Time lapse: it’s International Women’s Day and I am talking about the 23rd February still (so I’ll do IWD after this) – which in itself became a double occasion: I went to see the exhibition in which I had pieces in, and this happened on Terminalia Day, the annual festival of psychogeography – named after Terminus, Roman god of boundaries – edges between spaces, critical or lurid lines, which we psychogeographers are so interested in.
And so I went to the South-East, (see previous post), to Torquay – (time lapse, space lapse), to see The Art of You – so this exhibition is ‘about our art’, whereas my Terminalia festival participation means, I’d suggest, that I am a Terminalista.
Orkweed
So here it is: my pieces and the journey, oh where to start! Let me start at the intersection of the two. My prime piece in the exhibition (for it was the only framed one) was my Orkweed, which, by being framed, made a journey down the coastlines! It’s a seaweed from Orkney, so I called it Orkweed. Within Orkney, it is from the small but beautiful island of Papa Westray – and now it was on show in Torquay. So it’s travelled a long way but it’s stayed close to the coast, so it was still in its favourite surrounding there! It’s made a connection, a line, from Papa Westray to Torquay, and I made a line by ‘taking’ it, photographically (think Richard Long, ‘line artist’ (I mean his work ‘A Line made by Walking’) – and here developed a long line from northern Scottish coast, where I ‘took’ it, to southern Devon coast, where it was ‘hung’).
The Journey
Getting there, on Terminalia Festival Day, was an ‘unpsychogeographic’ act in the traditional sense, in that psychogeography is about walking, (and making sense of space while walking) , and here my major travel piece was a train journey. Therefore I had three ‘pieces’: First to Paddington – requiring movements within London to get there – then the train bound for Paignton, get off second to last stop Torquay, and then the Torquay walk. So the train enabled a transition between two large spaces. The train-
journey was also a very different sort of boundary (or anti-boundary!) between my walks: a connecting one. The journey was ‘moving’ (well, not surprisingly)., especially when I passed by Newbury: here I would, once upon a time, have gotten off to get to Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp. Wow! How many peacemakers and feminists got off here not too long ago – and now it looks as if nothing had ever happened! Like an erasure, a place with a high risk of forgetting.
The other big event on the journey which involved a lot of ‘moving’ was the bit by the
coastline, the moving, rising, roaring sea, especially the journey through delightful Dawlish. The waves were so high that I worried the line we were travelling on might
break once again, like it did in 2014. Devon might sound mellow, but this coast certainly wasn’t – it felt more like in the Outer Hebrides than Devon. Apparently this was already the beginning of Storm Emma, and the following week, after both snow and storm, the train station turned into a waterway rather than a railway.
Then came Torquay: hill harbour – one stop after Torre which is just the hill in itself. So there’s an upstairs downstairs thing going on here. Even musically it sounds that way: Tor-quay: I could sing it like a kind of echo sent from up high, to reach down below. Harbour Deep Mountain High! I knew before that Torre is another station in Torquay,
but I thought it was on a different line – now I realised that both stations are on the same line! How interesting to find just how dots are connected by lines, and sometimes all the dots you find may be connected by a single line!
Starting my walk, I go to the sea first, for this is the edge, as far as I can go. And now I
find the tide is low! This happens to me a lot: whenever I go to the sea, the tide is low! That means, the land is more exposed, parts of the beach can be seen which are regularly submerged by water. I am, as usual, more likely to meet the times of exposure, the receding tide, coupled with the expanding land. I like this: it’s the ebb tide I am used to,and the ebb tide I like: when stones and seaweed, shells and things, are appearing, and when birds have more space to stand on the wet sand of these expanding between-times. It’s ephemeral at this outer edge before the waterline.
Then I walk up the hill to the hostel I am staying at, and on the way I pass by the famous
Torre Abbey, and by the Artizan gallery where my Orkweed is in and all other things gallery. Just before getting there, I found a symbolism for dots arranged into a single line, with ventilators on a low rooftop in a row – like the stations: dots on the same line, not
different. Then i find an eggbox-mask, later a ‘gardener’, on the street!
The exhibition
The Art of You exhibition was great. We were a bunch of diverse artists, with diverse work. All of us showed our personal relationship to Art, and what it does for us. What stood out was that those of us with belongings in different places – i.e. origins in more than one country –used our art as a way to show how our different origins connect with each other, so art relates to identity and to our multicultural-ness. So art becomes a thing beyond art too, it becomes a medium, an instrument, a platform to speak and to show with. It reminds me of Steve Bandoma who said “ my culture is my physique, my art is my metaphysique.
My exhibits were, apart from my Orkweed were a ‘Leaf in the Light’ and a a flower ‘Sun-Soaked and Serene’. And then there was my narrative. How art relates to
psychogeography, and how I related to the two and all that stuff. I could go on and on but won’t because I haven’t written enough about the other artists either! There was lots of deep work, the one that immediately appealed to me was Muhammad Taymour’s ‘Gazing Game’: a film about how we gaze at each other, using surreal ‘substitutes, starting with what i thought was a parody on ‘how did the chicken cross the road’. Well yes, how do we cross, whatever ‘crossing’ may be mean, and when do we cross, and do we cross at all, or do we go in a straight line on the same side of whatever path we are following, never crossing over? Oh, and now, at the time of writing, the next exhibition is on already, so go and find out, it’s in the nicely painted turquoise building in Lucius Street.
‘London Bridge’
The remainder of my exhibition and Terminalia weekend was a wider exploration of south Devon just before the snow fell in. So there is more to say, more to write, as usual. I found a ‘piggy island’ off the coast, which is a rock that looks like a piggy in the sea. And then I found ‘London Bridge’! This sounds like a joke but walk along the coast, just
outside Torquay harbour on the coastal path, there comes Beacon Cove, Peaked Tor Cove, and then London Bridge! There’s a Daddyhole Plain too look… London pops up everywhere, it seems I didn’t need to go back then?!
ColourCirclesite 