Artist's Statement 2015
Space is a doubt. I have constantly to mark it, to designate it. George Perec [1]
I am a cross-disciplinary artist who explores the body’s dialogue with architecture and site, through calligraphic gesture and sculptural inscription. Using drawing, sculptural intervention and performative exploration, I create delicate pieces, which speak of the fragile relationship we share with the world around us.
In 1999, I began working extensively within old buildings linking the performed process of investigation with generating material form. Collaborating with dancers was a way of expanding my own repertoire of movement whilst alerting me to the importance of linking gesture to emotion, intentional meaning and narrative. Traces and marks are not merely task-based but aim to speak of the space. Building from a sculptural background, I layer and construct using a subtle palette and wide variety of materials and hybrid approaches: including fabric, stitch, graphite, ink, found objects and photography, aiming to catching this tenuous link and lightly pin it down. I am intrigued by being lost in the gap between disciplines and often misapply methodologies and hierarchies as a source of new material forms. Fragments and layers are collaged and boundaries reformed as instructions are misapplied as scores.
Creating material responses as a witness to my performed acts exists as an important strand of my work, where I aim to transcribe the spatial relationship into haptic, experiential form. These publications and objects are not seen as something to add on but as pieces in their own right that can bring illumination and reflection to both the viewer and myself. Examples of these would be the limited-edition book of pirouette drawings locationotation (2001), the award-winning, double-bound collaborative book point and place (2007), the tin of sound and objects Cloud dance (dance in a tin) and Rosebud: a nine foot breath trace-drawing of the story of Sleeping Beauty read into an anaesthetic machine, created as part of a ten-month residency for the Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland.
This approach is also embedded in my interest in bringing together other artists in collaborative process. Watching other artists navigate boundaries in play is both exciting and challenging. In 2001, I founded the multi-disciplinary group point and place, who seek to explore the possibilities of collaborative practice despite geographical challenges. Another longstanding relationship is with performer, Libby Worth, exploring the possibilities of scoring and improvised play in pieces such as Step Feather Stitch: a misreading of embroidery and dance patterns and Fold, a dance film where we performed on top of a canal boat.
[1] Perec G.1997. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, London: Penguin Books. P91
Space is a doubt. I have constantly to mark it, to designate it. George Perec [1]
I am a cross-disciplinary artist who explores the body’s dialogue with architecture and site, through calligraphic gesture and sculptural inscription. Using drawing, sculptural intervention and performative exploration, I create delicate pieces, which speak of the fragile relationship we share with the world around us.
In 1999, I began working extensively within old buildings linking the performed process of investigation with generating material form. Collaborating with dancers was a way of expanding my own repertoire of movement whilst alerting me to the importance of linking gesture to emotion, intentional meaning and narrative. Traces and marks are not merely task-based but aim to speak of the space. Building from a sculptural background, I layer and construct using a subtle palette and wide variety of materials and hybrid approaches: including fabric, stitch, graphite, ink, found objects and photography, aiming to catching this tenuous link and lightly pin it down. I am intrigued by being lost in the gap between disciplines and often misapply methodologies and hierarchies as a source of new material forms. Fragments and layers are collaged and boundaries reformed as instructions are misapplied as scores.
Creating material responses as a witness to my performed acts exists as an important strand of my work, where I aim to transcribe the spatial relationship into haptic, experiential form. These publications and objects are not seen as something to add on but as pieces in their own right that can bring illumination and reflection to both the viewer and myself. Examples of these would be the limited-edition book of pirouette drawings locationotation (2001), the award-winning, double-bound collaborative book point and place (2007), the tin of sound and objects Cloud dance (dance in a tin) and Rosebud: a nine foot breath trace-drawing of the story of Sleeping Beauty read into an anaesthetic machine, created as part of a ten-month residency for the Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland.
This approach is also embedded in my interest in bringing together other artists in collaborative process. Watching other artists navigate boundaries in play is both exciting and challenging. In 2001, I founded the multi-disciplinary group point and place, who seek to explore the possibilities of collaborative practice despite geographical challenges. Another longstanding relationship is with performer, Libby Worth, exploring the possibilities of scoring and improvised play in pieces such as Step Feather Stitch: a misreading of embroidery and dance patterns and Fold, a dance film where we performed on top of a canal boat.
