Refresh Your Yes - Temporary Installation - Brisons Veor

I began writing down frequently recurring instructions which I had collected by dealing from the  Oblique Strategies cards by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt. I kept each that had a resonance with my train of thought in the month before the Brisons Residency

Don't break the silence

Listen to the quiet voice

Lost in useless territory

Breathe more deeply

Faced with a choice, do both

Turn it upside down

Into the impossible

Distorting time

Ask your body

Repetition is a form of change

Retrace your steps

Courage

From nothing to more than nothing

The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten

Be extravagant

Is there something missing?

Retrace your steps

Remember those quiet evenings

Go outside. Shut the door.

Retrace your steps

On the evening of our arrival I read instructions to the other artists and asked them to respond spontaniously with a word. I collected their words

Up

Yes

New

Precious

Amazing

Me

Cobbled

Adaptor

Generic

Chuckle 

Plus

Reaching

Through

Error

Terror

Tremor

Toddle

Decide

Timbre

Sound

Slosh

Simplify

Wave

Ahh

Aha

Peddle

Cavern

Tired

Shining

Echoing

Imaging

Drink in 

Truncate

Hooked

Sand

Cooling

Sanctify

Hedgerow

Soft

Shuffle

Springing

Loosely

Lift

Small

Refreshed

I had brought some roughly cut squares of cotton and some textile letter stamps. I sat on the floor, enjoying my close proximity to the sea, my perch above the path and the occasional surprise of passing walkers. I could have sat at the table or desk, both probably more comfortable, more practical, but there is something about sitting on worn, sun washed floorboards that takes me off to other times and places. Each square contains one word from an Oblique Strategies phrase - other words were from the initial conversation with my companions, a not quite acrostic but with poetic potential.

I initially tried to install these phrase by phrase, 

out side against the render of the house 

or on a washing line but the wind made it impossible.

Instead I used a series of wooden battens in the studio space and installed them phrase by phrase. It s a meditation on possibilities, time, change, chance and communication. I also included some tiny figures. Everything about the making was deliberately imperfect.

A kind of pilgrimage - walking on foot - tiny people

just like the 00 Gauge figures

I had brought in my kit of possibilities

installed the morning before our departure.

I shared the results with the others and was happy to find that each person really enjoyed the contemplative meander it allowed them to make, words connecting in random yet somehow meaningful ways. It was very hard to record photographically, the 6 am light made the fabric grey, the introduction of available extra lighting added some interesting shadows but threw out the whiteness of the fabric and the walls. Later in the day the light was slightly kinder.

Refresh Your Yes 

Temporary Installation

Brisons Veor 2016

Carole Miles

More images can be viewed here

Many thanks Brisons Veor truly "a residential workspace set in an inspiring and unique location, where creatives in any medium can take time out to work on a project, away from the day-to-day distractions of their home lives". Huge thanks also to Susan Williams MRBS for making this Residency possible, Gareth Williams and Andrew Rushton for their words and encouragement.

Our Allotted Span - Brisons Veor

Working on four previously pre-felted samples I created two lengths of felt and fabric. Textures and layers inspired by explorations of Cape Cornwall hedgerows, walls, rocks, shoreline, sea and boulders. The work is called Our Allotted Span.

Thinking about time, layers, strata, mortality, 

loss, legacy, hard facts, soft wrappings. 

The piece was installed in and on St. Helen's Oratory 

and around and on Brisons Veor - both installations 

 

made under very windy conditions. 

Also made in memory of Joan and Alick Rushton 

 who are represented by each length

I was assisted by their son Andrew, my partner, we remembered their union, their lives and the complexity of all human relationships. We made the final temporary installation on the bench we sat on and looked out to sea, thinking of the two  of them sitting together, look out to the horizon and listening to the conversations of wind, waves and birdsong.

Retrospective connections

“We draw ever nearer to our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails off " Haruki Murakami - Sputnik Sweetheart

"Human beings are allotted their appointed span of time; the Lord gives, and He takes away" (Job 1:21)

"When I consider the brief span of my life absorbed into the eternity which precedes and will succeed it—memoria hospitis unius diei praetereuntis (remembrance of a guest who tarried but a day)—the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then" Blaise Pascal

The full set of images can be viewed here

Exploration - Cape Cornwall - Brisons Veor Residency

In June I was part of a Residency at Brisons Veor

which enabled me to spend a week

experiencing the beautiful wildflowers

the intriguing coastline and changing weathers

with artist Susan Williams MRBS, 

photographers Gareth Williams 

and Andrew Rushton

We walked separately

in pairs

 or as a quartet

We brought our own works in 

progress to continue or pursue.

We enjoyed convivial company

and I had the most intense period 

of making and installing work.

Just a week, but what a week.

I continued to work on the pre-felts made during the course with Jeannette Appleton and developed a piece inspired by the Oblique Strategies cards by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt. I had no definite plan other than to let my surrounding sing to me and my experiences guide me, I was swept along by a tremendous energy drawn both from my surroundings and my companions. 

It was a jewel-like and infinitely precious.

An album of inspirations and experiments which informed the work can be found here.