Melting Down for Rosemary Lee

This year I'm taking part in Rosemary Lee's Melt Down, included in the Dance Umbrella 2012 programme and which will be performed in Granary Square, Kings Cross, London, on Sun 7, Sat 13 & Sun 14 October.

Originally commissioned for Dance Umbrella 2011, where the piece was performed around a square in Bloomsbury, it has now been reworked suit the busier and more urban location at the back of the station.

Showing you a picture of us rehearsing might be giving too much of the game away, so I've included the image above, where a garment was used as a prop in a warm up exercise lead by our rehearsal master Luke Birch before doing an actual run through of the Melt Down.  To me the image says something fundamental about the piece, and all things for that matter - we are all subject to the one inescapable force, and that is gravity.

background image by John Sturrock, foreground
image by Richard Oliver

vanity weaves

Over a month already since the last weekly post…  Time is a fierce adversary!   Making up for it now with a brand new film of the newly restored weaving time machines. Commissioned privately over a year ago, I teamed up with the genial Marcelo Barbosa to develop these sculptures.

Hacking into old IKEA lampshades, as well as various basketry items originally collected for Hybrid Basketry, the woven capsules rotate inside one another and generate light. They measure time, weaving light and motion in a continuous cycle. Think of them as inverted kaleidoscopes, projecting light patterns onto their surroundings.  This kinetic playfulness is double edged however. The light is trapped in the complex intertwined patterns of the weave and you’ll notice a skull at the centre of one of the capsules. The sculptures are vanitas, reminding us that with each rotation we are irremediably closer to death. All light creates shade.

Only while writing this am I reminded of Come Back, an equally dark and mysterious light installation I created at St Pancras Chambers for the exhibition Shine curated by Up Projects, a London based arts organisation who are soon to celebrate their 10^th anniversary. Come Back consisted of a rotating projection in a darkened room spelling the words that make up it’s title and could only be seen from the outside through a half opened door.  It’s strange to realise how creative thoughts, something I've referred to in my previous post on this blog, tend to come round in circles.