How does one orient towards a place, how does one locate themselves somewhere? How to make physical strategies to do so, how to develop tools for situating yourself somewhere? How to help your body arrive to a site, to the land, to all it has held, holds, will hold? How to include what you are, what you’ve been and what you’ve held, how to mix, how to converse. How to create an occasion, the way, the how, the style, for being together? How to be friends with an unassuming green field by the road in Tipperary? How to understand its constitution, its specificity, its habits, its personality? How to arrive here, how to arrive here, how to help my body understand, I am here.
1. A Large Wooden Hexagon Structure, Something To Push Up Against. Something to lean against, something with mass to make me feel my scale, in this site, something that can move with me. A solid structure to be in relationship with, to, towards. Make a tool to practice convening, my Structure’s structure convening with another Structure’s structure. The force, the exertion, the push back, the bounce, the weight, the roll. Acclimating to a field by exertion of an object across it. How to arrive by laboring, the laboring through a material as a means of arriving somewhere.
2. A Suit On Which to Map-Make. A set of shirt and pants, made of industrial wool felt, found in the pile in the backfront of Milford House. Grey wool felt, acting as a piece of paper, a drawing instrument that is worn. A piece of chalk with which to draw in one hand, draw on the suit that sits atop your body. Practicing mapping, from multiple prompts and points of view. Draw (to map) the architecture in front of you – on the back side of your suit. Draw (to map) the lines in space people make as they move – in the armpit of your suit. Draw (to map) the negative space between bodies – on the collar of your suit. Most importantly – Map Affect. Map all the moments in that green field where you affected or were effected. Map the experience of mutual affectation. Map where these moments happened, translate them onto your suit, map their tone, map the act of affecting as if it were shapes, geometry, curves, spatial punctuations. Map the composition of affect.
3. Daily Practices In/With the Green Field. Using the act of measuring and mapping in new ways. Repurposing the act of measuring as a tool through which to meet this field. This field, who is steadily becoming an acquaintance, I measure this field. Its 3.5 acres of volume, I measure this field with the length of my body. The length of my body as a ruler, a unit, a surmised unit of measurement. I measure this field with the length of my body which is to say I measure it imprecisely, subjectively. I measure the volume of this field in footsteps too, which is also to say I measure it imprecisely, subjectively. What is the use of measuring imprecisely, what ‘result’ it yields. Maybe I measure it this way so that it has space to measure me. Put me in perspective, relief my body with its presence, my lack of accuracy holding open space for it.
3a. I draw diagrams daily for a while. Diagrams of walking backwards in the field, diagrams of sprinting eight times around the field, diagrams of the names of the trees lining its perimeter, diagrams of pacing back and forth for exactly one hour. Diagrams of the weekend I was away from the field, the distance between me in Belfast and the field in Tipperary, diagramming my longing for the field. Detailed and rigorous practices in the field giving way to loose and subjective diagrams. Another ode to affect, repurposing the form to subjectively index.
How does one orient towards a place, how does one locate themselves somewhere? How to make physical strategies to do so, how to develop tools for situating yourself somewhere? How to help your body arrive to a site, to the land, to all it has held, holds, will hold? How to include what you are, what you’ve been and what you’ve held, how to mix, how to converse. How to create an occasion, the way, the how, the style, for being together? How to be friends with an unassuming green field by the road in Tipperary? How to understand its constitution, its specificity, its habits, its personality? How to arrive here, how to arrive here, how to help my body understand, I am here.
