Carol Laidler

Sound installation in Shelter number 3, De la Warr Parade, Bexhill-on-Sea, for Coastal Currents, September 2023.

a collaboration with Pat Jamieson

Take a seat in the shelter, look out to sea and listen.

“in your shell like” is a site specific poem. It considers erosion of the landscape along the coast and the erosion of our own bodies.

The sound is activated when you sit on one of the benches facing each other.

To listen:

https://on.soundcloud.com/iwyQXXHRnAKaErpL6

Excerpt:

there are days when it hurts to stand up to unfurl fully 

days of crumbling knees and flaming hips 

when pain shoots through our whole beings 

till it takes every last effort to tie our shoelaces

on those days far is the fourteen steps from this shelter to the railed edge 

mathematics can calculate the distance between here and there 

sea level to mountain top 

earth to moon

ground to tree tip 

but

there are days

and days

when the water glints pink and silver

when the pull is to throw off the stifle of clothes

walk down to the water 

and swim 

towards a horizon

that is always receding

still    

looking out 

the line that cuts between air and sea is dark dark grey 

at times crisp at times blurry 

a ship sits almost exactly at the far end of vision 

slightly over 3 miles

the litter and dog waste bin is piled high with plastic bags 

tied and draped

rain smears the glass panes between the benches 

drips onto toes 

onto faces in a fine mist

a word in your shell-like

90% of the time sewage monitors at seasides 

are broken 

outfall pipes void themselves unchecked

fouling 

ear-like shells fail here

or do not fare well

Observation Station - field studies in a beach hut, part of ongoing collaboration with Pat Jamieson, Map of Erosion.

In the summer of 2022 and 2023 Pat Jamieson and I set up a residency space in a beach hut in Bexhill-on-Sea. The beach hut became a base for drawing, writing and experiments with erosion.

We invited different experts and enthusiasts to talk with us in the beach hut. We were joined by an archaeologist, a geologist, a writer, an explorer. These conversations have informed our thinking and our writing.

Map of Erosion is partly inspired by a map found at Birling Gap, which charts the erosion of the coastline between 1950 and 2013. Close to the map a small row of terraced houses is poised precariously on the clifftop where the chalk cliff is sheering away.

In our research we are walking the coast responding to the landscape as well as our own bodies. We have been recording erosion through photographs and sound, writing, drawing and working sculpturally with materials suggested by the landscape and the industries that emerged in East Sussex: chalk and flint, charcoal and iron.

I squeeze clay into fossils of touch, the imprint of my emotions. My hands look a hundred years old, washed till the skin tightens and pulls over the bones. I squeeze the clay. I feel the wet sticky drying, catch. I shape it into my palm, squeeze hard, squeeze harder. It takes all of my body weight.

It’s easy enough hiding in plain sight. No one has been in my house for weeks. All they see of me is what I choose to keep in the frame.
I push the words around the page, cross out, reverse, start again. This takes hours, spread across days, tense with the scrunched up-ness of it.

Do I enjoy my life I wonder? Who is telling me to do this? What makes me enact the same repetitions, eat and repeat. What makes me forget other things?

I borrow my neighbour’s blood pressure machine. It clamps on to my arm and expands hard till it hurts, then slowly releases. All my cells have changed. How many times since I was born?

I shake myself, or rather I shake one half of myself. The other half sits inert and thinks: “If I put all the DNA in my body into one single fine strand it would reach beyond the solar system.”

The unexpected accident of it.

I get out the wind-up record player and the old wooden box of 78s that had belonged to my mother. I clean the appliance with nothing but water and a soft damp cloth and rub it dry with kitchen roll. I replace the rusting needle at the tip of the arm with a new one from the matchbox in the drawer of the player. And take the brittle record from its sleeve.

The violin’s exquisite notes shudder like a ballerina unfolding her petals, carefully till her skin is undone, till my skin is undone.

