tacita dean - in search of...'trying to find the Spiral Jetty'
I read about Tacita Dean's 'Trying to find Spiral Jetty' sound piece during Unit 1 when I was exploring her film work. Made in 1998 it was inspired by her interest in Smithson's 'Spiral Jetty' piece and the collaboration she went on to have with the author JG Ballard, subsequently making the film 'JG'. As I had started to work with sound during my Millbank work and also wanted to explore the idea of the pilgrimages I make to coastal sites to make my work, I was interested in how she used the idea of a journey as a sound piece.
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My experience of trying to listen to this piece became quite a journey - almost mirroring the work itself. The library at Chelsea had the cassette of this work in a special collection so I need to reserve it to go and listen. My first attempt to listen to the piece was thwarted because the library didn't have the right lead to plug in their cassette recorder. They had to buy a new one and I was to visit again....some weeks later I attempted a second time. This time it was discovered that the cassette player didn't have an audio socket to plug in headphones (you'd think they would check this stuff right!?). Foiled again I made the trip a third time bringing my own walkman (that I hadn't used since the 1990s!) and headphones. Finally I was in!!!​
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The 1998 sound work is a 27 minute conversation between Dean and her friend/colleague Gregory Sax. It was recorded as they drove together to find the Spiral Jetty following instructions faxed from the Utah Arts Council (see photo below).
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​Dean reads out the whole instructions at the beginning of the piece and, as they continue - often uncertainly, keeps checking back to where they might be. A lot of the conversation is focused on particular landmarks - 'we've just passed the sheriffs trailer', or 'is this a dirt track - what is a dirt track?' and either uncertainty about, or excitement at, finding where they are in the instructions provided. They discuss at one point whether Smithson wrote these instructions himself. The instructions have their own air of mystery and strangeness - with quite specific detail often followed by uncertain vagueness - eg 'No. 7 After you turn south-west you will go 1.7 miles to cattleguard #2. Here, beside the cattleguard you will find a fence but no gate.' The specific mileage instructions mean that they are checking their milometer in the car very precisely. At some points in the journey they do not speak and we hear the sound of their journey; the truck/car engine, the sound of bumps in the road, the noise of cattleguards, Gregory sneezing. As it continues it becomes more and more gripping. I know that they are not going to find what they are looking for, yet I am willing for the outcome to be different and its exciting to just hear what happens on their journey - even if its just finding the landmarks in the instructions and the location of Spiral Jetty.
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Finally, they have to stop the car (just when it gets stuck in the road), and get out and walk the last bit. They are discussing that there are no specific instructions at the end, it just says ''...look towards the lake. The Spiral Jetty should be in sight'. Silence. We hear Dean's film camera whirring. Then Dean says, 'I'm not sure this is Spiral Jetty' and it ends.
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After listening to this my research established that the tide was indeed covering the sculpture at the time Dean visited. Drought caused the lake water to recede in 2002 and the Spiral Jetty has been visible since then. Just a year after they visited the Spiral Jetty work was 'purchased' by Dia Art Foundation and this organisation continues to lease the part of the lake bed it is built on. Today there are very different instructions to get there and a car park at the site!
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It struck me that this sound piece is a very simple recording of a journey. There is discussion about route, sound from the surrounding countryside, the vehicle, the sneezing. Its very ordinary, but at the same time has mystery, atmosphere, space for the listener to imagine the route and re-create the journey with them, following their descriptions and discussions. It is like I am in the back of their car driving with them. This intimacy is something I enjoy and I think works really well in the piece. I think the elements of place created by sound/conversation and direction are all things I would like to work with in the future in my sound work.​​ It made me think about fieldnotes and how I undertake my trips to my location and record elements of it. I began researching other artists and how they undertake fieldwork and this led me to the publication 'Fieldwork for future Ecologies' which I will be considering more in Unit 3.
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References
Dean, Tacita, Sax, Gregory. (1998) Trying to find the spiral jetty [sound recording], audiocassette, 27mins, London, Sound Design Company, 1998.