[1] Perec G.1997. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, London: Penguin Books. P91
Reorientated: a Conversation of Different Geographies A-Side B-Side Gallery 22-26th June 2017
Loa Kum Cheung and Brixey-Williams create a disjunctive path that dances between Western upbringing and Eastern composition. Deconstructing the terrains of their own backgrounds, they attempt to understand the relationship between physical and cultural heritage within the context of personal experience. Drawing upon the Chinese notion of Shan Shui, where the purpose is less about realism and more about an expression of the mind and heart, the artists are able to absorb technical qualities of composition, rhythm and flow to cultivate personal landscapes that offer a variety of perspectives upon the idea of belonging. This repositioning unites the artists as they deploy some of the boundaries of Asian landscape art and calligraphy to investigate disconnections between time and location, allowing the pre-existing landscapes to be absorbed into the original meaning of ‘–scape’: a personal and continued material engagement with place.
Brixey-Williams renders visible the relationship between the body and site through performative and sculptural inscriptive acts in the landscape. Evoking calligraphic practice where the ink performs a role within the white space to bring vitality to the page, she opens a dialogue between the gestural quality of her movements (and their semiotic function as a language abstracted beyond the readable) and the intrinsic qualities of the place. Carefully applying spatial compositions and Asian formalities in her photographs, sculptures and ink drawings, she balances the freedom of gestural flow with the delicate colours of the Essex marshlands of her youth that echo traditional Chinese ink wash paintings.
Loa Kum Cheung explores the idea of a displaced heritage, drawing reference from old family photos and open source archive to fabricate nostalgia for a lost lineage. The melding of the actual family memory and idealized projections of places she has never experienced first hand is lightly layered, creating slippage where the new and ideal can co-exist. Favouring the tactility and raw materiality of wood, she employs pyrography and oil with a focus on intentional mark making. The physicality of the techniques used is an attempt to exert ownership over the elusiveness of memory, time and place - inherently flawed, disjointed and the subject of idealistic escapism.
This is an intersection of a duo of trajectories that share both affinity and disconnection. Deconstructing the terrains of their own backgrounds, the artists attempt to understand the relationship between physical and cultural heritage within the context of personal experience.
Loa Kum Cheung and Brixey-Williams create a disjunctive path that dances between Western upbringing and Eastern composition. Deconstructing the terrains of their own backgrounds, they attempt to understand the relationship between physical and cultural heritage within the context of personal experience. Drawing upon the Chinese notion of Shan Shui, where the purpose is less about realism and more about an expression of the mind and heart, the artists are able to absorb technical qualities of composition, rhythm and flow to cultivate personal landscapes that offer a variety of perspectives upon the idea of belonging. This repositioning unites the artists as they deploy some of the boundaries of Asian landscape art and calligraphy to investigate disconnections between time and location, allowing the pre-existing landscapes to be absorbed into the original meaning of ‘–scape’: a personal and continued material engagement with place.
Brixey-Williams renders visible the relationship between the body and site through performative and sculptural inscriptive acts in the landscape. Evoking calligraphic practice where the ink performs a role within the white space to bring vitality to the page, she opens a dialogue between the gestural quality of her movements (and their semiotic function as a language abstracted beyond the readable) and the intrinsic qualities of the place. Carefully applying spatial compositions and Asian formalities in her photographs, sculptures and ink drawings, she balances the freedom of gestural flow with the delicate colours of the Essex marshlands of her youth that echo traditional Chinese ink wash paintings.
Loa Kum Cheung explores the idea of a displaced heritage, drawing reference from old family photos and open source archive to fabricate nostalgia for a lost lineage. The melding of the actual family memory and idealized projections of places she has never experienced first hand is lightly layered, creating slippage where the new and ideal can co-exist. Favouring the tactility and raw materiality of wood, she employs pyrography and oil with a focus on intentional mark making. The physicality of the techniques used is an attempt to exert ownership over the elusiveness of memory, time and place - inherently flawed, disjointed and the subject of idealistic escapism.
This is an intersection of a duo of trajectories that share both affinity and disconnection. Deconstructing the terrains of their own backgrounds, the artists attempt to understand the relationship between physical and cultural heritage within the context of personal experience.
