Obsession

Travelling regularly backwards and forwards to Leicester my obsessive nature was drawn to a particular line of trees and to another more randomly placed set.   One was orderly in every visual aspect, the train from which they were viewed plodded along, they were neatly spaced, had beautiful round shaped domes on top of elegant trunks.   The other appeared completely in disarray with tall bent trunks and straggly, shaggy windswept tops and often hardly made it into the frame as the train was the High Speed.   I photographed both sets over and over in a compulsion that came from deep within me, the images lie condensed as pixels within an external hard drive, unvisited, unused and becoming a fading memory along with the journey to Leicester.  One day I'll resurrect them and make them into the video I see in my mind.

For now though my sight is taken up once again with the sea, remember Sea Piano Fret?  My obsessiveness has turned its attention back to the waves.   I've watched them for years now, at night when the moon is full it casts an electric blue light as though rushing through the crest when the tide is full, fat and seemingly slow.  I've watched them crashing into the shore when a man stands precariously on the concrete groin opposite my window.  I've dreamt about them.  Lately I've been watching them up close, fascinated by the fact that some do actually seem to be retreating from the land, while others appear to want to devour it.  

I'm not the only obsessive one, of modern day observers of the sea here are two: Susan Collins set up webcams across the south coast and observed the tides roll in and out pixel by pixel.  Catherine Yass made the film 'Lighthouse' (the Royal Sovereign Lighthouse located five miles out to sea off the coast from here and visible from my windows) disrupting our spatial awareness with the camera movement, I watched it again and again. 

The sea right now is ever so slowly revealing some of its secrets, it's a bit scary though.  Placing myself in precarious positions and catching myself jumping with fear at just the right moment to avoid being consumed by it is no fun and stupid at best.   I found a copy of George Knight's 'Photography Hints & Tips' - the special limp edition of 1971 which expressly tells me on page 34 'At the coast' ... Take great care of your equipment on the beach, and protect it from sand particles and salt spray by keeping everything (yes - the ever-ready case as well!) in a polythene bag; never leave it lying in full sunshine, whether it is loaded with film or not...  Well I've exposed my film-less, bag-less equipment to salt, sand and sun and hope to goodness it'll still function once those evils have done their worst. 

And after all that scariness (I'll show you that later) here is a relaxing, gentle shot.

Glen Jamieson, reviewing...

Reflections on Time Travelling (with Sea Piano Fret)
Lucinda Wells, Trinity Buoy Wharf 

With the bare ground flooring of the Gatehouse at London Docklands' Trinity Buoy Wharf under feet, I sat mesmerized by the image of an unfurling St. Leonards seascape. The sea moving gently under an early evening sky is a familiar scene to many seaside dwellers. But even if it is watched on many occasions from the same viewpoint, the same favourite bench or balcony, a seascape is ever changing, and it can evoke different impressions, recall memories, and encourage reveries. Viewed from this sofa for sale on a peninsula where the Thames joins the River Lea, I watched the sea reclining, the tide and the waves creeping and curling away from land. Unlike any seascape I had seen before, a fear grew in me that this sea gestured to an end of an era, that we had gone as far as we could in time and now we were moving backwards, as land and time was being recovered.

A piano melody emerged from the seascape, faintly muffled as if the piano was being played on the seabed, growing in intensity and in harmony with the unfolding of each wave. The tune is evocative of a certain era in Britain - or of a wartime film (the era is before my time), say Distant Voices, Still Lives (Terence Davies, 1988). I learned that Lucinda Wells' "Mum" ("a Londoner through and through") played this tune, and as was her usual way, would play by ear - "the music was inside her head and her hands found the notes". Surreptitiously recorded by the artist, this reticent song that could not be emulated with the same sentiment by a pianist or a performer speaks remarkably loudly and expressively of histories in Britain, both personal and collective. Conceivably, I had travelled to a time I had never been before, a time loaded with histories and memories that are poignant for many, but to a place that was undeniably Britain.