Writing excerpt from “Arctic Terns: Writing and Art-making Our way through the Pandemic” published by Sage Publishing and Cultural Studies - Critical Methodologies. 2021, from a writing exchange with Bronwyn Davies, Susanne Gannon, Davina Kirkpatrick, Sheridan Linnell and Jane Speedy.

photos Rebecca Goldman @tiredofbeingmild

Works made during lockdown 2020

I O IN THE DARK

Some nights sleep

retreats like the tide going out

I go outside

to feel the darkness on my skin

hear a low chatter somewhere

on the other side of the wall

on the other side of the street

look up into the sky

the earth moving through space

with me on it

on nights like this I think of you

touch your embrace in the black sky

a dark cloudy hold

like the painting of Leda and the swan

an enveloping

I try to find the painting of

Leda being enveloped by an inky cloud

but I can’t see it

the images all show a swan

I have in my head something more

unknowable

what am I thinking of ?

I type in woman and cloud Leda

and there it is

and it isn’t Leda at all

it’s Jupiter and Io

painted by Coreggio in 1530

Jupiter was a randy old goat

there a swan / here a cloud

the many loves of Jupiter

evanescent and immaterial

an erotic rapturer

Io (I) precedes its shadow across Jupiter’s disk

Europa (II) is emerging from occultation

Ganymede (III) is eclipsed

Callisto (IV) is occulted

and Io

enraptured is pulling Jupiter's great

smoky hand towards herself

with barely contained desire

I o in the dark

Music for the night – Billie Eilish - No Time to Die

images Carol Laidler

In Free Fall, 2020, installation in The Centre of Gravity exhibition, at the Gardiner Haskins Building in Bristol.

A collaboration with David Alesworth, Éilis Kirby, Huma Mulji, Sarah Rhys.

“Imagine you are falling. But there is no ground…. Whole societies around you may be falling just as you are. And it may actually feel like perfect stasis—as if history and time have ended and you can’t even remember that time ever moved forward.” - Hito Steyerl

In Free Fall was a response to the activity around the statue of Edward Colston. It comprised a to-scale footprint of the empty plinth in cardboard, constructed, then suspended in the cage in front of the lift on the 4th floor; an uncertain perspective, an altered horizon, an attempt to find new ground. In a reference to Robert Morris’ Box, it is accompanied quietly by the sound of its (un)making. A conversation about what we were making, how we were making it and whether we should be making it at all.

Centre of Gravity was a project bringing together a month-long exhibition to Soapworks in the former Gardiner Haskins store near Bristol Temple Meads Station. https://centreofgravity.uk

photos. Sarah Rhys

Shown in Spike Print exhibition, 2019

Mosquito from mosca, or fly (Latin musca); Musket, a crossbow firing stinging bolts, a hand-held gun. Culicidae from the Latin culex denoting a biting gnat

translucent phantom

frail corpus

Out-breaths temporary plumes
of carbon dioxide unwinding into the invisible
chemical landscape in the air around us
mosquitoes follow this subtle topography
flying upwind, orienting themselves to the
pulses of carbon dioxide locking onto targets
up to fifty meters away

Discomfort primarily due to heat
wet heat sweat heat hot air
no air no air no air no air no air
sleeping on the going
sleeping elsewhere
no where no where no where no where

Mosquito song
call and response
the urge to mate that life/pulse/heat
stridulating organ rasping out the beat

After the blood meal, the female mosquito lays eggs directly on or near water or vessels that may fill with water/ stagnant/ standing sweet-water/ untended pools/ birdbaths/ clogged rain gutters/ tin cans/ buckets/ discarded tyres.

Performance talk and film for Walking’s New Movements: a conference to discuss latest developments and future prospects for walking and walking arts, University of Plymouth, 2019. Also shown at Flat Pack Film Festival, Birmingham 2020.

In collaboration with Davina Kirkpatrick.

Inspired by Alyson Hallett and Phil Smith’s 2017 book "Walking Stumbling, Limping, Falling”, and drawing on Davina Kirkpatrick’s workshops in visualising pain, we met for a series of walking conversations about pain and aging. Our thoughts and writings became a meandering contemplation about the states of our bodies. This playful inquiry continued through letters and collaborative writing, allowing slippage between our walking intentions and the fragility of our bodies.