DIA art foundation website accessed 25 April 2025, https://diaart.org/visit/visit-our-locations-sites/robert-smithson-spiral-jetty​
Crone B. et al (2022) Fieldwork for Future Ecologies: Radical Practice for Art and Art-based Research, Onomatopee 225, Netherlands, Wilcom Art Books
Tacita Dean, (1998) 'Trying to find Spiral Jetty', audio cassette; location shots at Chelsea library
Tacita Dean, (1998) 'Trying to find the Spiral Jetty', audio cassette instructions.
tracey emin - the wedding
I knew from research on my interest and love of stones and rocks that in 2016 Tracey Emin married a rock. I was reminded of this when I went to the London Print Fair and saw a sculpture by Emin called The Wedding (2019). It’s a small bronze made in 2019 that depicts a women leaning over and either wearing a wedding gown or wrapped in a blanket that I discover, is based on the funeral shroud of her father that she wore in the wedding to the stone in 2016.
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​It feels like this character is sheltering/protecting herself from something or is weighed down somehow. In 2016 when she married the rock Emin created a number of bronzes/paintings on this theme – including small bronzes of couples and one ‘I wanted more’ that looks like a woman laying over/becoming the rock. This was in a New York show Stone Love.
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I felt a strong response to these pieces and to what Emin talks about in her connection to the rock. I think the strong emotional connection is resonating with me more than the scientific geological - maybe because of where I'm at emotionally myself, but also because I haven't explored this side of my work much before. The merging of body and stone is a motif I am interested in.
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I made a number of paintings of the bronze using both the pigment of rocks, ink/watercolour and oil paint. The paintings of rocks helped to move me on from not being able to draw the ‘landscape’ at Kimmeridge and not knowing how to start. It has made me think of the me and rock – finding a way to marry the body and the rock as a source of comfort and respect for the rock, the earth itself and time. This takes me back to my interest in Ana Mendieta and my undergraduate dissertation which discusses in particular her Silueta series - see additional context piece.
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I also found a Carol-Ann Duffy poem about Emin's act of marrying a rock (see additional information) and am considering how I might use some of the words from the poem in the audio piece I aim to do for the Research Festival. I have written a letter to Tracey Emin - a kind of collaboration with her idea, even if I don't get a reply.
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References
Emin T. The Wedding (2019) Bronze sculpture, size 12 x 10 x 5 cm. (4.7 x 3.9 x 2 in.) https://www.whitecube.com/prints-multiples/the-wedding accessed 26/04/25
Jones J. (2016) Stoned love: why Tracey Emin married a rock, Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2016/mar/22/tracey-emin-married-rock-love-intimacy, accessed 26/04/25
Stone love (exhibition) Tracey Emin, Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York, W 22nd Street, May 5 – June 18, 2016. https://www.lehmannmaupin.com/exhibitions/tracey-emin7/press-release, accessed 26/04/25
Paintings of The Wedding by Tracey Emin, in Kimmeridge Clay pigment (30x24cm), watercolour (21x25cm), oil paint (23x31cm)
Tracey Emin and her rock,
photo credit: garage.vice.com
Tracey Emin, The Wedding (2019), Bronze, 11.5 x 10 X 5cm
Tracey Emin, I wanted more (2016) Bronze
Photo: Tracey Emin. All rights reserved; DACS 2016.
Courtesy of Lehmann Maupin.
katrina palmer - end matter
I went into this BA sculpture lecture as I had found a connection with Katrina previously over her work in Portland, Dorset and her use of spoken word. Very interesting and enjoy how she speaks about her work. Lots of space and careful use of words. Absence is a big theme for her. And at its extreme - mortality.​
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In End Matter she uses the idea of the Portland quarries loss of stone needing to be accounted for - by loss adjusters. In a fictional audio piece (which was also an audio walk) she had the loss adjusters seeking recompense for the stone that has been taken from the island. They walk around Portland and meeting various other characters/inhabitants of the island - including a gravedigger and two sisters. Towards the end of the piece one of the sisters gets crushed to death by a falling rock - the repayment for the loss?
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The physicality of this image stays with me. The weight and scale of the stone. The crushing.
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In her talk Katrina discusses her use of objects and words – she is using words to reach for/to describe objects, but this act she says 'is bound to fail'. Using words to describe creates a lack of the thing being described - this lack, the space between the word and the object becomes the desire for those things/objects. I like this way of looking at what we make in art - I feel like it relates to me in the longing of place. I am working at home to create work about the place/site that I am not at, and neither is the viewer and maybe part of the purpose is to create or represent, in the space between the work and that place, a desire for it? Is this part of what I am communicating in my work? This relates to the writing of Stewart in her book, On longing and particularly resonant for me where she writes on nostalgia, 'nostaglia is a sadness without object...which creates a longing that of necessity is inauthentic because it doesn't take part in lived experience.Nostalgia is always ideological - the past it seeks has never existed except as a narrative' therefore she argues it always will be reproduced as a 'lack'; 'nostalgia is a desire for desire', p23 Stewart (1992). These ideas around desire for the thing that never existed, the sadness without object feel very pertinent for me and I will come back to this in Unit 3.
