Improvisational Collaboration

In order to expand my artistic practice I embarked upon an improvisation performance with Owen Lawrance. Owen's work had focused upon performance and mainly, audio work. I was interested in how Owen's sound work would effect my actions within the space in which we performed. We worked for a day in the 'Sculpture Instillation room', all the decisions we where to make regarding the work and it's set up where not discussed before hand, we both agreed than we should move in the objects and materials we wanted to work into the room and start from there. Owen set up his sound equipment which consisted of two speakers, an amplifier, mixing desk, and microphone in the corner of the room opposite the camera we had set up to document the work. Owen's set up was compact and defensive, he had created a space for me to perform in quite separately to his corner of sound work. During the performance because of Owen's amplified sounds a small crowd gathered to watch and soon disbanded, I can only imagine because they found no entertainment or artistic value in what we where doing. The performance began slowly as a dialogue between artist and material and a dialogue between myself and Owen began to form. Owen branched out of his corner to involve himself in the rest of the space and materials eventually after bordering off his area with soil and salt.

One audience member and fellow M.A.P artist Rob Offord stayed for much of the duration. Rob's review of the work highlighted aspects of the work which had a particular relation to the audience. Rob's continued presence in the room lead to our involving him with some of our actions. By the end of the performance myself and Owen had sat quiet and still upon an island of soil contemplating the performance and experiencing a scene of emotion created by a liberation that comes from acting impulsively, I felt an unease in leaving Rob to stand apart from us in the room as a passive onlooker and invited him to sit with us which he did.

Rob reviewed the performance to us afterwards remarking that as an onlooker and following the conventions of the M.A.P audiences he had tried to avoid effecting the work, but once bags of soil had been tipped empty and the fine soil particles had covered the room Rob found it impossible to move without changing the material. As the soil had effected the entire room the audience was no longer separate to the performance and found themselves participating actively with the performance than passively as they had done before. This was a point which brought to light my previous performance of cleaning in which the audience moved around me as I moved around the space to clean. My following performances also included actions and set ups which forced the audience into positions which kept them from sticking to the wall farthest away from the performance.