What happens when our bodies age and deteriorate? When pain takes over and mobility is hampered? How does a body in pain take part within a dialogue into place and movement?

excerpt:

voice 2
I was walking down Colston street today, walking fast but wobbly. My foot met an unexpected, uneven bit – and my ankle went sideways. I crashed down hard on the steep slope. I lay there considering how I was going to get up again. “I have become one of those old ladies that falls over,” I thought. I couldn’t move. I could hardly catch my breath. Three people around me jumped into action, “Do you need help?” they asked and rang for an ambulance. One of the men sat down behind me. “Put your knees up and lean back against my legs.” he said gently. I couldn’t see his face. His knees held me, and warmed me as he spoke soft reassurances into my ear. He told me he was a mountain rescue volunteer. “I am being rescued,” I thought. I asked him what his most memorable rescue had been. “Mostly it is not memorable.” he said sadly. “We are called to clear the bodies of people who have taken their own lives. It’s strange how many people are drawn to mountains for their last moments on earth.”

voice1
Physical pain is a distressing bodily feeling that can range widely from localized discomfort to agony. The etymology of the word pain comes from the Old French (11c.) peine meaning difficulty, woe, suffering, punishment and from Latin poena meaning a fine, a penalty, retribution, indemnification.

Voice 2
walking
not walking
limping,
labouring
lumbering
shambling
shuffling
staggering
trudging
tottering
toiling
pierce like pins
sharp like shards

image Carol Laidler

Film and Installation 2018

Shown at Liquidscapes Conference, Dartington Hall.

excerpt:

magnified moon illusion
looping across the evening light

arcing a path of reference
from our standpoint on earth
converging with Mars and Venus

listen

the vibration of
a wing
a drum
a connection

through the hum
to a quark
on the dark
side of the universe

[tide turns]

in amnion
we do not breathe
nor do we drown

diving into wakefulness
a memory of wet
before breath

published in Liquidscapes edited by Richard Povall, 2019.

image still from film Carol Laidler

An exploration of River, a collaboration with Carolyn Black on opposite banks, three meetings.

Series of images, Performance talk, Liquidscapes Conference, Dartington Hall, 2018. Talk published in Liquidscapes by earthdotart 2019.

In the Spring of 2018 Carolyn Black and I started an experiment into collaboration, an investigation of river from opposite Banks. We had never worked together before but both of us have walking practices that explore contested edges of water and land along river and coast. We were also making our own parallel inquiries into notions of art writing and the relationship between visual art and words. Our exploration began as an inquiry into the in-between, the meandering, the not knowing, and soon became a creative undertaking, where two consciousnesses might potentially be shaped into one collaborative work.

We set up a structure through which we might examine these processes. We lived on different sides of the River Severn so we set simple rules of engagement: three pairs of meeting places on opposite banks at specific times. Our tools could be writing, photography, film, drawing, and/or sound.

Starting down river and moving towards closer proximity, at each meeting place we became geographically closer:
1, A bridging point - Aust and Beachley, at either end of the Old Severn Bridge.
2, An outflow - Lydney Harbour and Sharpness.
3, A crossing - Rodley and Upper Framilode.

excerpt:

Voice1
230 million years ago, here was hot desert, lying still on the equator. Sea reptiles, ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, swam in the lake, the air full with insects, mecoptera - scorpion flies. Now their bodily remains lie entombed, an ancient landfill, sometimes washed down by wind and rain onto the beach below. I pick up a piece of gypsum, the shape of a melting snowball, formed in the drying up of the desert lakes. Someone shows me their finds collected in a plastic tub. Sharks teeth in a shoulder of limestone rock and a single tiny vertebrae the size of a pea.

Voice2
The cliff I speak of is neither cliff nor rock, it’s a palimpsest of many materials: industrial strata, petrified oddities, encrusted creatures. Loose rocks have, over time, become embedded in a slab of concrete, which has torn them from their rightful place within the retaining wall.

Voice1
River goes out and Sea comes in at the same time. A river shares its secrets at the surface, turbulence lines curl and swirl. Two pulls - the sea’s tidal tug and the river water seeking its lowest point, heading towards the ocean.

Voice2
The tide cuts rivulets into sand banks, miniature creeks occasionally collapse with a splash, when the water pushes them one step too far. The channels get increasingly wider.

Voice1
The tide is at its lowest now. I peer across River to the other side. I can just about make out the bank in the mist but visibility is hazy. I see no sign of C. I look through my binoculars, perhaps a milky figure on the slipway on the upriver side of the bridge? To reach upriver here I would have to slide through seaweed and slimy mud.

