You may now be slipping into imagining some relatively tranquil pond-on-hill setting, but actually, what attracts me about this particular site is that it directly juxtaposes a stillness that the pond vicinity emanates with a panoramic view that includes the very busy main trunck road. This, typically carries a continual flow that frequently intersperces the largest of lorries with both Greenwich tour coaches and chugging London transport buses as well as cars/vans/cyclists etc. The road, in its close proximity, brings the setting particular momentums, noise levels and acoustics. Imagine a narrow slice of stranded land: on one side, sandwiched by a fairly quiet road and then a high wall, over which is the leafy Greenwich Park, and immediately on the other side of the pond vicinity, a single carriage way road from which there's a continuous thunder, swishing of traffic and punctuations as rattling engines speed away or slow for the pedestrian crossing nearby.
Immediately to the other side of the busy road is more green open-space -- playing fields -- and, as this is the top of the hill (which forms a kind of large plateau area, not a point), the skyline is low behind the passing traffic. So, on film, framing the the traffics scale can be made even more dominant. The site first inspired the vision for this work when I was walking past it at around twilight on a crisp November evening -- the pond vicinity and road were well lit and bathed in orange tungsten lighting and the blue night sky and stars were reflected in the pond. The area at this time is unpopulated, as not a pedestrian-friendly vicinity-thoroughfare and so it presents this image of stillness against a cinematic scale panorama of both noisy and encapsulated traffic sliding by, but also somehow floating as the skyline behind is so low.
The durational performance movement-work of the leaning figures, in stillness, would be striking against and immersed in this cinematic space... I also like the way the roadway at this point is strikingly straight, so the passage-way of traffic heightens the sense of stark directional movements, whilst the 8 or so figures would be within the borders of the pond-vicinity floating and slowly drifting randomly. Much of my movement-based work is interested in using contrasting vector movements or momentums -- as this seems to be a way of materialising a showing of a sense of 'becoming' that I think is important to draw attention to, ie relating to the non-linear, to do with the event of the Aion rather than the Chronos, in relation to Deleuzian concepts, but neither trying to represent these.
The images of the pond vicinity location presented here were taken in August, hence are very leafy. (I will post some more taken this November). However, the vision for this work is actually season specific, as it requires the leaves to be off the trees as well as the contingent environmental atmospherics that the this specific seasonal moment provides, ie, as when the space was seen previously on the November evening referred to above. At this time the cinematic sliding-thundering-floating traffic vision is both louder and more striking as its pervasive proximity to the pond vicinity is more intense and stark. It's less separate and not hidden by the trees which, in their bareness, amidst this now even more exposed space, on a windless evening also engender a kind of sustained durational sitllness from their embodiment of dormancy. This will work cut against the different breathing stillness created by the floating and subtle shifting-leans of the envisaged figures situated within the pond.
Description of...
A film work idea by Lauren Goode.
Project work-in-development, since 2004.
