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27 March to 20 April 1997: THE LADIES OF NAIRN Anne Ooms The Explanation I want to write plainly about how I work. The process of being with the work, attempting to sustain connection with it, involves an ongoing cultivation of openness. This for me is the fundamental joy and difficulty. It is the job of setting aside judgement and anxieties, the narratives of what has been and should be, of a place in history, in order to pay attention to what I can only think to call a 'real' desire. It is a tricky and elusive business which must allow for distractions with an infinitely gentle rigour. It involves the paradox that while I remain committed to the production of a successful work of art, its success is predicated on a faith in letting go; most importantly, the letting go of a preconceived notion of success. Relinquishing the wilful push for resolution is a moment by moment activity. The process of choosing creates the philosophy of my practice: when and how do I allow diversions to have their way without undermining the project and myself as an artist. The continual renegotiation of my relation to these questions is the task at hand. The ability to use change creatively, to accommodate ongoing dissolution, is commensurate with the strength of my faith in it and in my practice as a whole. Sense of self and loss of self are inseparable. My amorphous complex of desires in the face of a job to be completed (an art work, a lecture, a catalogue essay), continually threatens to fix into a dichotomy. Attentively resisting this polarity by accepting both and refusing to force either issue allows connections within myself, the work and between us to arise. This sense of connection is always an energising surprise. It's a break in causal logic, a temporary abeyance of habit, a satori. It's a blessed relief. While working on a series of embroideries for this exhibition, I became more interested in my collections of postcards and certain fragments of texts and deciding to put the latter two together, began the narratives which became the current work. (I often find that beginning a work enables me to imagine the work I really want to do.) A recurring image through these texts and in various forms in others I've written, is of a man in a clearing in a jungle or wood. One of the memories which forms the compost for the image is undoubtedly Mellors and his cottage in Lady Chatterley's Lover. To feed the last of the seven texts written for The Ladies of Nairn I had on my desk a post card of a painting of the Virgin and Child with a walnut and another of a green Hans Arp sculpture. Their choice at that moment had no apparent reason. Blocked for a bit, I absent mindedly turned over the Arp card and noticed the title, Waldhut and having no German dictionary, rang a friend who looked it up. It means keeper of the forest or you could say game keeper, he told me. There is no order for the seven texts to be read. In one you'll find a slender line of connection to this, the eighth text. catalogue essay Anne Ooms1997 |
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