Also interesting is the idea that Palmer discusses of 'where the work sits' – as an idea formed in peoples minds rather than as a real thing in front of them – ie true for use of sound/words in art. This gives me something to consider in making further sound pieces. I had a chat with Katrina about my work which was very useful. She reflected that the process of my making is the work (resonates with what I heard William Kentridge talking about in one of his videos) and the end piece is the evidence of that process. Also, that all my pieces provide a mapping (of experience and place) - do they need to be (physically) joined together somehow? All to consider.
I came to this artist towards the end of Unit 2 and I think this work is more likely to inform my work in future and particularly the sound work I am hoping to do for the research festival.​
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References
Katrina Palmer, (audiowork) End Matter, The Isle of Portland, Dorset, 25 April 2015 - 30 August 2015, https://www.artangel.org.uk/project/end-matter/ accessed originally November 2024.
Stewart, S. (1992) On Longing: Narratives of the miniature, the Souvenir, the Collection, Duke University Press.
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Katrina Palmer walking in Portland, Dorset, Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer
curation - soil and terra incognita
Of the exhibitions I have seen recently I found elements within two exhibitions of particular interest for curation and installation ideas. Unsurprisingly both have links to the subject of my own work. The SOIL exhibition at Somerset House invited a wide range of international artists to consider the role that soil plays in the planet's health. Artists work ranged across film, painting, installation, sculpture, photography and more. The installation that I was most excited by was the film installation at the beginning of the exhibition. This showed film projected from multiple viewpoints in a large room. The central area had a circular thread 'curtain' which visitors could enter inside to view a film being screened on two semi-circular screens opposite each other to create a complete immersion into this underground place. It was a captivating microscopic close up of plant roots growing in soil, finding a meandering path, shooting out to find nutrients in the soil to grow and survive. The artist Wim van Egmond working on what he calls 'micro landscapes', used time-lapse from underground cameras to show what happens in the soil itself over time. The immersive nature of the installation with accompanying sound was hugely successful at transporting the viewer into a hitherto unknown/unseen world. While I don't expect to have the resources to create such an installation myself I think the use of curtains, creating a contained space and the size of the screens themselves are all things I can consider in creating a future immersive experience in my work.
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A second exhibition contained many ideas and inspirations for curation and displaying work. Terra Incognita at Thames-side Gallery brought together a collective of printmaker-artists using a variety of media in an excitingly large exhibition space.
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I found Clare Mont Smith's work and curation most compelling and inspiring for my own. She had produced a series of nine screenprints on newsprint paper and hung them each in front of a lengths of scrim as a kind of framing device. Again this was an immersive experience as they were hung at different angles and with enough space around them to walk amongst them. There was a sense of almost getting lost in them - the subject of the prints being Venice was therefore entirely appropriate. Each of the screenprints was layered or inked differently so that they might reflect different times of day or perhaps angles of viewpoints you might catch just as you are turning. It was a very thoughtful and atmospheric corner of the exhibition. Again it gives me ideas for my own work - certainly about having multiple hangings of my pigment cloth perhaps - with different images on? But also ways of telling a story about a place by the curation of the work - the encounter the viewer gets at different points and from different perspectives. Mont Smith's work 'reflects on the vulnerability and destruction of ..(the worlds growing urban populations)... in a fractious and overheated world, and references the ‘brown paper watercolours’ JMW Turner made of Venice at night.'
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Overall it was interesting to consider how a large gallery space could set the ambition for work and how it might be curated in a very different way to a smaller more conventional gallery 'box'.
