ON / OFF

Published in The Foundling

This is a selection of notes to myself. My most consistent practice over the last three decades is writing. I am working on at least three notebooks at any one time and I write everyday.  It's from these notes, gathered together loosely under the title ‘on/off’, where I attempt to explain to myself how things are made, and include only those things that are under the umbrella of 'on', and mainly connected to this project at the Foundling.

on music

The first time I used music in a piece of work was for a video piece called Unnatural Acts in 2000 commissioned by Frances Horn for the Ex-Teresa, Museum in Mexico. This was a three-screen piece. The film focuses on the strange acts of a performer (Jefford Horrigan) deconstructing and destroying various household objects. There was something vaudeville about it and I felt it needed a music score, although not a comic sound track. While in a club in Glasgow three years later, I heard this saxophone player, Greg White, and I realized his was the sound I wanted. I spoke with him after the gig, and we arranged to meet so I could show him the film.  He then wrote and recorded some music to accompany it.

>When I make video works I am constantly adding sound and all kinds of music to see how it changes and affects the mood and feel. This constant 'worrying' of the material has become part of my process. One piece made in 2003 was called Evening Chorus. I filmed the street lamps outside my studio coming on and added a sustained piano for each of the twelve lamps. Other projects included Root, a collaboration with Thurston Moore that included among others, Blur and David Bowie. The second opportunity to work with a composer came about with the project Grand Central. This featured Graham Fagen as a barfly.  I discussed the work with the artist Conor Kelly and I gave him some music that I had recorded of a street performer three years earlier in Mexico. Conor orchestrated this music and composed and recorded the sound track for the short film.

>On two occasions I was able to employ the skills and abilities of two composers. This process was liberating and by handing over this element of the work it allowed me to focus on other aspects of the work.  However, in a pub conversation one evening, I said I would never get involved in the compositional process, which in my world means that is exactly what I would do next. In the 90's one of my jobs was as a road manager for a contemporary music group called Metonia. This involved carrying and setting up equipment driving the van all over the UK and making sure that everything went smoothly. In the course of this I got very close to the band members, as we are all involved in carrying and setting up, and for a short while on tour, they become like family. In particular I was close to Ian Dearden and Javier Alvarez. Ian was fantastic at explaining things, we always kept in touch and I now saw an opportunity to work with him directly.

> I called him to see if he would be happy to work on collaboration. The project was called Broken Voices, something that I had tried to get going a few years early but abandoned when I could not raise the funds.

>At a private view at Peer Gallery I met Paul Goodey, (Head of School of Wind, Brass and Percussion at the Royal Northern College of Music) who said I should contact the singer Linda Hirst. Linda has sung with Berio and John Cage as well performing with The Michael Nyman Band. I had lunch with Linda and she agreed to join the collaboration. The collaboration on Broken Voices was very successful, so I reassembled the team for The Foundling Project.

> To develop The Foundling, I continued the process of workshops and performances, which allowed us to experiment and explore ideas. Working with professional musicians this closely was a life changing experience and has set the pattern for these kinds of collaborations in my future practice. The String vocals that cascade down the central stairway of the Museum, was developed with Linda Hirst and some of her MA students at Trinity College, London. I had this idea, which involved continuously passing on the note 'a' for an undefined period of time. This recording was made at Trinity College's recording studio. What I like about projects that are developed over time is that you can construct a work piece meal, and develop it slowly, which is the flip side of working to deadlines.

on photography

I love digital photography; its drawbacks are its great surprises. It is the very things I first hated about it that are now the things I now love. It allows me to be playful.

on the Moving image

Video or film is essentially a series of still images. In previous large-scale video works such as, Marking Time 1999, Unnatural Acts 2000, Grand Central, 2003 and Broken Voices 2007 I have used the same cinematographer, Jonathan Callery. Again it is important to me to work with the same people.  A case in point is the lively discussions I have with Jonathan in the planning stages of filming and on set; it is an extremely dynamic relationship that I value. On all of the films I pre-shoot everything with a small camcorder, this to some extent becomes the storyboard or the nearest thing I have to that. It's just like a sketch. In The Foundling I wanted to make the majority of the film using photographic stills. The previous project Broken Voices had many fast paced sequences and I felt that the subject matter of The Foundling should be quiet and slow.  I did shoot a lot of moving images, at Ashlyns School, on the streets of Shoreditch and in the Museum itself, but in the end used none of this footage the exception being the sequence with the actor Julian Bird. This was filmed in a dark doorway in Clerkenwell, London. The only other live action sequence was in the section Hide and seek, where I filmed Miguel Tantos performing and improvising to The String vocals. Workshops and live performances are a really important process and development of the project. As I am working mainly through a lack of knowledge, I depend heavily on my collaborators. I also need to see and hear everything in real time as I find it difficult to imagine how something might look or sound. This is probably frustrating for everyone else, but there is no other way around it.  I just want to get things right, even when I am not sure what right is.