On the walls were images of uncarpeted floors, with the artist's feet in red shoes at the foot of each photograph - at the foot of doorways, staircases, and garden paths. Here Wells seemed to have traced a path through her family home, where her mother's piano would have resonated between rooms, and from where, like many a British family, they would leave for and return from days out by the sea. The red shoes at each open doorway present an eternal future of possibility and at the same time reveal the marks of history. Indeed, we can learn a lot about ourselves from looking underneath our carpets and wallpapers, scratching beneath the surface. But as Wells takes us through the house, across the surfaces of her personal history, we arrive at the foot of a closed door. We might conceive that these photographs of open doorways document the last time Wells would have walked through them - what was once a gateway to a different room has become a preserved pathway to the end of an era.

As the waves recline away from land, and the piano plays the sea, it's as if the marks of time scarred in these floorboards and traversed by Wells' red shoes for the last time have become reopened wounds - where not only the artist's history but thousands of British memories and fictions are seeping out. When the tides creep in again, perhaps these surfaces will play host to new life, with new carpets and new families, and bear the marks of more comings and goings, with new histories and memories to take their place. At the same time, one cannot help but wonder of the fate of the St. Leonards seaside resort, and whether these connections and memories will be lost at sea in the following generations - only to be glimpsed when the carpets are stripped off the floorboards and the marks of history are re-opened in reveries of time travel or when watching and listening to the sea.

As I sat in the next room of the Gatehouse with a blank projection screen in front and the sound of the sea piano behind me, I contemplated the bare flooring beneath my feet, and pictured this London Dockland building in the time the now distant piano evokes.

Like Lucinda Wells' mother finding the notes on the piano that were in her head, visitors were invited to draw on wallpaper the marks of their time travel reverie as the sea piano resonates from the next room. This was not a simple invitation to write a reflective account of the experience in an installation guest book, but an invitation to mark out and visualize the experience, and respond to one another. Perhaps future wallpaper can be peeled away to reveal this one, and the many fictions and histories of Time Travelling (with Sea Piano Fret) will be discovered - as it is not often that we listen closely to the sea, look under our carpets, or draw on wallpaper to discover our roots.

Glen Jamieson

(Jamieson is a Photographer and Writer based in Norwich, Norfolk. His latest book: Suspicions of a Peninsula Town (YH485 Press, 2010) is available from http://yh485press.org - Contact mail@yh485press.org for more details).

http://glenjamieson.blogspot.com

Sea piano fret

It's a prelude and it's begun: I'm making a new piece, a collaboration with my resistant Mum (purist of the piano) and possibly Dad and Adrian. Getting back to my roots in video has taken a while (a number of years) and though I've shot and shot and shot stuff in that intervening period most of it remains on its original source tapes waiting for the time when (and if) it will be harvested, but its certainly not to be just now.

Now, this time, is urging another particular investigation into what fascinates me on many levels. The subject that has always been uppermost in my thinking, that of memory - cultural, societal, local - is requiring a re-visit. Time itself is asserting its presence.

Rea Tajiri wrote about a kind of memory which wants to be explored because it is a whisper of something hidden, unknown yet in some way known, referring to her cultural history and what is omitted. Laurie Anderson wrote in 'Words in Reverse' about the Cree Indians "I am singing the songs of my fathers... I never knew the words of the old songs... I never sang the songs..." I admire too the work of Vera Frenkel who used her imagination to imagine the grandparents she never knew.

My previous video work was about memory, my memory and not my memory. Sometimes it was just a memory, plucked from the space where my mind resides. A construction a la Boltanski or Marker.

Growing up I was surrounded by generations of family (cockneys) who played the piano and sang, it was what was done at that time (if you were lucky). Mum played by ear (no it didn't hurt apparently - yes that joke has been made before) from the age of 5, her hands so small that her fingers couldn't stretch for the melody and she'd use the side of her hand instead. She was much in demand and, to her eternal regret, everyone at that time said she didn't need lessons because she could play any tune requested having heard it only once. I love the stories she recounts of her playing in the dark during the blitz or even when the lights just went out.

The music was inside her head and her hands found the notes. Mum doesn't like the sound of her playing, because she says that when you hear the right cords as they are meant to be played from sheet music it is altogether 'better' but I don't agree, her music is a sound all of its own - of an era and a place, it is joyful and sad, uplifting and poignant. It is full of history and extremely visual. No wonder silent movies always had a pianist.