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Following the Keeping up Momentum event, Pushing the Envelope, that took place over two sessions in January and February 2022, we were so inspired by the booklet containing five narratives and images sent to us by Team Movement and the process they adopted that we decided to go for a new collaboration.

At a google meet on 14th February we decided:

To start with a provocation of: "I do not Innovate. I transmit "(André Derain)

Each person will create an image and a text that responded to the previous image and text sent

The ultimate aim was to produce a mini album (possibly also stab bound) with the images and text attached by photo corners

The text and the image would be a maximum of 10cm square

Order: Kevin, Deborah, Rebecca, Sarah

Sarah to create padlet, and Rebecca to look at the album.

Kevin to start with the text "I transmit" and image

Transfers would take place online but the ultimate aim is a physical object

We'd have a progress check in 2 weeks' time

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I transmit waves. The waves become music.

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I transmit waves. The waves become music.

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Above is a photograph of Porthcurno, in Cornwall. Not far from here Guglielmo Marconi made the first transmission of radio waves across the Atlantic Ocean. Porthcurno was also the site for the UK end of an underwater cable (laid in 1870) that relayed messages all around the British Empire. Until 1993 Porthcurno was the site of the Cable and Wireless Training School. Now there is a museum.

I have tried to make the second sentence, above, one that Deborah can pick up and take to the next stage in a similar fashion.

I am so far unable to post the associated photograph here but I will keep trying. Meanwhile I will a send a copy to everyone via Google Messages (the thing we have been using to communicate). I also made a print. This is a photograph of the print:-

I wrote the words in ink on a page that could, if we decide to make something physical, face the photograph. I think my writing is too ugly to use (I am not used to writing with a brush).

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The waves become music. We clap and cheer demanding more.

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The waves become music. We clap and cheer demanding more.

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For inspiration I went to Poets.org and The National Poetry library website and searched for words that related to Kevin's theme. After a roam through Emily Dickinson's "Musicians Wrestle Everywhere" and Amy Lowell's "Listening" I settled on Gwyneth Lewis's "Voice" So the second sentence comes from here: https://www.nationalpoetrylibrary.org.uk/online-poetry/poems/voice I thought the descripition of the voice as something slightly malevolent and not entirely controllable sat well with the image of the sea.
Which led onto thoughts of all those female singers of the jazz age whose voice led to lives where it was probably a curse as well as a blessing. So the images here, all 4inch square, colour pencil and gouache on canvas and gesso are variants based of a famous photograph of Bessie Smith. The inclusion of the word "Voice" comes from watching a Peter Blake documentary last week.  At the moment I am inclined to use the top right as the image for the collaboration.

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We clap and cheer demanding more. Not everything was lost in the flow of time.

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We clap and cheer demanding more. Not everything was lost in the flow of time.

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I took much longer than expected to be able to focus sufficently on making a good job of this task. I didn't want to turn it too dark, yet I really struggled to come up with anything else. Our world seems to change daily at the moment. And so with the provocation, I tried to find the positives and applauds for things recently, despite how upside down we have found our lives. As a Nation we have stood outside our homes and clapped and cheered for the NHS and their outstanding efforts during the Covid battle. We clapped and cheered for Captain Tom Moore when he worked so hard to raise money in his own very special way, at the age of 99. And most recently, also because somehow we are demanding yet more from him, our Parliament (as well as us at home) clapped in such admiration and support of President Volodymyr Zelensky. Personally, I applauded until my hands hurt!!
With all of this in mind, I used a vibrant green (a colour of peace, rest, security, nature) as the central base layer and painted around my son's hand. The Ukrainians have none of the things which green represents any more. I then followed on with a family set of prints, even the dog. This reflects the families who are all trying to escape Ukraine, with their loved pets. As the layers of hands increased so did the shades of colour used. The final hand, drawn around my own by my son, is more ragged and distorted and dark purple, nearby a bomb. Our applauds make us feel better, yet their situation only gets worse with more and more deaths, more and more unnecessary fear. More and more bombs and destruction.
The words circling around in the piece are Zelensky's, in blue and yellow, though the yellow is a more difficult shade to see on photo. Just like Putin thought he couldn't see any power in Ukraine, how wrong could they be. The blood is the finishing touch to my piece, needing no explanation. The gaps, the same as in Ukrainian's lives now. Their homes left behind, their security is now a feeling of emptiness, their hope......

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Not everything was lost in the flow of time. 

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Not everything was lost in the flow of time. 

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The world has changed a lot in the time since we began our collaboration.