on Cage / chance

Ever since I read about Cage using chance operations in his work, I have been fascinated by this method. I have been trying to employ chance operations in my work for a while, but unsuccessfully.  I keep coming back to the question 'Why have I failed'? I think the answer comes down to confidence, or the lack of it in having the courage to step aside.  Watching musicians improvise in a performance where I have no control over them is a bit like using chance, I still find that I try to contain them within a plan, a schedule or some other such system. A work based on chance and random is a project further down the line.

on The Foundling

The museum was a discovery and I was intrigued by its history. The stories of former pupils and the organized way that they were catalogued were very moving. They were left like luggage and abandoned, hopefully to have a better life.  Leaving tokens with their children so that they could be redeemed at a later stage was an extraordinary process.  I felt unprepared to deal with such stories in my practice the history of the place are usually just peripheral to other issues that for me are more at the forefront of a project. In The Foundling I found myself responding in a very personal way. As a result, the work became much more self-referential, I revisited parts of my own childhood - emotional as well as actual places, like Epping Forest and Shoreditch. My family came from the east end, and the entire area is cut and pasted with my family history. I guess this project became in one sense a quest to discover a lost childhood: perhaps all childhoods are lost, and all of us foundlings, who become lost and found and lost again. However I wanted to avoid at all cost the project becoming a documentary, or to be nostalgic or sentimental. I hope that I have managed that. I wanted each of the four films to be separate entities that are linked but different in feel and atmosphere. A bit like a musical score divided into movements. I also wanted to make it into a kind of visual poem.

on collaborations

I spend most of my working life on my own either in my studio or sitting in a café drinking coffee and making notes. I prefer to go to art galleries on my own and watch films on my own. 

Collaborations are the opposite of this, but I enjoy this process because it is in direct contrast to the way I normally work. There are many advantages to collaborations: sharing and allowing ideas to develop, achieving ambitious goals that would be impossible on my own. But the biggest advantage is working with people who know more than I do.

I reassembled the team I worked with on Broken Voices: the producer Clare Fitzpatrick, the composer Ian Dearden and the vocalist Linda Hirst. Ian and Linda are both great artists and teachers - in a sense I have been studying with them both. We brought in musicians Oliver Coates (cello) and Miguel Tantos (trombone) and for one performance, Clive Williamson (piano).

We began The Foundling project with the performance Lost and Found at Tete a Tete Opera Festival, Riverside Studios. A second performance at the Foundling Museum was called Hide and Seek and a third, in Venice, Sticks and Stones. Each of the live performances was essential in the development of the work. They were total collaborations. In the past I have used people to make voice recordings and narratives in my video and audio works. When I am thinking about a voice I listen constantly and eves-drop on all kind of conversations. Usually I prefer a smoker's voice, it has a gravel and seems to be somewhere other.

For The Foundling I wanted a particular voice but I could not describe it. At a dinner party I met Julian Bird, a psychiatrist and actor. He reminded me somewhat of Alfred Hitchcock. So Julian read the poems and we recorded it for the film. Working as a team has great advantages. The creation, with Clare Fitzpatrick, of workinprogress was seismic, Inventing a new organization was exciting, initially set up to support my projects it has now developed into a means to support other artist works and projects. Clare is my most important collaborator. Workinprogress is now joined by Helen Newhouse, who amongst other things also has helped document the project.

on poetry

I wanted to introduce some poetic text. I found myself re-reading T.S. Eliot, a poet I had put back on the shelf years ago, but now find myself reading again. I asked the writer Mel Gooding to make something for The Foundling project. We had dinner at his house and talked about Eliot, looked at some images and pottered about the concepts of the project. I said that there would be four sections and I gave him four titles. Mel and I have worked on a previous project called Site Unseen. I think has well has being a very intelligent critic and writer he is a gifted poet. When I got to see the three poems I realized he had also introduced William Blake in to the mix. I went out immediately and got the complete poems of Blake.

on books

I wanted to work on the Foundling book with Emma Hill. We have collaborated many times on exhibitions and publications and I needed someone who knew my work. I had initial plans to design the book using chance operations based on musical octaves but in the end abandoned this. The images and words tell their own story. I wanted the book to be a kind of handbook, but definitely not a catalogue.

on deadlines

Normally I like deadlines - they set a pace and create a kind of urgency. Working on a project is a total immersion. I need to connect with the work and to exclude everything/one else. This makes me periodically anti-social. However, with some projects an encroaching deadline is a nuisance. Sometimes I want a project to just go on and on.

on failure

Four days before The Foundling exhibition opened the hard drive I had purchased to contain all the versions of the four films crashed, losing all the work. I had about fifteen draft versions of the films on DVD and had a back up made a month earlier. I had been working on these films for months and I was very familiar with all the shots. I had to start again. The system failure was helpful in fact it's now built into my method.  When working on any element in a project I often start many times over from the beginning to ensure freshness and to give me a distance away from the work. I quite like it when things go wrong; it's at the point of collapse when I think being an artist is the best job in the world.

In the process of extracting these notes and editing and re-presenting the ideas, I realize how central the written word is to my entire practice, connecting all the different elements together.