This is where it starts
to
This is where it begins
Certainly it’s a challenge to express in words The Observatory experience which was essentially all about touch, play and intuition. For the past 18 years, it has been an established part of my practice to make artwork inspired by, and expressed within, architectural sites or the landscape, so coming to Lymington was a very exciting prospect. I had never chosen to make any work in a landscape like this – which in itself is surprising as I was brought up near the Essex marshlands and spent much of my youth beachcombing near the Thames Estuary. So on arrival there was an immediate resonance together with the provocation of memories but also a sense of adventuring. I am a great believer in synchronicity and as I got into the car on the first day to drive to Lymington I turned on the radio and the partial phrase that jumped out at me was: …a pocket full of seawater... I decided to bring this phrase with me, along with a determination to up my scale.....
...to read the full account please go to Current Project >The Observatory Residence> Writings
to
This is where it begins
Certainly it’s a challenge to express in words The Observatory experience which was essentially all about touch, play and intuition. For the past 18 years, it has been an established part of my practice to make artwork inspired by, and expressed within, architectural sites or the landscape, so coming to Lymington was a very exciting prospect. I had never chosen to make any work in a landscape like this – which in itself is surprising as I was brought up near the Essex marshlands and spent much of my youth beachcombing near the Thames Estuary. So on arrival there was an immediate resonance together with the provocation of memories but also a sense of adventuring. I am a great believer in synchronicity and as I got into the car on the first day to drive to Lymington I turned on the radio and the partial phrase that jumped out at me was: …a pocket full of seawater... I decided to bring this phrase with me, along with a determination to up my scale.....
...to read the full account please go to Current Project >The Observatory Residence> Writings
Extract from: Step Feather Stitch: an unfaithful reading co-authored with Dr. Libby Worth in Choreographic Practices Vol 3 2012 pub Intellect ISSN 2040-5669 pp43-64.
"...For one of the dancers, repeated gestural mark on body-sized pieces of paper opened up drawing to three dimensional and active possibilities. The sound of pencils sweeping across paper, large scale movements and the drawing left behind as document of action stimulated fresh scores that brought paper into sculptural relation to dance. A visual artist discovered that point and line movements across the space extended the body’s field away from the centre, opening up marks and intentions that became choreography.
Maybe the closest analogy to the terrain entered at that point is Tim Ingold’s description of the Chinese calligrapher who learns to write as a child through first ‘motioning the characters with sweeping gestures of the arm and hand, naming each element of the character as it is formed…’ (Ingold 2007: 135). This ensures an embodied memory of the characters and, as Ingold comments, a strong link between calligraphy and dance in which both calligrapher and performer ‘concentrates all [their] energies and sensibilities into a sequence of highly controlled gestures’ (134). In both activities ‘the entire body is caught up in the action’ (134), and once the rules of each are understood, boundaries may be crossed to express personal vitality and meaning. Gordon Barrass recognises a link between calligraphy with opera and dance, writing of it ‘as an art in which the brush dances and the ink sings’ (Barrass 2002: 15) where intangible traces of feeling and expression are left on the paper, the brush acting as an extension of the body. By unfaithfully reading the written instructions to dance and embroidery with a view to interpreting them in a more personal way, we reflected the move in the early twentieth century to value freedom of gestural expression…"
"...For one of the dancers, repeated gestural mark on body-sized pieces of paper opened up drawing to three dimensional and active possibilities. The sound of pencils sweeping across paper, large scale movements and the drawing left behind as document of action stimulated fresh scores that brought paper into sculptural relation to dance. A visual artist discovered that point and line movements across the space extended the body’s field away from the centre, opening up marks and intentions that became choreography.
