Goodbye January, Hello World!

Performance I - Photographs by Stuart Tonge

Performance I - Photographs by Stuart Tonge

Performance I - Photographs by Stuart Tonge

January is pretty much over and that's okay. Most of January was spent focusing on my convalescent, whom I am very happy to say has now convalesced and is back at school. I was going a little crazy trapped indoors most of the day with two small hormone driven boys!!! So now, back to procrastinating about the two performance pieces I created over the x'mas period. I have begun writing about the content of the performances, in part to contextualize the work and in part for the forthcoming publication Premier Pli II. I was rearing to go when I'd just completed them but now I have cotton wool in my brain ... again.

So above is a little sneaky peek at Performance I photographed by my hubby, the shots included are unedited. I was excited to receive the edited footage of Performance I a couple of days ago from my very good and generous friend Ben Sadler, who filmed and edited the footage for me. There is no footage of Performance II, it was however documented by another talented and very good friend Sarah Goudie and again these photographs have not been edited. I needed to really push myself to even show these ... I hate the feeling of the work becoming too precious or private .... Clearly I've had too much time lapse, with performance I seem to work much better the quicker I work, not allowing myself too much time to begin the self criticism and for doubts to start working their way in. So the first step is to just start getting on with it ... so here it goes.

Performance II - Photographs by Sarah Goudie

Performance II - Photographs by Sarah Goudie

Performance Circle

I want to perform. I have wanted to perform for a long time. When I was not brave enough to perform nor brave enough to use my body as a tool to share narrative, I began making sound pieces and sound installations instead. I sang and told stories, I impersonated, I spoke and used my voice in many different ways. I let objects hold my stories, I let others speak my words.

Yesterday, after writing and writing in my journal I stopped because I sensed I was going through a motion. I sensed that I had written these words before. Over and over again. I kept thinking back to a piece of work that I made many years ago, a floor piece. Two large pieces of fabric that I had stitched together to make one, onto which I had created a circle marked in charcoal fragments, my smeared finger prints and hands marking this fabric, making this circle. I was to perform a piece about mourning, I was to perform in the center of the circle with my audience sat around encompassing me, observing my mourning, a re-enactment of the loss of my father. A re-enactment of the mourning that I had witnessed in women in particular, many times as a child in Ghana with wailing and sobbing and calling the deceased persons name over and over again.

Yesterday I went and unearthed that piece of fabric. The piece that I had wanted to stand in the centre of but was too afraid to do and so instead a large oval clay pot that I hand made sat at the centre, housing a sound piece of my wailing and sobbing and repetition of my father's name 'Allotey', now the middle name of my first born son. Yesterday I laid that fabric out in my sitting room and stood in the centre of that circle and breathed. I have come full circle and I am now ready.

This happens to me when I close my eyes ...

Still thinking of performance every day. Still dreaming of audience. Still waiting in the wings to be thrown onto the stage. Still feeling so heavy, surely I need to fly before I can walk. Watching. Waiting. Looking. Waiting. Being. Waiting. Tomorrow. Tomorrow. Still. In the distance.

One of the BEST gifts I have ever received ...

For my 28th birthday my sister Alison gave me a number of gifts (she is very generous) but the one that will always stand out in my memory is the beautiful book pictured above that she found in a charity shop on Mansfield Road, Sherwood, Nottingham. This book has changed my life! When I took my first glance inside, it felt as if someone had been peeking at my 'wish list' and dreamed up my ultimate book! Creepy tales and creepy pictures for the girl with a wicked sense of humor that loves the scent of a well journeyed book - perfect!

The Five Fables from France by Lee Cooper offers dreamy stories of caution, the titles alone give you a wonderful hint at what is to emerge:

The Girl Who Played a Trick on the Devil

The Three Butchers from Reims

The Wolf in the Ram's Skin

The Strange Feathery Beast

The Midget and the Giant

This book has been with me for eight years now and each visit inside it yields so much inspiration and so much pleasure, pure escapism! I am currently trying to piece together ideas for a series of live performances that I hope to carry out during 2011 and this book has been at the centre of inspiration for that. I will talk more about the details when I have further clarity myself. In the mean time, here are some of the illustrations that appear in the book by the very wonderful Charles Keeping, who has generously nourished me over the years and continues to feed my soul with his depictions of other worldly creatures.

Inner Sleeve

The Strange Feathery Beast

The Strange Feathery Beast

The Midget and the Giant

The Girl Who Played a Trick on the Devil

The Girl Who Played a Trick on the Devil

The Wolf in the Ram's Skin

The Wolf in the Ram's Skin

I came across these drawings of mine today that were in an old journal from my uni years around 1997. It was a journal that I kept for ideas to develop in Printmaking. It is so useful now to look back on all these records as evidence of my interests and of my creative journey. I despise the idea of time being wasted or of efforts going unseen and that is the reason I am so glad that I have found a format in which to share all these fragments of my 'bigger' picture.