While on a daytrip to Portsmouth I’ve noticed something very, very bad has happened to my portfolio and it’s basically stopped existing. Working on it, I promise, hope to have it up as soon as possible. I think this may be a good opportunity to introduce you to my bit on the side, a little side project I’ve been dabbling in, Objets d’art. Enjoy being a magpie with me.
ETA: It’s up!
The hare with amber eyes has been following me for some time now. The book is going to be a separate post, I hope, but now I wanted to write about “Signs & Wonders”, Edmund de Waal’s installation at the V&A. I’ve been intrigued about it for the longest time and in a way it will always be intriguing – it’s impossible to look at it closely, impossible to examine and study it. It has a most unusual placement: when you enter the V&A, before you even reach the space where tickets are sold, raise your eyes and there it is: in a dome 15 (?) metres above you there is a glimpse of a red band of metal, a circular shelf, you realise, full of ceramic dishes in subtle beiges and celadons. It’s witty, surprising and tactful (a word de Waal expounds upon, fascinatingly, in his School of Life lecture, also in relation to the installation I’m writing about – watch his “Sunday sermon” here). De Waal is very interested in the idea of the vitrine, a vessel for vessels – in this case the red aluminium shelf attracts the eye in an almost aggressive way, which is an interesting contrast to the visual murmur of the ceramic pieces.
But yes – the unreachability of it all! That was my first visit to the V&A, so I had to walk around it for a considerable amount of time, increasingly tired and distracted with all the other lovely things that are on display there, to try and find the best angle to see “Signs & Wonders”. In the end, when I did finally reach a good place and craned my head to see, it was very restful – a collection of understated shapes, an elegant echo of the riot of forms and colours that I saw in the rest of the museum. It seems this is precisely what de Waal intended: on the plaque on the wall you can read his statement on the piece, saying: “I’d look hard at some part of the collection, then look away and then make the after-image. It was a kind of distillation”. This is exactly how it works – it’s an essence, a reflection on what the V&A is. Very happy to have finally seen this.
Edmund de Waal’s “Signs & Wonders” at the V&A.
It’s been a while. Work, travel, a relocation to London. Dealing with changes and getting used to a new life, away from the sea, closer to the heart of things. It’s all good though, all learning experiences. I’m feeling a bit rusty with writing in general, so I’ll start with a particular: the Anish Kapoor exhibition at the Lisson Gallery, sadly ended yesterday. Caught it just in time.
My absolute favourite were the metal hemispheres filled with colour on the inside. It’s such a rare experience to have your field of vision filled completely with just one thing, even rarer for it to be just colour, vivid, saturated, absolute. Those sheets of colour mess with your perception: when the colour is matte, when there’s no reflection to guide your eye, from an angle the insides of the shapes seem completely flat, not concave. I stood in front of the pieces, closely, and giggled. There was more to the exhibition, but the sheer joy provoked by the experience of facing those made them a definite highlight for me. Still amazed I now live in a place where those things are accessible, available, free.
I had an interesting conversation with the person I interpreted recently. After we worked together for three days and were saying goodbye, he thanked me for doing such a great job. I was of course very flattered, but I was wondering to what extent can someone who does not speak the target language assess the interpretation. He went on to explain: he knew the interpretation was competent due to the questions the participants asked. They referred to some of the subtlest aspects of his lecture and showed in-depth understanding of everything it entailed. It was a very interesting idea, to assess interpretation on the basis of the audience’s/listeners’ feedback, and I don’t mean feedback as in “do you think that intepretation was good”, but feedback as in production, associations, reflections. It makes sense.
As some of you may know, my MA thesis had a lot to do with senses, especially the sense of smell, its cooperation with memory and its presence in text as a shorthand for many other things. I love my MA – I loved writing and researching it and still look out for sources about the issue. It’s one that I find organically interesting, but experiencing what I wrote about was not something I could force. It just happens – like last Saturday, when we left the house on a bright, mild Welsh morning and I got a lungful of the freshest, tenderest air, smelling of wet soil drying in the sun, uncurling leaves and the sea. It was like a soft punch in the chest – for a second I was back in York, in May, during that glorious spring, that beginning. It was a smell I hadn’t felt since that May almost seven years ago, but when I did, last Saturday, I was certain it’s the same scent. It was so visceral. Sounds trite, and yet that trip back to seven years ago wasn’t. Someone wiser than me speaks about it more eloquently here.
I had the pleasure of seeing the dancers of National Dance Company Wales twice in the past two days. On Thursday I went to photograph the open class and today we saw a performance consisting of “Phantoms of Us” (chor. Eleesha Drennan), “B/olero & Black Milk” (chor. Ohad Naharin) and “The Grammar of Silence” (chor. Itzik Galili). It was interesting to see them in two different settings: the casual one, when they wore their own clothes, joked, goofed around and worked hard, and the professional, when they moved in unison, carried on by choreography, in costume, equipped only with a stage persona. (Note: my camera and I couldn’t deal with the open class. All I have is a blur, a collection of images in which you can only just see a perfect contour of the upraised arms, gracefully arranged fingers, a profile. It’s still beautiful.)
I enjoyed the performance very much – the music and the movement harmonised beautifully, the lighting was understated but clever, the intimate venue meant I heard the dancers’ quick breaths. My favourite piece was “Black Milk”, performed by five male dancers dressed in ecru garments reminiscent of the hakama. That created a religious, ritual, martial atmosphere, but there were moments in the choreography that had the pure exhilaration of children at play. “B/olero”, a duet of female dancers, was a very compelling contrast of lighthearted femininity and athletic, almost mechanical movement. Another moment that stands out: the dancers emerging from darkness and slipping first one hand, then the other, into columns of light (in “Grammar”). “Phantoms of Us” was very impressive; faced with the stark, almost naked figures on stage I had to marvel at the extremes a well-trained human body can push itself to. Funny, considering I was wearing shoes with heels so high I had to slip them off during the evening – clearly I need more training.
It took me far too long than I’ve liked to make all of this work, but well, here we are. This blog will be a bit of everything: expect reviews of all kinds, comments on living between Great Britain and Poland, casual photos and the odd personal post. Hey ho.