Voice2
River passes between us

Voice1
It’s funny/strange/comforting to think that she is there - invisible, on the opposite bank at the appointed time.
I here, you there, now here, nowhere.

Published in Liquidscapes edited by Richard Povall, 2019

images Carol Laidler

Sound and sculptural installation, a response to the Colston Window, St Mary Redcliffe Church, 2017, 2018

A collaboration with Edson Burton, Tommy Cha, Anwyl Cooper-Willis, Pat Jamieson.

Featuring the voices of Ione Brown, Alex Ranahan, Edson Burton, Carol Laidler.

Excerpt:

The depth of water under this ship
echoed by a sounding line
cannot begin to measure


Clinging
between harsh air and forceful sea
between swell and suck
between home and despair


We lie three deck deep and dying
Eyes yawning into a sky of rotting timber

……No matter how much you wipe the slate
it can never be clean.
Toppling figures of an imperial past,
whose money
to pay for these fine monuments
came from someone else’s
blood and sweat.

images Tommy Cha

Promenade performance, 2016, Glenside Hospital Museum, in the grounds of the former Bristol Lunatic Asylum.

Produced by alldaybreakfast

Directed by Lily McLeish

Writing by Carol Laidler, Pat Jamieson, Anwyl Cooper- Willis, Tommy Cha

Cast: Lil Davis, Jade Fearon, Jodie Hay, Evan Lordan, Bryony Reynolds, Josephine Starte

In 2016 Bristol based artist collective alldaybreakfast worked with director Lily Mcleish to create an atmospheric site-specific performance in Glenside Hospital Museum.

Unlocked focuses on the tension in perception between ‘asylum’ as a place of safety and one of incarceration. The work examines the myths and common perceptions of the institution, the language surrounding emotion and the relationship between gender and mental (ill) health.

The museum holds artifacts ranging from 1861 when the Bristol Lunatic Asylum opened, until the hospital’s closure in 1994.

The audience follows the actors as they weave through the fascinating and sometimes disturbing collection of artifacts. The performance gives voice to the patient, interweaving words found in the museum archives with experiences of people who are dealing with mental illness today.

excerpt:

This key
is made from a six inch nail
by a patient.
It opened all the doors in the hospital
as well as the phones.

Was this key made
by a patient with special privileges?
Did they let themselves out
and then let themselves in again?
Did they creep the wards at night
opening all the doors?
Was the patient followed by others
Pied Piper of the key?
Did the patient unlock all the phones
dial all the numbers
trying to call home?
Or did they find a six inch nail
carve the key in secret
slipped into a pocket
holding it fast in their hand
rubbing it with their thumbs
feeling the surface grooves and notches
happy knowing that one day they might use it?
And was the knowing
enough?

Touched: an Antonine Itinerary of the Cabinets in the Museum

A series of writings attempting to unlock the history of the objects in the collection, written during the alldaybreakfast artist residency at Glenside Hospital Museum 2016 - 2017

Starting with the objects and labels, here I interwove words taken from Keat’s Ode to Melancholy.

specially purified
anaesthetic chloroform
answers all recognised tests
for purity and stability

store in a cool dark place

naturally sourced
from seaweed
or fungi
it takes a full five minutes
of inhaling an item
soaked in chloroform
to render a person
leaden-eyed
unconscious

a continuous volume
must be administered
the chin supported up
in order to stop the tongue
twist
falling into
the airway

dials set to the correct amount
and combination
to obliterate wakefulness
but to think
the mask
held over
deep deep upon
the nose and mouth

the slow slide into
unconsciousness
drowsily
free from
fever
forcibly arrested
obstruction
pinched
gasping
groan

slowly erasing control
and the fret
the anaesthetist
squeezing
the black rubber bag
my quiet breath
the correct amount
according to
weight

will

to be

fade far away
to that other place
dissolve
upside down
and quite forget
the quiver of nothing
of not

the weariness
connected across
the ether till
turning to poison
it was exposed
that chloroform
causes depression
of the central nervous system
or sudden sniffers death

floating in the void
stored in a cool dark place
do I wake or sleep?

images Carol Laidler

Shown in Unlocked exhibition in the Arcade, Bristol 2016 and in the Vestibules, Bristol 2017

Sound installation in Glenside Hospital Museum

Made in collaboration with Pat Jamieson

This work came out of an alldaybreakfast residency at Glenside Hospital Museum, funded by the Arts Council and Bristol City Council.