Maybe the closest analogy to the terrain entered at that point is Tim Ingold’s description of the Chinese calligrapher who learns to write as a child through first ‘motioning the characters with sweeping gestures of the arm and hand, naming each element of the character as it is formed…’ (Ingold 2007: 135). This ensures an embodied memory of the characters and, as Ingold comments, a strong link between calligraphy and dance in which both calligrapher and performer ‘concentrates all [their] energies and sensibilities into a sequence of highly controlled gestures’ (134). In both activities ‘the entire body is caught up in the action’ (134), and once the rules of each are understood, boundaries may be crossed to express personal vitality and meaning. Gordon Barrass recognises a link between calligraphy with opera and dance, writing of it ‘as an art in which the brush dances and the ink sings’ (Barrass 2002: 15) where intangible traces of feeling and expression are left on the paper, the brush acting as an extension of the body. By unfaithfully reading the written instructions to dance and embroidery with a view to interpreting them in a more personal way, we reflected the move in the early twentieth century to value freedom of gestural expression…"
Tired calligraphies (sketchbook writings for w0budong 2014)
“There is no energy left, they’re tired of soaring to the top of the paper or flourishing with brio. No deciding marks or spots but a washed out flop of ennui. They hang from chains, suspended and slipping from the wall. Dangling their feet about the skirting board, threatening to puddle on the floor. The ink runs down the strips unguarded in no particular style or shape. The fabric is shredded and no longer is there a perfect, blank white space where marks choreograph or compose the page. These tangle and melt into one another, spiral in exhausted patterns until they run out of steam.
Depleted of vigor, they wearily stop short. Suspended with no full stops. Language hanging metaphorically in midair. There is nothing else to say. All arguments have been used up.
Crumple and droop. Sink into torpor. They cannot bother to exert. Or prefer to jumble with other marks – a garbage of collaborative, automatic language. Mixed meanings.
Delicate –they are wafted by air –no argument, compliant complacency, frayed.
What does it mean to mark? To state something: I was here, this was said, it was recorded. But the ribbons of mark are deconstructed – just material and ink with no way of creating language. It is all a nonsense, floating, and delicate. Is it a memory of a word? If the giving up of a point of view, is there any point? Why have the chains overcome and pinned them? Perhaps the chains are the last and only means of support that this language has.”
“There is no energy left, they’re tired of soaring to the top of the paper or flourishing with brio. No deciding marks or spots but a washed out flop of ennui. They hang from chains, suspended and slipping from the wall. Dangling their feet about the skirting board, threatening to puddle on the floor. The ink runs down the strips unguarded in no particular style or shape. The fabric is shredded and no longer is there a perfect, blank white space where marks choreograph or compose the page. These tangle and melt into one another, spiral in exhausted patterns until they run out of steam.
Depleted of vigor, they wearily stop short. Suspended with no full stops. Language hanging metaphorically in midair. There is nothing else to say. All arguments have been used up.
Crumple and droop. Sink into torpor. They cannot bother to exert. Or prefer to jumble with other marks – a garbage of collaborative, automatic language. Mixed meanings.
Delicate –they are wafted by air –no argument, compliant complacency, frayed.
What does it mean to mark? To state something: I was here, this was said, it was recorded. But the ribbons of mark are deconstructed – just material and ink with no way of creating language. It is all a nonsense, floating, and delicate. Is it a memory of a word? If the giving up of a point of view, is there any point? Why have the chains overcome and pinned them? Perhaps the chains are the last and only means of support that this language has.”
point and place - a response to the publication of the collaborative book project by Mary Paterson 2007
Mary Paterson is a freelance writer and co-director of Open Dialogues
To open is to step inside. As soon as you have turned the first page of this book, you become implicated in its contents. The leaves open outwards – left to right, right to left – in a series of triptychs of image and text that overlay, interrupt and interact with each other. To open point and place is to assert yourself into its pages, to view and re-view, to find coincidences and foster connections.
Like its leaves, the images in point and place also reach outwards. Unattributed and structurally free – the book is bound so that they can fold and unfold over each other without a prescribed order – the images float between contexts and hint at worlds they can’t contain.
A ship viewed through a telescope.
A man’s knuckles that read AMEN.
A couple’s shadow photographed in the snow.
These pictures represent bodies of work carried out by the six contributing artists, and which encompass photography, sculpture, performance and site-specific projects. As a result they resonate with agency. Maps, plans, doodles, notes that have been censored, albums that have been photographed – these are the pickings of rich intellectual endeavour. These are the memories of intentional events.
But, while they signal authorship, the images here remain resolutely anonymous. One picture reads, in a piece of ‘graffiti’ added to the photo, ‘the three dimensional keeps leaving two dimensional marks of itself.’ Without the comfort of names, histories or a narrative structure, point and place seems to speak in the passive voice. The outside world impinges on it without introduction or explanation, like a set of instructions written in code.
