A reflective essay by Jacqui Malins documenting her residency at ANCA Gallery, 22 July - 9 August 2020.
A dilettante, a dabbler. Inch deep, mile wide, flittering from distraction to distraction. When it is all tangents and no centre, when everything seems disparate and disconnected, how do you recognise the patterns? Put the bits together and make something of substance?
‘Dilettante’ is derived from the Latin ‘to take delight’. In this residency, I wanted to apply and reflect on tactics which have proved fruitful in my practice so far, without limiting it artificially in my attempt to control it. As someone who is quickly attracted to and distracted by the next interesting thing that crosses my path, or my mind, I have often struggled with feeling overwhelmed by creative practice. Now, instead of fencing myself in with a predetermined theme or subject, I wanted to start with a working process, and observe what happens when I allow my interest, curiosity and delight to lead me, unfettered.
To provide focus, instead of a fence I used a touchstone. This was a chapter of Jane Hirschfield’s ‘Ten Windows’, a book that (poetically) explores how poetics work. 'Poetry and the constellations of surprise' explores the many subtle or striking ways that surprise can operate to open up awareness, capture attention, shift emotional states or perspective, conjure insight. I worked through that chapter, revisiting its ideas across the three weeks of the residency.
My raw material was a collection of writings made over the past year or two, and a number of video sequences that were created at the tail end of another project. These were all available to play with, to shake together in new combinations, to bend, cut up and recombine. Each week, I worked in a block of four days with a plan:
· Day 1: an intensive reading and writing process
· Days 2-4: investigations in text, movement, voice and image/video
· Days 3 &4: 'Work in progress' showings each afternoon.
In the first week, the plan was great - it got me started, short-circuited too much thinking about what I was about to do. After that, I had so many threads unfurling that I didn't need such a strict plan. The work-in-progress showings, with set times and the promise (threat?) of an audience, created useful structure. They gave me something to aim for, relieved the isolation of working for days alone and kept me trying things out with my voice/body/projector/camera, rather than simply thinking about things and designing them in the incorporeal space of my imagination.
It was valuable to see people's reactions as the work developed, talk about how they responded to the ideas, do some thinking out loud. Several visitors remarked on how much they appreciated an opportunity to see creative process in action, not simply a finished product.
As the days and then weeks progressed, bits of work started to form. They initially seemed unrelated. The first day yielded a completely new piece of text and video, embodying my feelings about the threats of the pandemic and fragility of my older parents, territory I would once have avoided due to the risk of sentimentality. Then I tried combining a range of unrelated texts and video sequences, which yielded some interesting results. The first exciting combination involved a poem which reflects on the constant growth, decay and replenishment of our bodies over our lifetimes. This started me off on a trail of pieces related to science and its history - spontaneous generation, a macabre poem about the embalming jars of a 17th century anatomist, a seminal paper on herd behaviour I have been interested in for several years now, a poem about mirrors, the new push to colonise Mars. Scattered bits emerged. Gradually in the third week, connections began to appear between some of the pieces.
At the end of the three weeks, I have an early iteration of a work I am calling 'Matter of Life'. It traverses different ways we fit into the world, how science has shifted our understanding of where we fit, the awe and wonder it can generate, our fragility and impermanence. A lot of the raw material pre-dates the summer fire season and the pandemic, but unsurprisingly the work is suffused with a heightened sense of life and death. I am excited about developing this work to its next stage.
I also came away with an assortment of bits and pieces - ideas, text, images, processes - that I didn't have time to pursue. Some of these may one day be used in this or other work, some will remain creative debris. Most valuably, I was able to deliberately and actively observe the way I work and understand it better. Yes, starting without predetermined boundaries and allowing my promiscuous curiosity to roam can feel daunting and untethered. But this residency demonstrated that it can also allow more expansive, subtle and surprising work to emerge. I am hoping this experience enables me to relax into my dilettantism, allowing it to lead me to new discoveries and delights.
Image credits (Title image) Jacqui Malins, Performance still, 2019. Photo by Kendall Kirkwood. (Below) Jacqui Malins, Glimpses of a dilettante (performance stills), 2020. Photos courtesy the artist.
