The impossibility of memory

In the late 1980’s at a time when more than 2000 people a year were murdered in New York City, Southside Williamsburg, in Brooklyn was an extremely hot and heavy neighbourhood and was also where I lived from 1986 – 1990. In April 2012 I went back there with my camera to capture the past, but where was it….? The video shows me in the studio working on drawings for the upcoming blood/MarcyAV exhibition and talking about the inspiration for the show. blood/MarcyAV is  me visual artist Michele Marcoux, sound artist Lynne Thermann and poet Sheila Black and explores the nostalgia…

Is Painting Nostalgic?

  Memory is where I start. A core dislocation, the sadness, a lie that I tell myself.  To start. There is longing but also relief. There is no going back. There are limits but there is potential. I was meant to be here…….. When it’s going in the right direction nostalgia disappears. You don’t look back and risk that your experience of the potential of desire, of joy, of beauty will disappear, vanish before you have sense enough to recognize it. Leaving not much in its place but longing and regret. NOSTALGIA. The point is to keep going, make the…

Hillsounds and Dollfur

 Lynne writes (and edits sounds) from Moon Hill Farm, a civil war era farmhouse at the top of a mountain near Claryville NY. She lives with Jean, who has owned the farm since the 60’s and her mum Carmella. This is her latest post from the Catskills………………………………………………………… i’m a woman who came of age in new york city in the 1970s, when definitions of creative art were really expanding. as a young person I heard a lot of music that was really brand new. it changed the very definition of listening, of being with sound. the listener became part of…

Nostalgia/Analgesic Diary

Since we all met up at Jean’s fabulous upstate NY farm last April, Lynne and Sheila and I have been working diligently away at the Nostalgia/Analgesic project. Sound! Image! Poetry! Lots has happened in the meantime, Sheila’s moved herself and her family to San Antonio, Texas to run Gemini Ink, Lynne now has her mum up in the Catskills with her and Jean – Lynne has lots to do to keep everyone warm and fed up there – and chopping all the wood is the least of it! Here in Edinburgh I have moved to a new studio in Dalry,…

Balloons

These balloons are part of on-going research begun in 2010 and were collected from a beach on Block Island, a small island off the coast of New England in the USA. The beach is an isolated and rugged environment of cliffs and boulders facing the open Atlantic. Along with the expected detritus of landslide, fallen trees and wreckage from the shipping industry, it is striking the number of cellophane balloons which accumulates here. Wrapped around boulders, buried in the sand, accumulated in masses like seaweed they are the dead junk of a consumer society which causes huge environmental damage. Formed…