In fact, there is no passive voice, but the space for an active one. The final collaborator in this interdisciplinary project is you, the reader, who must involve yourself in the book’s outcome from the start. Because of its unusual structure, each page you turn in point and place is also a choice you make. When you reveal an image, you conceal another. When you re-view this book, you also review its connections; solidify your favourites, cast out the ones that disappoint. When you read this book, you create your own journey.
The clue was right there on the opening page, in a list of contents that promises ‘Opportunities to travel’. Except that on closer inspection, these contents are located in time and space (or point and place) elsewhere. This list is another floating signifier amongst the possible significations that the reader must impose. When you come back to it, of course, it might not even be the opening page any more.
Mary Paterson is a freelance writer and co-director of Open Dialogues
To open is to step inside. As soon as you have turned the first page of this book, you become implicated in its contents. The leaves open outwards – left to right, right to left – in a series of triptychs of image and text that overlay, interrupt and interact with each other. To open point and place is to assert yourself into its pages, to view and re-view, to find coincidences and foster connections.
Like its leaves, the images in point and place also reach outwards. Unattributed and structurally free – the book is bound so that they can fold and unfold over each other without a prescribed order – the images float between contexts and hint at worlds they can’t contain.
A ship viewed through a telescope.
A man’s knuckles that read AMEN.
A couple’s shadow photographed in the snow.
These pictures represent bodies of work carried out by the six contributing artists, and which encompass photography, sculpture, performance and site-specific projects. As a result they resonate with agency. Maps, plans, doodles, notes that have been censored, albums that have been photographed – these are the pickings of rich intellectual endeavour. These are the memories of intentional events.
But, while they signal authorship, the images here remain resolutely anonymous. One picture reads, in a piece of ‘graffiti’ added to the photo, ‘the three dimensional keeps leaving two dimensional marks of itself.’ Without the comfort of names, histories or a narrative structure, point and place seems to speak in the passive voice. The outside world impinges on it without introduction or explanation, like a set of instructions written in code.
In fact, there is no passive voice, but the space for an active one. The final collaborator in this interdisciplinary project is you, the reader, who must involve yourself in the book’s outcome from the start. Because of its unusual structure, each page you turn in point and place is also a choice you make. When you reveal an image, you conceal another. When you re-view this book, you also review its connections; solidify your favourites, cast out the ones that disappoint. When you read this book, you create your own journey.
The clue was right there on the opening page, in a list of contents that promises ‘Opportunities to travel’. Except that on closer inspection, these contents are located in time and space (or point and place) elsewhere. This list is another floating signifier amongst the possible significations that the reader must impose. When you come back to it, of course, it might not even be the opening page any more.
Response to an image score sent by Rajni Shah
Once upon a time, there was an urban princess. Hers was a furtive half -life snatching excursions at night amongst the playgrounds left by children who had gone to bed.
Excitedly she ran through the tin-can alleys and stroked her hands across the corrugated sheets, until she entered the enclosed play garden. Checking she was alone she tapped three times on the American flag revealing a trapdoor in the rubber safety surface with 100 silver steps leading down. Then carefully taking scissors from her pocket she snipped the threads, rolled up the flat walls and, shrinking them, popped them in her pocket.
Leaving the moon light behind, she tiptoed down the steps in her long white dress and leather jacket to go and dance upon the grass. Her footsteps twirled over and over until the grass became a record of her square dance. The flat walls fell out in different directions, twirling and spinning and she playfully walked their lines and danced their meanings. Then, with a final flourish, she ran helter-skelter and mounted the horses and rode until dawn.
At last it was time. She sleepily took a skein of rose thread from the edges of the sunrise, gathered up the paper walls and using the tracing paper retraced her steps back up the stairs to mend the world above, so the children would never know in the morning what dances had occurred.
Once upon a time, there was an urban princess. Hers was a furtive half -life snatching excursions at night amongst the playgrounds left by children who had gone to bed.
Excitedly she ran through the tin-can alleys and stroked her hands across the corrugated sheets, until she entered the enclosed play garden. Checking she was alone she tapped three times on the American flag revealing a trapdoor in the rubber safety surface with 100 silver steps leading down. Then carefully taking scissors from her pocket she snipped the threads, rolled up the flat walls and, shrinking them, popped them in her pocket.
