TIME AND TIME AGAIN

I must admit that I felt lost; a case perhaps of too many things at once. I wanted to make an exhibition that might have a different flavour but I was distracted by having to go on a somewhat chaotically arranged journey to Portugal to search for a small piece of land. I should confess that I am note sure about my direction and sometimes it is necessary to get completely lost first in order to find this direction.

Anyway I am sitting in a train station in Portugal. The waiting room is circular with a generous level of light entering from several angles. I notice that there is a pigeon sitting on the floor, right in the centre of the space. This pigeon was quite motionless which was unusual as other pigeons moved around as pigeons tend to do. Someone noticed my fascination with this pigeon and told me that the pigeon sits in this space everyday in this posture of meditation. Apparently people who suffer from insomnia come to sleep in this space when the pigeon is there. It is thought that this pigeon has special powers. I smile when I am told this story, suspecting that this could be a way of teasing travellers with local myths. Nevertheless this image stayed with me. Why shouldn’t a pigeon meditate? Anyway I think that the purpose of travel might be to have exposure to such strangeness.

After the train journey I caught a bus and finished up in a village in the middle of a National Park. The light was clear and the air likewise was clean. I felt that I would like to explore the countryside so I booked in for three nights. I was tired, but at the same time I felt compelled to go walking. In my guide book I found out about a waterfall in the mountains. It was a long walk through woodlands but eventually I was standing in front of this waterfall. The water was freezing cold but eventually I submerged myself. I imagined looking at myself from above swimming round and round. I was alone with butterflies, birds and lizards. Normally my senses are relatively withdrawn in relationship to patterns of thought but in this situation it was as if my senses overwhelmed my ability to synthesise thought. I let the sun dry my skin.

I am not sure why I am telling you these things but it is perhaps related to the process of creativity itself. I tend to look at things very closely but it is unexpected encounters which leave the deepest impressions. The perfect composure of the pigeon, the cascade of the waterfall, huge rocks lodged in the earth, Ottoman textiles, and blue and white tiles in a Church, all entered the space of my memory, lingering in turn on the edge of my imaginative reserve. All of this is balanced with the frustration of seemingly wasted, or dead time in airports, sleeping in anonymous rooms, and tiredness assembled within passage.

I am back in London sitting in front of my computer screen. The light is even and thus constitutes itself as flatness. I am attempting to draw my thoughts together but nothing seems to be happening. I pick up a pair of scissors and start cutting away at some waste paper. I cut, fold, sometimes make marks without thought about outcome. I arrive at a still point and sip my green tea. I realise that I am no closer to an idea for the exhibition. I have a question about the time we are living in but the instant such a thought occurs then I start to be overwhelmed by imagery but at the same time I have no one constant image. This for me is a paradox; being in a time that is bereft of an image, whilst seemingly being drowned in imagery.

I need to go outside to walk around. I wonder if I can read anything from faces on the street. Faces appear to show so much, or so little in the same instance. I remember reading that the face was the most complex surface in the world. Faces are the inexhaustible reserve of humanity, but such a thought does not really help me. I like the essential paradox of faces, the way they erect a mask within appearance, the possibility of their continual deceit, but then the way there is always something that can never be hidden. When I design I want to show something that might otherwise be invisible so even though my work has little to do with the face the experience itself of faces is always close to me. Such things can find their origin in small things, fragments, unattended passages, but always there needs to be an external event which can be transported into an elsewhere.

I keep thinking about the pigeon and the pool of water. They have stuck to me, and as such, they reoccur constantly. I have this vision of a room in which there are two screens projecting to large moving images of these two moments. Sometimes I think that might be enough and yet at the same time this would be such a small gesture relative to experience. I need to create another experience out of my everyday practice in order that I can show a movement of a different order. It always seems that the starting point for this process is a strange feeling of vacuity. I am not sure if I have the strength to keep going through this but then I find that something pushes me. I start to work, as if blind, or as if in a trance; bending, stitching, combining, until I think that something starts to emerge. I have a desire to show this process because it is like a bridge of reverie that is passed over before formal issues start to assume ascendancy. I think a lot about form and with this the formless as well. I really dislike formality, or at least the display of form, as a principle mode of value within the appearance of a thing. Perhaps we can say something is beautiful when form exceeds appearance and through this we are in communion with the sensation of difference. Beauty always opens, and to have a capacity to open, there must be something that exceeds rational structure, even though that structure is always a necessary means for this experience. Perhaps this is similar to the experience of mediation which on the surface is a given form of sitting, the control of breath, the circulation of a mantra, the hands held by a mudra, the focus of etheric centres and yet these are an essential form which is the mere starting point. I think that I am reaching toward the point that creativity is a way of dealing with paradox which is able not only deal with contending, and in many cases contradictory forces; such as form and formlessness, or stillness and movement, visibility and invisibility and so on. For instance I would like to make an exhibition which is composed out of a narrative, like the story I am trying to express now. At the same time I suspect that I also might need to lose my immediate sense. After all what can I say? I am a woman, I was born in Japan, and I am now in the middle of my life, that I feel somewhat lost in this world so I dream of other things and that this list can extend to cover my life to the point at which nothing is being said, let alone risked. Anyway I think that I dislike the use of personal narrative by artists. I would like to point towards forms of difference that perhaps creative expression might occasion but these are never as they seem. One mark or one gesture should be enough, but when do we give ourselves over to such singularity.

