I craved to make liberating work
that was as agenda-less as possible, to liberate myself from more
thematically-driven projects. Themes would emerge anyway. I wanted
to do something with a lightness of touch to investigate brevity
and simplicity.
A lot of friends tell me I am untidy. All around my flat would be
strewn notes, diagrams, ideas for projects, songs, smart media
cards, bits or rubbish. Friends named these “Dooks Droppings” or
would say “You really are a messy pup.”
One day, I collected all these Dooks Droppings™ up in one place and
looked at them. I began to think about the film “Terminator2” where
an assailant is reduced to lots of droplets of mercury on the
ground. Slowly but surely these droplets coalesce to reform the
assailant once more. This is a grand metaphor for my own working
method. I write many seemingly unconnected trains of thought but
when collected, sometimes the whole becomes more than the sum of
it’s parts.
I decided I would collect all my notes and use the entire gallery
as a notebook. I had some “Haiku-like” poems printed as vinyl text
for the floor. I wanted people to walk over them and not be
precious. Other poems and mini sagas were printed on
architect-board and positioned in discrete places like toilets or
very low on the wallls. The idea was, that if you “found all 20”
you could claim “a special prize” (this was a book about the
exhibition and three people got the prize. Kids loved it).
The “detrius” included :
A recipe for Chana Dhal
Looped text Mantras
Word Play
Medical Speculation about my health
Lines from new Poems
I was unsure whether this was a “writing project” or an “art
project” as pigeon-holing is difficult and tiresome for me. But I
decided it was an “art project” in the end as it made the gallery
punter really look hard around the spaces, the nooks, the crannies.
It intersected art and poetry in a kind of word treasure hunt. As
far as I am concerned, anything which gets people looking at art
for longer than usual in the classic white cube gallery space can’t
be a bad thing in my humble opinion.