Leaving the moon light behind, she tiptoed down the steps in her long white dress and leather jacket to go and dance upon the grass. Her footsteps twirled over and over until the grass became a record of her square dance. The flat walls fell out in different directions, twirling and spinning and she playfully walked their lines and danced their meanings. Then, with a final flourish, she ran helter-skelter and mounted the horses and rode until dawn.
At last it was time. She sleepily took a skein of rose thread from the edges of the sunrise, gathered up the paper walls and using the tracing paper retraced her steps back up the stairs to mend the world above, so the children would never know in the morning what dances had occurred.
Meander (written for Clare Smith's Zine accompanying Stitched Time)
Embedded ink, shiny with clusters and puckers sweeps across the landscape, creating coastlines with the materiality of the flow. The ruckles of the paper matrix transform the ground into a three-dimensional, contoured mapping, with an area in the binding still uncharted.
The lines journey. Navigating from an unknown place to traverse the paper, the destination is not clear but, instead, the process of a wandering relationship seems to be the point. Not point and line however, but a delicate flow of tiny decisions as the pooled ink is scuffed over. As the lines repeat, the track is re-trodden, re-worked like footsteps wearing down a desire line. The ink’s inlets eventually lead into the Heart of Darkness, where being lost is valued. It is a track: a trek.
The running stitch pins down this walking meander – one foot in front of the other. Alongside the delicate, disciplined, deliberate rhythm is an element of risk. One strong pull in the wrong direction and the whole topography will tear apart. The space is vitalised by the body’s repeated, intentional sharp piercing. Breath and attention is inherent in the work of in and out, through and over, up and down, until the line moves off the page.
Embedded ink, shiny with clusters and puckers sweeps across the landscape, creating coastlines with the materiality of the flow. The ruckles of the paper matrix transform the ground into a three-dimensional, contoured mapping, with an area in the binding still uncharted.
The lines journey. Navigating from an unknown place to traverse the paper, the destination is not clear but, instead, the process of a wandering relationship seems to be the point. Not point and line however, but a delicate flow of tiny decisions as the pooled ink is scuffed over. As the lines repeat, the track is re-trodden, re-worked like footsteps wearing down a desire line. The ink’s inlets eventually lead into the Heart of Darkness, where being lost is valued. It is a track: a trek.
The running stitch pins down this walking meander – one foot in front of the other. Alongside the delicate, disciplined, deliberate rhythm is an element of risk. One strong pull in the wrong direction and the whole topography will tear apart. The space is vitalised by the body’s repeated, intentional sharp piercing. Breath and attention is inherent in the work of in and out, through and over, up and down, until the line moves off the page.
Text printed on glass reflecting filmed ballroom dancers in the installation Elastic Ping 2000
Facing each other. Turning away and finding again. Hand on a cheek caress, finger, part. Turn, run. Walk to edges, look. Eyes contact and run run run towards the grasp and lift and swing. Space circles and sweeps around while faces remain fixed points. Down and drop slowly in a pool on the floor. Roll and turn and circle and look. Hand to hand and stretch and pull and up and round and over and under and into and through and stop s l o w l y. Pant. Lips moistened and teeth tip. Hand on wall and moving upwards and up until the spine is stretched stretched. Elastic ping into a curled and coiled. Shoot into space with new energy until the grasp contains the whole body and the place and the space and the one and the two become a thing in motion a dizziness a stop.
Facing each other. Turning away and finding again. Hand on a cheek caress, finger, part. Turn, run. Walk to edges, look. Eyes contact and run run run towards the grasp and lift and swing. Space circles and sweeps around while faces remain fixed points. Down and drop slowly in a pool on the floor. Roll and turn and circle and look. Hand to hand and stretch and pull and up and round and over and under and into and through and stop s l o w l y. Pant. Lips moistened and teeth tip. Hand on wall and moving upwards and up until the spine is stretched stretched. Elastic ping into a curled and coiled. Shoot into space with new energy until the grasp contains the whole body and the place and the space and the one and the two become a thing in motion a dizziness a stop.
Fold me
Enfold me
Tuck me in and tuck me tight
Fold me into my returnings
Fold me into my wanderings
Fling me out and smooth me right
Stretch me
Spread me
I am folded into your linen cupboard life.
(Song)