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​References
SOIL: The world at our feet (exhibition), Somerset House, 23 Jan - 13 Apr 2025
Terra Incognita (exhibition), Thames-side Gallery, 5 Apr till 20 Apr 2025
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Soil in Action by Wim van Egmond (2023), installation shots at Somerset House SOIL exhibition
Clare Mont Smith (2024/25) Bridge of Sighs screenprint installation
ana medieta - sileuta
Increasingly as I have gone through this unit I have shifted towards the feeling I needed to have myself in the work somehow. This resulted in my hand/rock castings. But as I have read and connected so much to a bodily experience and an emotional connection to rocks I have been thinking a lot again about Ana Mendieta. I studied her for my undergraduate degree and wrote about her a little in unit 1 notes. The connection to her work and the situation of the body directly in the landscape has started to become a strong need for my work. I think I had resisted this for a long time as I have seen other work that draws on Mendieta's work that put me off getting into this space (see photos below). However, I feel the need to explore how I can find my own way to represent this earth - body - self idea.
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​​I looked again at Mendieta's Silueta series because she uses a mixture of her actual body (in the first Silueta) and the absence of body (later works in the Sileuta series) which I find intriguing. In these works Mendieta placed herself naked within nature and covered herself with various natural materials such as grass, mud and flowers or being buried in mud and rocks; later versions of these sculptures were made without her own body being present. Instead her image was created in the form of her 5ft silhouette using a wider range of materials including red pigment in snow, stones, flowers, ignited gunpowder and fireworks, excavations in mud and sand. The works contain ideas of ambiguity, with presence and absence and a deep connection of self to nature.
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By shaping her body image into the land as her art she makes us consider how we are part of the earth (both coming from the earth and going back to into it) or perhaps our own role in and on the earth – and how we relate to it. Questioning how do we inhabit the space we are in? Perhaps a more contemporary analysis might consider what environmental imprint we leave on the earth, though this was not such a relevant discourse at the time these works were made. This discussion about how we relate to the land clearly relates to how I continue to develop and represent my self in a landscape and how I chose to embody my experience. Mendieta was creating these in part as a way of exploring her identity and the idea of identity and belonging has become a more significant area for me more recently. Since my last field trip my connection has felt more bodily and so I began experimenting with photos of myself with the rocks and with pigment cloths in various ways (see gallery and documentation sections) and this line of inquiry is something I hope will feature in my show in July.
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​​​References
Jennifer Calivas (artist website), https://jennifercalivas.com/, accessed 25.04.25
Rachel Shephard (artist website), https://www.rachelshephard.co.uk/ accessed 25.04.25
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Mendieta A. (1973) First Silueta and (1976) Untitled, from the Silueta Series, photos courtesy of Ana Medieta and Galerie Lelong, New York.
Calivas J (2021) Self Portrait While Buried #9,
photo credit: Jennifer Calivas, https://jennifercalivas.com/
Shephard R. Single colour photo screen print, photo credit: Shephard, R. https://www.rachelshephard.co.uk/
naiza khan - mapping water
I saw the film 'Mapping water' at the 'Drawing the unspeakable' exhibition at the Towner Eastbourne. I found it hugely engaging. In this work Khan's film gives a narration of experience over a changing set of film images that work together to tell a history of and what Khan calls the 'construction' of the sea, the land and its' people. It has a feeling of documentary as it tells stories of specific places in her own history and uses film, maps and a series of watercolour paintings in progress that tell stories as she speaks. The stories and images created all relate to our relationship to water and the seas; how we colonised the sea, how other artists (eg Hokusai and Friedrich) respond to the sea, what climate change is doing to seas, the role of travel across the seas in establishing new relationships in history between people and newly discovered lands. There is a strong sense of places that are important to her and her own identity and she seems to be exploring this further in her series of paintings that accompany the film.
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I found the flow of images of the artist making, of places, of maps, very compelling and a good way of creating a sense of place and connection. The storytelling combined facts from history, personal reflections, scientific data about climate change and descriptions/comments on her own painting 'how little I can control water'. I found the piece very absorbing and it gives me ideas about how to represent and consider place in my own film. A lot of what holds it together I think is the narrative over the images. This is something I haven't done in my work and not sure I have time to fully research and 'write' something in time for the show but certainly something I might consider in a later sound or film work.
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References
Naiza Khan, artist website https://www.naizakhan.com, accessed 14.05.25
Drawing the unspeakable, (exhibition), Towner Gallery, 5 October 2024 to 27 April 2025, Eastbourne, https://townereastbourne.org.uk/whats-on/drawing-the-unspeakable
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Khan N., Mapping Water (2023), Stills from film, Single channel video, 20 minutes, 2023
Khan N., (2023), The sea under construction (Karachi), Watercolour on paper 57.2 x 38 cm