Hello up there,
Thanks for this Margi, I love the idea of 'outside rooms' and enlarging the spaces in which we conceive ourselves performing, to embrace the environment.
I have spent quite some time working outside responding to, working with (and sometimes ignoring) landscape,
yet of course whilst it is familiar - it is also still vastly unknown, and my relationship to these various concepts of 'body in landscape' is always changing and evolving.
Like any relationship really.
Peter's Berrinba Wetlands project impressed me in these ways:
the many dimensions and multi planar thinking involved :: layers of earth/ under and over :: vegetation and rates of growth :: mulch to protect the ground :: water as an environment and as a resource ::
fauna and wildlife corridors within and without the parkland :: transactions with human stakeholders :: the support of local community and consideration of their needs :: the fluid relationship with council :: the wishes of the
land endowment people :: the architects and engineers and labour force :: aesthetic considerations :: artwork and video :: the industrial corridors :: the ongoing maintenance and upkeep ::
And then : from our perspective as users :
time and what grows and what dies away :: what returns? :: the path itself and the time of our journey :: the intersecting circularites of time and space
light and shade/ heat and cool :: pausing at bridges :: transition zones :: the hidden places underneath where trolls hide
the ways we see and are seen :: the landscape is looking back at us
And then : the tiny pocket of Kemp Place
another reclamation :: a tiny haven amidst concrete flyovers :: a series of red poles planted in the ground/ another claiming
exclaiming :: declaiming
THE MORE YOU THINK ABOUT IT THE BIGGER IT GETS
Thinking back simply about the studio time (on Sun 20th)... my experience of working in the room and conceiving a 'sensory experience' for Margi and Brian was as much about what was outside the room as the space inside.
I was drawn to the windows as frames for the many layers of texture and movement, colour and reflection happening outside.
In response to the qualities that had emerged for me on our saturday excursion, I wanted to draw your attention to as many ways to perceive that space (inside and outside) as possible.
one thing i wanted to do but didn't/couldn't were :
creating light reflections on the ceiling (eg with a bowl of water , but you need direct sunlight for that i think)... or creating subtle changes of light
(there was more to say, but this is where i paused...)
28th March.. to resume in another place...
In mid March I spent 7 days on a Body/Landscape workshop in Central Victoria with (Amsterdam based) Body Weather practitioner Frank van der Ven.
Lots of walking (our walking became slower and quieter as the week went on) and some wonderful ways of looking and changing perception - not just of the outside environment, but also of the inside spaces of the body.
I thought about our reflections on landscape architecture and the dramatic impact of light and shade and our relationship to the path... strongly sensing gravity and how the variations in ground surface affect stability...
reading the landscape at the same time as 'falling' into it... sensing trees and rocks 'in place' and the time that they occupy stretching forward and backward... sensing my own place in that time, my specific weight and density,
the layers of me, stretching back and forward in time and space... remembering that i am also formed and shaped by the forces of gravity, of heat, of light, wind, water...
sometimes when i move these days i am aware of all this geological and cultural history, like the earth's strata, playing itself out through this weathered body...
n x
