Time You Need
A site responsive commission with various outputs: performance, text piece, workshop and installation.  Part of the Over Time project curated by Anne Robinson, 2014.

 

I was one of ten artists commissioned to make work in response to five hours spent, without time pieces, on the Thames foreshore at Enderby’s wharf. I created a performance work, an installation and a performative lecture and also devised devised two inter-generational workshops.

worromot tuoba gnikgniht pots t’nod, performance on the Thames Foreshore
This work addressed the liminality of the foreshore and its illusory power as a portal or doorway.  In this transitional space, one may be metaphorically and imaginatively mixed up with shifting sands of time to be relocated in another dimension.
A number of actions were required of the participant to gradual transition them into a liminal space.  A card was presented with backwards text which the participant was asked to read. Classic and more obscure texts which allude to space/ time portals or time travel were re-configuring and read to the participant like a hypnotic liturgy.  Images of potential portals in the locale were offered for selection, along with a blindly selected text  drawn from the liturgy and accessed by reaching through a tiny model doorway into a purse.  Finally, a whimsical song fragment was sung to them before they were released to wander the foreshore in search of their chosen portal.  The performance was later adapted for presentation at the Queens House, where it took place at the foot of the famous ‘haunted’ Tulip Staircase – another symbolically liminal location.
Time You Need, installation and performative lecture at Stephen Lawrence Gallery and National Maritime Museum.
These works made reference Enderby’s history as the manufacturer of transatlantic telegraph cables and the conceptual link made by Spiritualists between the telegraph cable and psychic communication with spirits of the dead.

“Over Time  is a visual arts project about time passing, curated by Anne Robinson. There are ten artists taking part, working across a range of media including painting, film, performance and animation.   Each one will make a response to spending precisely the same fixed amount of ‘clock time‘ in specific stretch of the Thames foreshore around Enderby’s Wharf, during the weeks and months leading into the exhibition/performance period. The work derived from time spent in this historically resonant and atmospheric riverside space will result in a weekend of activities: 13th and 14th September, 2014 and an exhibition at the University of Greenwich 18th September to 16th October There will also be a day of performance and film works at the National Maritime Museum on Sunday 26th October. All of the invited artists are already engaged in some way in working with aspects of temporality, such as perception, elasticity, affect, politics, recording and value”
Anne Robinson from the Over Time website: http://overtimeart.org/