"Every few hours someone cries” is a quote taken from a written account of staying in a mental hospital. We took fragments of accounts told to us, as well as from writing found in the archives of the museum and sewed them onto one hundred cloth handkerchiefs.

During the Unlocked performance in the museum, the words were recorded and later installed in the padded cell in the museum.

Voices - Lil Davis, Jade Fearon, Jodie Hay, Evan Lordan, Bryony Reynolds, Josephine Starte

Sound recording - Tommy Cha

Produced by alldaybreakfast

Sound installation at Cleveland Pools, Fringe Arts Bath, 2017

in collaboration with Pat Jamieson

The work was installed in one of the changing rooms at the disused lido in Bath. It was part of a larger exhibition: Primordial Soup, curated by Laura Denning for Fringe Arts Bath. Built in 1815, Cleveland Pools is the only surviving Georgian swimming pool in the country.

Starting with the Big Bang, Changing Rooms explores the history of water in Bath.

excerpt:

Underlain
undulating
foundered strata
stonily hiding the
likely mechanisms
of slope failure
mudslides
trial pit and borehole
held in a shallow mass

Primordial waters
escaping from
earths
deep
mantel
the diminishing wake of past
rolling under turbulent waves
in the vast
ocean
a gradual
chemical
evolution

The history of water
holds in solution
what has been done
by whom
to whom
at whose behest
and why
This is what came down the river
This is what was thrown away
Babies in the Bath water
dipping amongst the stinking offal
Ladies and Gentlemen
turn your sweet noses away
Brunel’s trains
and Darwin’s thoughts
transport the fittest survivors
seaward bound
in search of new pursuits

Changing
rooms
breathing
and navigating
from land to water
a curious reverse
of the evolutionary process
plunging in the pleasure pools
feeding
the perpetual desire
for earthly happiness

images Carol Laidler

Installation in a municipal beach hut on Dawlish Warren, books, map, walk, conversation, 2016

a collaboration with Pat Jamieson

Fin whale
juvenile female
Beached - Dawlish 29.09.16
Umbilical cord still attached
It doesn’t appear to be a ship strike
It doesn’t appear to be an entanglement

The installation comprised two deckchairs, a book of writing from Flight, a book of photographs of a dead whale that was washed up on the neighbouring beach while we were there and a map that guided the viewer to two other points along the spit: Sanctuary on the beach and Hide in the bird hide. Each day we walked the landscape from the beach hut at the amusement park to the bird hide on the edge of the salt-marsh, two extremes at opposite ends of Dawlish Warren. At the hide we chalked up words as messages to the birdwatchers.

This site-responsive work is a metaphor for migration, ownership and territory, raising questions about privilege, who is hiding and who or what is being protected.

excerpt from Flight

The sky’s the Limit
Endless holidays at the last Resort
Railings
against the
lives of others
It’s the time for sucking out the Septic tank

The hide
smells of wood
and creosote
and chalk dust
slits towards the salt marsh
smeared with cobwebs
in this protected place
this disputed territory
we sit looking out
armed with our
surveillance
equipment
Sun pierces
in shafts
against the
stained
wood
bullet holes spill light
scratch the dark
pitch
Here we two hide

images Carol Laidler

Walk and Performance Talk with images at Language Landscape and the Sublime conference, Dartington Hall, 2016

In collaboration with Pat Jamieson

excerpt:

There is no lifeguard.
Please avoid landing to the left of this sign
When the tide reaches
the colour topped post to your left
important bird flocks will be roosting ahead
Please do not attempt
to cross the fence
or proceed beyond this point
We ask visitors
never
to walk in front of the hide
or on the salt marsh
and we would like to remind visitors
that there is no public access to the golf course
Do not hold up play by stopping on the shoreline
This way is not dedicated to the public
The hide is built on land
leased to the golf club
and is used with
their
kind permission
So please
do not
trespass
on the course
Thank you
for your co operation

The summer months
are the busiest time

usually

most fatalities occur
attempting to reach

elsewhere

Winter has not
stemmed the flow

this year

April was the
deadliest month

so far

more than 800 died crossing

numbers fluctuate wildly

images Carol Laidler

Walk installation along the river Exe and performance talk with images at Royal Geographic Society conference Exeter, 2015.