Residency 2022, ongoing work in progress Perched in the attic of the original 330year old Milford House I look out and see the forest of ancient trees surrounding the house. I am drawn to the 250-year-old beech trees weighed down by 100,000’s of spiky beech mast. A day spent collecting hundreds of beech nuts led to hours of painstaking hand painting, which finally lead to the creation of spherical sculptural object encrusted in beech nuts. It was wonderful to watch as the beech nuts went through a process of transformation from the hard, spiky almond shapes, which slowly opened up like flower petals to reveal the oily seeds that they had been protecting. The quiet and supportive space of Milford House allows me to further explore notions of the traumatized female medical body. In particular I have been researching about the use of nylon and plastic man-made medical devices, which are regularly inserted into female bodies. Part of this process led me to create a life-size mesh made of plastic flagging tape (used to identify exterior boundaries and dangerous areas). Although I am drawn to the scale and fecundity of my surroundings it is the interior formal spaces in Milford house that have resonated with me to date. The majesty and idiosyncratic character of both the vivid red living room/ library and the pale blue music room have become a fertile space of exploration for me.
We believe that art is an evocation of a fragment of life. The reality of life is indeed complex and can be faithfully conveyed by the coexistence of various means of expression. Over the past year, we have shared our individual researches, which have seemed complementary to each other and have allowed us to grow our views on life and art.
Kiro, as an artist and beatboxer, reflects on the importance of the voice and the subtraction of the person in a performance, leaving more space for the sound dimension than the visual one. He works on the gaze, understanding it as a tool to reach the most unexplored and invisible areas of being, avoiding the prejudice linked to the visual dimension. He intends the gaze as a blade, in his practice the gaze is a tool to move internal chaos. He studies what rhythm is in relation to time, voice and its vibrations.
Vittorio as an artist, dancer and musician is developing his own daily practice based on repetition and listening. Repetition is always different, it is a way to go deep into sensations and movements, it is a concrete tool to analyse something immaterial and to untie our inner knots. Music and dance are means that allow us to build a continuity between us and everything else. He wants to achieve the feeling of being part of a unique nature, to conquer the continuity between inside and outside.
Simona is a visual artist. She is interested in architecture as a manifestation of life. Any architecture is alive if it works as a flexible and permeable boundary that allows the relationship between its interior and exterior. Lately, she has been making small wooden houses working on their atmosphere and context. These places are places of observation to study the invisible and silent relationships between man, objects, architecture and the surrounding environment that appear to her in their magical and immaterial nature.
During the residence period in Live Art Ireland the three artists will work together on the same project, continuing to explore the direction of their respective research
During our residency at Milford House, we developed our ongoing project Growing Sculptures From The Land, where we investigate the landscape through performative sculpture making. Using mud, cloth, stone and sound.
We started from the writings of Schelling about the cosmological intricacies of the system of nature, art and culture, just as much as BBC documentary series Around The World In 80 Gardens, alongside the concrete ideas of borders, nations and communities in relation to mud.
Reading sections from Timothy Morton All Art Is Ecological, Thomas Nail Theory Of The Earth, and Fredric Jameson Archaeologies Of The Future, we developed thinking about co-existence, re-wilding, place and space. We saw the layers of fallen trees and undergrowth growing out of the destruction of the old, into hypercities of bugs and critters, birds and plant life. We have been particularly inspired by the idea that everything emits time, as well as the deep understanding of the existence of others. The work became involved in geological relations between the soil, human culture, and nature.
We performed the making by digging the mud material from the ditches, filtering through the cloth and hanging them on the trees; then tending the sculptures day by day until they were ripe. Plucking them from the trees and opening the cloth to reveal the mud shapes, the fire pit dried them into fragile, cracked artworks. We then transferred the sculptures into the screen so they can travel freely. Finally, we placed the remnants of the physical mud sculptures in the public space of Portumna Forest, where they will participate in the ongoing ecosystem dialogue, decomposing, feeding, being part of the ground.
Here’s our Pragmata Collective artist statement:
Pragmata Collective is engaged in art-making with people things and places that are: sometimes private but relate to public; sometimes personal but relate to social; networked, entangled, technological; performed, prescriptive, perchance; researching, learning.
Pragmata is the collaborative practice of artists Adele Lazzeri and Toby Tobias Kidd.
Adele’s research and art practice revolve around sculptural experiments as philosophical enquiries into the geological-cosmological relations between art and nature.
