White Noise
Last weekend I worked on a project in Torquay.
In the Spanish Barn next to Torre Abbey is an exhibition of Damien Hurst’s famous piece ‘Mother and Child Divided’ which involves the preserved remains of a cow and a calf cut in half lengthways, with visitors able to walk between them.
In tandem to the opening of this exhibition, the Office of Subversive Architecture had designed a 200m long white carpet path to provide direct access from the seafront to both Torre Abbey and the Barn.
My job, alongside that of other performers was to animate this ‘path’ for the community of Torquay.
Having found the team, all based in Exeter we met to bounce around some ideas concerning how exactly we were going to integrate this carpet with a community we were not too familiar with.
Phil Smith kindly contributed some text together with information regarding figures that were connected with the site, and we set about recording them to be played at the beginning of the path. My interest with this part of the project was in the geological history of the site (having studied geology when I was younger) having been inspired by a story of Phil’s concerning the Sticklepath Fault. I dug out everything I could find on the geological history of the fault:
“This zone of faulting runs across the whole of the south west peninsula from Bideford to Torbay. It is also of Alpine date, probably contemporary with the southern tilt referred to earlier. It cuts across the north-eastern part of the Dartmoor area where it can be traced by a series of valleys parallel to the NW/SE fault line. It has been exploited by various rivers over time including the Bovey and tributaries of the Teign and Taw.”
I found that by sheer luck the fault ends right near the Abbey, meaning that our carpet path could in a sense act as a continuation of it. With the path starting in a bus shelter, it made sense to create a timetable of all the places the fault passed through on its journey. The project then became that of acknowledging the varying layers that made up the site and how they could be glimpsed through the applying of a temporary one: the white carpet.
We decided that visually we needed to be linked to the carpet, and decided to adorn ourselves in white, with white flags allowing ourselves to communicate with each other if necessary (as there would only be a small number of us spaced along the 200m path).
On Sunday morning, bright and early we drove down and upon arriving at the site we began to flesh out a performance. Walking the route helped us find a structure to the piece, in which we could give roles to each other. Two performers to welcome the public to the path and to entice them to follow it, one at the critical crossing from public to private land and one to patrol the private land itself. At the end of the path would be sat two individuals who would record comments through varying forms of documentation. The masterstroke though was the decision to write on the carpet itself, as it was also a blank canvas in which the community of Torbay would provide another layer on the site. This I feel (and so do many others) to be the critical concern of site-specific art in the public domain: how to integrate it within the community.
Sticking with the geological theme for a second, the artwork acts as an ‘intrusion’ in which something new is forced into an area. However, what occurs in light of this is a chilled/baked margin in which both the intrusion and the site react to one another blurring their separation. The starkness of the white path needed such a margin.
We the performers acted as that of the chilled margin, part of the path integrating it with the area, whilst the people of Torquay were that of the ‘baked margin’ slowly accepting the intrusion with each pen stroke and foot print. We knew that the more people that walked the path and wrote on its surface, the easier it would become. Our dialogue together was maintained through the conversations we had and indeed the answers to our questions written on the carpet.
One of the performers who guarded the border between the public/private land decided to draw round the foot of each individual who crossed the boundary, symbolising a trace or a stamp in a passport, emphasising the connection between both sites.
Don’t get me wrong it wasn’t always easy, with graffiti from youths and abuse from some locals who viewed it as a waste of money. All of these though stemmed from a feeling of distance from the piece either economically or artistically. You cannot avoid the political with site-specific art, because you are always encroaching on land that is often not originally allocated for this purpose. The idea of allowing a temporary footpath in which the public can assert their right of way illustrates this perfectly. People ran, walked, cycled, rolled and hop-scotched their way along the path, and the community for two days was brought into a physical alignment. I met some incredible individuals on my walking back and forth of the path each with a story to tell either through their voice or indeed their writing. Walking, gave their stories forward momentum as if I was walking through with them. Each time I walked the path I saw something different written on it, a drawing, a story, a quote, a mark, all a trace sewn together into a path of performance.
Like Hirst’s piece, the path divided people but it also brought them together.
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