In collaboration with Pat Jamieson.

In 2015 we were invited to give a talk on a Waterlands panel at the RGS conference which was concentrating on the theme of “Geographies of the Anthropocene”. We decided to consider the river Exe in relation to flooding and defence. We made a 10 mile poem trail by pasting up and photographing words between Starcross and the flood gates on the edge of Exeter.

excerpt:

Voice 1
We set off from the railway station at the once port of Starcross next to the still standing pumping station and walk along the side of the railway lines, stopping to flypost a sequence of simple words relating to flooding and defence.

Voice 2
Waterline is a ten mile long paper trail, a poem to be discovered along a walk. It is an exploration of how content and context might impact upon each other to produce meaning, a metonymic practice, which involves examining the connection between things.

Voice 1
Along the road hugging the railway line to Powderham church guided by the map across the well graded new bridge, 4 meter tarmac, along the 1 meter stone path on 2 meter high bank to Turf lock. Looking across the wide stretch of river from new redstone into Permian deserts, washed coarse sands and angular debris, rocks overlain by river and sea deposit. Mudflats revealed by the low tide, fishermen scrabbling for lugworms and soft peeler crabs, to use as bait.

Voice 2
The juvenile peeler crab must moult many times, casting off the hard exoskeleton shell, which would otherwise prevent growth. By degrees, the old shell softens and partly erodes away, while the rudimentary beginnings of new shell form beneath it. The crab takes in water to expand and crack open the old shell at the line of weakness along the back edge of the carapace. The crab must then extract itself perilously from the old shell. If it gets stuck it will die. The exposed soft crab hides, waiting for its new shell to harden.

Voice 1
Entering the pub at Turf Lock, we order food at the bar and sit down in the bay window. A man sits down on the same table. He is here to repair a small wooden pier on the riverbank. His face is wrinkled by the wind and he smells of salt. Lulled by the warmth of the window and the taste of beer he tells us tales of the river. The thing is, he says, there is a right side of the river, the side where the upright people live and then there is the other side, the side that they send the transgressors, the ones they don’t want.

DRIP LOW FLOW MOIST
CHECK
GLUT SPATE SPIT STREAM
SEWER
SURGE TIDE CURRENT WAVE
CULVERT
BORE ABOUND ALLUVION

LIP MOUTH DRIFT FLUX
BANK
SOAK SPONGE POUR PLAIN
DRAIN
DRENCH GUSH WATER RIVER
RIM
DOWNPOUR OUTFALL OVERFLOW

INLET OUTPOUR NAVIGATE
CUT
DISCHARGE VISCOUS PLENTY
WALL
DELUGE STORM RAVAGE
CURB
FORCE SEA FLUVIAL

FLOAT SLIDE SLIP LEACH
LEAT
FLAT LINE RUSH WASH
RACE
SLIT DIP EBB PASS
PUMP
IMMERSE ENGORGE PERMEATE

FALL SPEW SPILL CLEANSE
GUTTER
PITCH DOUSE FORCE SOUND
SLUICE
RISE CRUSH FLEAM MIGHT
DAM
SURGE COLLAPSE ENGULF

RAMPART
DEFENCE
BREAKWATER
RESTRICT
CONTEND
BLOCKADE

SPURT SPLASH SQUIRT BURST PUNCTURE
PLUNGE DROWN SWAMP OVERWHELM
SWELL WEIGHT LEAK FILL

HOLD

SLIP CHARGE FLOOD WATERLINE

images Carol Laidler

An alldaybreakfast exhibition in 44AD, Fringe arts Bath 2016

Curated by Carol Laidler, Tommy Cha, Anwyl Cooper-Willis, Pat Jamieson

For two weeks a different time traveller – artist, writer, performer, scientist – inhabited The Time Machine for a day to investigate time from their own particular perspective. Their work was filmed and added to a video wall every day to form a multilayered installation. Each day the space was transformed. On the last day we invited these time travellers to take part in a public conversation about the exhibition and about time.