Someone asked me why I had left Japan and without thinking I replied concrete and salary men. I was asked to explain and I thought for awhile. “When I was working in Tokyo I felt that the whole city had been covered by concrete to the point that it no longer really breathed and that this concrete had in turn entered the souls of salary men who appeared so stiff and regimented to me.” On the level of imagination I started to think about these immaculate looking suits in relationship to the dense matter of concrete. I think men had begun to be complete prisoners of the social structure, so I relate suits with repression. Anyway I wanted to find a way of playing with these images, so I started finding suits that might be subverted from this chain of association. I am not really sure what I will discover in this process but it is something that touches my nerve. Perhaps it is a means of dealing with a return of the repressed.

Sometimes when I start with the intention of designing a bag, I find that I go astray, and suddenly I am making shapes like bodily organs. I really like the idea that a bag might be shaped like a stomach, gut or the heart. I sometimes smile to myself within this process, because the idea of an inanimate object starting to pump or squeeze amuses me, but then I return back to this world (which carries other types of demand).

I am standing in the middle of my studio. It is full of things. I am looking a half a football which I have cut apart to display its inner structure. It is now inverted and looks like a crude architectural model. The black inner diaphragm lies next to this. Somehow there is a mystery to these two forms, if as they are in a half way zone between product and un-nameable object. I feel that I wish to escape the over easy naming of things. I guess that I am a costume maker but this is also a source of a frustration because I do not want to be named as such. It is I think just one of the forms that I utilise. A singer came to see me a couple of days ago and said that she felt my costumes could be seen as being sculptural but I know I am not a sculptor in that the things that I make have a clearly defined function even though some of the costumes that I have made appear to resist this direct use. So I have to accept this ambiguity, well at least for the time being. When I think of the issues that I tend to keep returning to again and again, then I think they are essentially abstract in form, such as the relationship between mind and matter or energy and form. Connected to this I have a fascination with mathematics and geometry but these are not necessarily self-evident pre-occupations. My impulse to show my inside, not just in the sense of an exposure of feeling but rather a place that I could call my reserve; simply stated this reserve could be described as my accumulated sense. Sense can be explained as existing in a place between the world and language, a mode of co-extensivity, if you like. If things are placed too much within the realm of language then this feeling of co-extensivity is erased. This is why the language that is often employed by makers appears to hang onto ambiguity, or employ the gaps between meanings. If I speak I am always utilising a form that could be best described as a detour. In a way making is like a continual form of detour, you just keep circulating around something until the starting point is lost. We the most interesting things you always wonder about how the arrival was achieved because part of the sense of a detour is that it is made out of a series of gaps that do not logically join together. Anyway my eyes drift across the surface of these two fragmentary objects. When they existed as a football it was there to be kicked, but in this dissembled state, it has assumed another status, and as such, stands on the edge of a void. It is this state, which opens out the play between the states of anything or nothing that a zone is created in which language starts to slip and slide because certainty is thus lost.

Sometimes it is difficult to hold an idea of the so-called ‘bigger picture.’ All my experience directs me to the moment by moment attention to things, indeed this is in the end the nature of what is termed living a life. In most respects we live in a way that is forgetful of the function of attention. I have noticed how I have these starting points for ideas which I then push into storage boxes. I think that all of these boxes are the unconscious of my entire studio experience, shards of transient information, and materialisation of thought forms, failed experiments, and forgotten promises and so on. I want to discover a rhythm in all of these discarded elements so I start to create a chain of photographic encounters out of them. I am not sure if they stand as lost thought-forms reconfigured, minor chains of sculptural sketches, or just the possibilities that arise out of the shift within attention. I start to experience a strange suspension of time, as if I have discovered an in-between zone or encounter with fascination. I do not feel that concepts regulate this but rather the exercise of the imaginary plane and as such it is associated with floating. It also feels that it is a plane without finality or purpose. I am left simply to swim within this and that is all.

The Jena Romantic Novalis developed the idea that the power of the imagination is capable of creating a “sphere outside of time,” and that it is within this sphere, that we might approach the essence of our ability to say ‘I’. There is a utopian dimension to his thinking because contained within it is the idea of what the world might or ought to be, as opposed to what it actually is. Personally I cannot think about making without this dimension of otherness. My working space is organised in order to simply construct things but it is also a place in which imaginative power is held as reserve for the adventure of otherness. Consciousness always contains its own self-consciousness and as such is capable of extending its own limits. Creativity appears to me as the vehicle of going beyond limit and is the recognition of this movement. This is why we might talk not only of the act of stretching ourselves but even breaking our boundaries. Even though this implies a loss of formal structure we nonetheless require form in order that such shifts can become cognizable because form itself appears to embed a visual unconscious.

In my mind I return to the pool in Portugal because the source of its fascination for me, was in the way it always exceeded itself. We might simply say “this pool of water” but this does not account for the possible sensation of this. It is this gap, that as makers, we pursue and it is the existence of such gaps that we wish to lend appropriate form.