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“Not everything was lost in the flow of time.”  Intriguing!  I looked up the quote and discovered it was by Haruki Murakami who is a Japanese writer born in 1949.  The quote continues:

“…. we truly believed in something back then, and we knew we were the kind of people capable of believing in something - with all our hearts. And that kind of hope will never simply vanish.”

It transpires this comes from Murakami's novel 'Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage' (published 2013)which is about 'a young man haunted by a great loss; of dreams and nightmares that have unintended consequences for the world around us; and of a journey into the past that is necessary to mend the present.'

After exploring a number of other ideas, I eventually came back to this quote. To me, it seems to represent hope, especially poignant in view of the shocking and horrific situation Ukraine currently finds itself in.

I decided to represent the notion of hope with a drawing of the mythical phoenix which is generally associated with rebirth, regeneration, and immortality. I had to resort to the internet for images to use and adapt. I used soluble graphite and coloured inks. The phoenix is seen emerging from the darkness. I thought to make sense of the image, I would include the quote printed onto tracing paper, crumpled, ironed, and finally glued on.  The image is A4 in size but I will experiment to see how it works if I crop it into a square if we're going down the square route (no pun intended!).

New provocation:  “No man is an island entire of itself” (John Donne)

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"It is the journey that matters in the end"

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"It is the journey that matters in the end"

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This to me is the most amazing place that I have ever had the chance to visit. It is simply breath-taking!! The hustle and bustle in tourist season, compared with its rough and encapsulating sea in the middle of winter.

When given the provocation, I immediately thought of it's long path and the amazing emotion you get when being at the start of that path. This is where I hope to end and so again, it was very easy to decide what I wanted to design following my given task.

Whether one believes in an after-life or not, I added the clouds as suspense but also as the midway point between Heaven and the continuing Earth. This is a place I could visit daily and never get bored of. It is naturally beautiful and I am in total awe of its existence.

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The strand-line holds your destiny intact.

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The strand-line holds your destiny intact.

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Inspired mostly by the final part of Kevin's quote  "The strand-line holds your destiny intact" I looked back to John Donne and his No man is an Island essay, but apart from finding out just how original a man he was, I wasn't inspired. But what of the "strand-line"  - I am fond of walking the strand-line on beaches and my photography collection reflects this. So I returned to one of the more dramatic examples.
This is a bank of shingle at Salthouse in Norfolk at dusk. It should be a disconcerting place. At that time the narrow band of shingle was about the height of a 2-3 storey house. On one side a large salt marsh and a village and church set on a ridge . On the other the drama of the North Sea and on this evening an approaching storm.
It should be a place to avoid but I find it an exhilarating place to be. Maybe it was the height that gave a sense of freedom and a strong desire to walk towards that last glimmer of light

It is painted in gouache on a 4inch square piece of watercolour paper primed with gesso which allowed a really matt surface and the joy of scumbling almost dry gouache.

I pass on the quote

“it is the journey that matters, in the end".
― Ursula K. Le Guin.

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"I can't change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination."

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"I can't change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination."

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Rebecca's image of Mont St Michel immediately puts me in mind of St Michael's Mont which rises proudly from Mounts Bay a few miles from where I live and which see nearly every day. There seems to be an underlying sea (faring) theme emerging and here we are almost back where we started in Cornwall with Kevin's photo of Porthcurno, again just down the road from where I live.

The wind, storms, and sea are all raw elements to battle against and analogous to some of life's challenges. I have drawn a little sailing boat bravely trying to get somewhere, steering its way through the storms - I'm sure this resonates with most people.

I have used soluble coloured graphite blocks on photographic paper, sprayed with water to alter the properties of the graphite on the shiny surface which gives the impression of movement.

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No man is an island entire of itself; the isolation we feel is but a temporary mood. Wake and stir the dreams of your morning tide; the strand-line hold your destiny intact.

The first line you will recognise, I’m sure. The rest I made up.

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An attempt at a photobook. I have added two photographs at the front of the book to emphasise the theme of “transmit” (in this case transmitting electrical power). This book is very rough: I cannibalised a watercolour pad (of reasonable quality) and printed everyone’s work on pages from it. The watercolour paper lives a slightly desaturated, muted look to the prints, which I like. This should not really be looked upon a finished article but is more of a “book dummy”. Nevertheless, I am encouraged enough to embark on a project to make a similar book, using tree photographs, in black and white, printed on the same kind of paper (which seems to be particularly good for b&w). Moving on from that, I have the idea of using watercolour pencils (which I discovered last Friday) to hand-colour some b/w photos printed on the watercolour paper.

Unfortunately, the two-minute video of my curation is too large for Padlet to accommodate. This is a link to the video within OCA Panopto: https://oca.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=d23aa541-485c-49dd-98bf-aef9010d51c6 .