Participants: Victoria Walters, Pat Jamieson, Carol Laidler, Richard White, Anwyl Cooper-Willis, Lisa Scantelbury, Lily McLeish, Edson Burton, Chris Meade, Tommy Cha, Lou Gilbert Scott and Potstop,

images Tommy Cha

an alldaybreakfast installation and performance at Plymouth Art Weekender, 2015.

Carol Laidler, Tommy Cha, Anwyl Cooper-Willis, Pat Jamieson

Throughout the weekend we invited performers and volunteers to join us in building the Time Machine as well as to think about time. This centered on a narrative about the disappearance of a number of people from the local neighborhood. Performers were recorded live in the space and played back on a multi screen installation inside the Time Machine to form a collision between possible futures and memories of a constructed past; here all is fiction.

“Reports are now surfacing of information concerning the disappearance of a man in the Millbay Docks area of Plymouth. Kevin Dirac (38) a local man, went missing in July 2011 when he was working as a labourer on one of the City’s regeneration projects. Rumours have been rife since Mr Dirac failed to return to his mother’s home.
Clearance of Mrs Dirac’s house after her recent death revealed an entryway to a large hidden room in the basement. The room appears to be some kind of laboratory filled with scientific equipment. The walls are papered with information relating to other disappearances which have plagued the area. Stunned neighbours are amazed at the unexpected revelations.”

“It may be that we exist and cease to exist in alternations, like the minute dots in some forms of toned printing or the succession of pictures on a cinema film. It may be that reality is an illusion of movement in an eternal, static, multidimensional universe. We may be only a story written on the ground of the inconceivable; the pattern on a rug beneath the feet of the incomprehensible.” H G Wells, The Time Machine

images Tommy Cha

The Travelling Language Gallery - with Kryra Pollitt, Pat Jamieson, Caroline Gill.

Inspired by the film the Travelling Players. Busking with suitcases/ site-specific writing/ poetry performance. We met to share our writing. We performed at open mics in pubs, art exhibitions, street corners, and at midnight of the last night of Theaster Gates’ Sanctum, 2015.

My day of reckoning
comes as a surprise
I didn’t think it would be so
traditional
My security was imagined
the changes measured against me
data indexed and calculated
That’s not what I expected at all
And it seems I really did do
everything in the wrong order

photos: Tommy Cha, Carol Laidler

An alldaybreakfast installation, Fringe Arts Bath, 2014

Carol Laidler, Tommy Cha, Anwyl Cooper-Willis, Pat Jamieson, Bernhard Fairhurst,

Holy Souls interweaves texts, images, sounds and objects. Visitors are invited to take a seat in the waiting room and then choose a door to enter. Behind the doors are corridors leading to the other doors. The objects are decaying and surrounded in dust. This is all that is left behind.

“I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was - I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.” Jack Kerouac, 1957

images © Tommy Cha

An alldaybreakfast Installation, the Galleries Shopping Mall, Bristol, 2013

Carol Laidler, Tommy Cha, Pat Jamieson, Anwyl Cooper-Willis, Bernhard Fairhurst

The cities, towns and villages are full of empty shops. This was one of them. Full of Empty was an evolving exhibition. Starting with a note pinned to the wall and lit, Full of Empty was our critical response to being situated in a degenerating urban environment where bankrupt shops are sharp reminders that we are customers with empty pockets walking past shops without a commercial function. The installation comprised an empty shop painted and lit to reference Edward Hopper’s, Nighthawks. Intermittent performances responded to the theme of Full of Empty. The exhibition culminated in a row of flyposted photographs of disused shops, gathered through an open call. We used this platform as an opportunity to involve other artists and audience and create a rich dialogue of reaction and response.

A twenty mile long paper trail, a poem left along the River Frome, an installation in Stapleton Road Tavern, a performance talk, 2012. Made in collaboration with Pat Jamieson.

“It is the other rivers that lie Lower, that touch us only in dreams That never surface. We feel their tug As a dowser's rod bends to the surface below"

Water resonates with our saltier selves, our amniotic beginnings, bodily fluids, tidal ebbings and flowings, the unplumbed depths that lie beneath the surface.

