to the underlying structures of working in outdoor studios and the field expands to accommodate the practice of performing – survey and live event become one, held temporarily in the context of process. The field site becomes a fieldwork, where buried objects of enquiry are subject to the processing of change – methods for recording waste ground substructure. The fieldwork is an approach of archaeological reverse – a pre-performed history brought to the here-and-now, holding the surface intrusions of time. Other works demonstrate the breadth of investigation for process-driven explorations – location, relocation, dislocation and translocation. When does the work in one field end and the work in another field, begin? And, what are its documents? The living laboratory, a plant cycle from seed to leaf, the touch of which is at once pleasure and damage; and death, an unfolding of place for life in an artwork observing time and decay – environs for micro-inhabitants and the submicroscopic, the non-human bodies of nano-matter but much significance. Family stories unearth the hidden narrative of time and telling – the resurfacing of fragmented memory in scripts and voice becomes an image of performance. Buried remains. And the vast future – a post-human space imagined through film – as clear as it ever was, observing the single event of geology giving light to the last flicker of a dying star. In the civil collapse of growth without regard of resources, environmental resistance is the reserve of nature. Humanity is not safe. Itinerant action will be necessary. Here I am again – canopy above, roots below.