The theme of the winter residency programme, ‘Darkness and
Isolation’ raises a lot of questions. What kind of isolation are we referring
to? Isolation can be physical, environmental, social, political. Some kinds of
isolation can be factual, many other kinds are more a feeling, an experience, a
perception. Isolation is also a relative concept and we need to ask ourselves
in relation to what we feel isolated. These questions are particularly
important to me as my background is in rural development. Surely, living in
remote rural communities can be isolated in a physical sense, but I question
whether inhabitants necessarily feel isolated socially and culturally. The Land
Reform legislation has even taken a step towards addressing issues of political
and economic isolation by giving communities the opportunity to buy land hand and
thereby take control over a communities’ destiny. Though many communities feel
this may be too big a step, this legislation may effect their experience of
political and economic isolation. At the same time, city living can be an
isolated experience as many people hardly know their neighbours and the less
well-off are marginalised. The poet Meg Bateman captures this
particularly well in her poem Remoteness in which she describes where you can
find remoteness nowadays: “in the towerblocks between motorways/where people are
removed,/ edged out from power”.
As part of my project Said in Stone last summer, I wrote
around twenty poems in which I tried to capture the experiences and stories related
to stones of a variety of real and imagined people in Grampian. When I reflected
on these poems it struck me that, in one way or another, most of the poems
dealt with issues of – what I call – embeddedness, that is, the experience of
belonging to a certain place, time and community. To me, embeddedness and
isolation are head and tail of the same coin. Though equally contested, I feel
that embeddedness may have more positive connotations than isolation. During my
residency at SSW I will thus use the term isolation to respond to the theme ‘Darkness
and Isolation’.
To add to the art forms that I can use in my community music
work, and because I enjoy writing, I’ll work in the medium of performance
poetry during the residency. When I wrote the poems for Said in Stone and for the
video poem Wind, Willow, Water, the musicality of poetry stood out for me. In carving
out my own approach to performance poetry I want to capitalise on this musicality
and borrow ideas from performance art about ways in which perceived barriers
between a performer and the audience can be broken down through the creative
use of space and giving the audience a role in the performance. I will showcase my work during an informal performance on Friday 14 February at SSW.
Other posts about the residency at Scottish Sculpture Workshop are:
The music of poetry
Pottery and claypipe
Other posts about the residency at Scottish Sculpture Workshop are:
The music of poetry
Pottery and claypipe
Copyright text and image Petra Vergunst
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