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As a group, when we looked for the common theme in our work, the theme of “the sea” was very predominant, but I am 2 hours from the nearest piece of coast. So I therefore tried to stay with a natural setting for my curation and went with presenting it in the garden. We seem to have had quite a lot of breezy days, so although the artwork does dance around quite a lot, it enables a natural flow to be felt throughout the curation.

If I had been by the sea, I would have liked to use eco-friendly paper to print the work on and then allow them to drift out to sea.

I used a hairy, sparkly wool to attach the work to my clothesline as I felt this added energy as the film was being made.

My film is too large to upload, but I will provide the link below:
https://chat.google.com/u/1/api/get_attachment_url?url_type=FIFE_URL&content_type=video%2Fmp4&attachment_token=AOkZXXQgAwVggMvJ0PdDZ0rWucssYGBQFk4%2FcuTwFI%2BHXLGg10PPM3IyvpDxdzzRpNkzaTk2EboOAyZPE2MX1%2BNpshcymJHD4KiAmBSRZIMUBhUfWM2i1MDhl2zurK3pAzPxtl0cx9U%2FOk6m4TSwl3ZLEza%2BWH%2Bt4MllQwFH%2BEbDhD092xTYNJH4hDMXv7pUhk8Vf92GZSHbP72iovZbCa2GOTrU%2FKz%2BmcBZ7NFVJ3Qve4V4vB7Yhul10pEz%2F7RT1ugz3wETscGwUbyi2q4fpKCu8oQooiGBKhnUTmAVZl%2BlOG3iWyUorR79km8XAkTs8LLzjQwRxXciXs2XhWzqeMnUg8C6RHT0TZQi5VC6ZKWoGai%2Bl1PlBZrsV%2Bq2MybFXkKgD8TXTHxbuU3nDJy7ibqcnlcCA2esU24SdQsHu9wOi7hqDpXuNFJqtgxReP%2BJI6e5IdSAZgNpfqQy%2FoYF%2BpynN8hisIuNNyBnlFOFdtD65sYkz9eTdKpOm774D0NnxebXfIw5cVYby9mYAFGCRVI3Nz3PqpUDaVAO3erSohRNccNHTe68CKvYwzmNOHqHw4ynikyqWlU5%2F8qOZ2n4Qq%2BnF6Ql3qfDQQhCB0YwqZ204cigg0juXDDILMm33MogQX6m15CgX1VJct5qD0FiIwCxy0z8X6y3AlzsxckrzLQ4MCyyrJD9JYWoe0U3%2BHpLDg%3D%3D&sz=w512&authuser=1

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I was interested to try a video curation. I printed the full set of works out and attached them to my bamboo - utilising the movement that this gave the curation and then the garden fence. As Rebecca has mentioned the sea (and movement) did seem to develop as a common theme. Neither of my curations were particularly successful in themselves but they gave me a number of indications of things to do differently next time. This included using a stiffer card to print out images. Printing all the images, even when I had the original, was a way of standardising them but the photo paper did not give the images sufficient presence.  Using a mini tripod for my phone allowed the filming to flow better but the lens brought in a surprising amount of peripheral imagery (e.g. the washing line) and background noise (I could live with the parakeets and the building work less so my sighing and bumping into pots) so a more open location would be useful.

The videos are here (will require OCA login)

Bamboo mobile

https://oca.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=6a72fa2f-2155-4a40-a092-af060097ca1f

On the fence

https://oca.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=91e0517b-0754-46ec-a742-af060097ca23

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https://online.fliphtml5.com/zpuuu/sajm/

Returning to our original provocation, a quote by the French artist and co-founder of Fauvism, André Derain, "I do not innovate. I transmit ", I am struck that whilst the theme of ‘transmission’ was central to our individual pieces, a strong connection with the sea emerged with all its associations with 'destination', in all its various meanings.

I had many ideas about how I might curate our work, from the sublime to the ridiculous, but implementing any of them proved more difficult.  I initially played with a couple of static digitally created exhibitions but it was difficult to make them engaging.  I then toyed with an online interactive exhibition but there were complications with that.  I was aware others in our group were considering a video curation so I resolve not to go down that route.

I eventually decided to present our pieces in an online booklet form.  Whilst the sense of tactility and three-dimensionality that one would experience if the pieces were seen first-hand is greatly diminished, the booklet format has the benefit of being accessible to all potentially reaching a wider audience with the option of zooming in or out to scrutinise detail.  My curation is a lot more formal than I had originally envisaged but presenting the pieces in sequence as each of us responded to the previous provocation, shows the ‘narrative’ as it developed.  It is left open-ended and has the potential to be continued if and when the soul is willing!