The source of the River Frome lies just outside the city boundary. It curves round in a great arc and then flows towards the Avon in the heart of Bristol. Over years this little river has been kicked aside and covered over. It is a hidden artery culverted in concrete for much of its urban length, emerging only occasionally from these artificial caverns. There is a real sense that this river no longer has a place in the contemporary manufactured landscape of the city. Nonetheless this awkward and unwanted little body of water persists.

In the process of mapping the physical and metaphorical course of the river, we walked the length of the River Frome from outside the Watershed where the river ingloriously spills into the Floating Harbour, along its 20 mile course on an expedition to its source. Stopping to flypost words that resonate within both their urban and rural settings, we left a paper trail to create a textual map.

from the stained to the pure

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river street tales of drownings / rats pulling at plastic bags filled with spilled sheep intestines thrown in the river

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through discarded shopping trolleys / families of ducklings numbers reducing daily

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and covered over / fringed by giants - Tescos and Ikea / underpass and overhead / people in hiding / allotments / benches in parks / children and dogs / a snuffed out snuff mill / tracks from workers houses / the edges of the city / trees and green

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barbed wire fencing / private property

Installation, 2012, The Galleries Shopping Arcade, Bristol.

“You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space” James Joyce

Every year in the time that I knew him, T walked to Weymouth. He'd set off from his front door and walk slowly all day. It took him six days and I'd join him for part of it. When T first found out he had heart failure he was on a walk. He felt worse each day and on the fifth day he walked into the hospital. They couldn't believe he had walked so far with his heart in such a state. When I think of T, I think of him walking.

In Footfalls, the floorboards are heavily marked by evidence of use. The shop gallery is strangely colourless, monochrome, while the window reveals the corridor in the shopping arcade beyond, in garish technicolour, cinematic in scale and shape. Extracts from Beckett’s instructions in his play Footfalls and Gilles de la Tourette’s thesis on walking Études Cliniques et Physiologiques sur la Marche are thinly papered onto wooden staves and lean unfixed against the walls.

The title Footfalls refers to the Beckett play in which May is pacing out her life, up and down the stage in one second footsteps.

"The walking should be like a metronome", Beckett instructed in his play. He called them "life-long stretches of walking".

At intervals the sound of footsteps crunching on stones can just be heard, the ghost of the walker gently directing the attention of the viewer to the rhythms of people, the transitory occupants of the shopping arcade, walking by on the other side of the glass; like an empty stage with a film beyond.

Strip: downstage, parallel with front,

With the leg as support

Lighting dim, strongest at floor level,

from the ground in a rolling motion

from the heel to the tip of the toes,

from right (R) to left (L),

the last part to be lifted away:

Steps: clearly audible rhythmic tread.

Pacing starting with right foot (r),

and the foot touches down at the heel.

Turn: rightabout at L, leftabout at R.

now rests only on the tips of the toes,

facing front at R. Pause.

in turn leaves the ground;

Curtain. Stage in darkness.

Paces three more lengths, halts,

touches the ground at the heel

length nine steps, width one metre,

a little off centre audience right.

with left foot (l) from L to R.

Pacing starting with right foot (r),

Installation 2012

In collaboration with Pat Jamieson

From the street the OPEN sign can be seen hanging on the glass door of the empty shop and pasted across the wall behind the door, the word WOUND is written in large black letters: a shout, a cry or an instruction to passers by.

The empty shop is starkly vulnerable in the harsh white neon light. The door is locked shut, the shop cannot be entered, placing the viewer outside looking in. This converts the edge of the shop front into the frame of the work and highlights the tension between open and not open.

The work is temporal, existing for two nights only, the photograph, taken at the one point where the two words can be seen together, is all that remains.

I was interested in the surprise element of happening upon this work by chance or glimpsing it from the top of a bus. Like an altered billboard it exists within the everyday world as a disruption, albeit a small one.

image Carol Laidler

Provocation at the Pleasure Pier in Weymouth and an Installation in the Galleries Shopping Arcade, Bristol, 2012

Made in collaboration with Pat Jamieson

Pleasure Pier was a response to a sign pronouncing that feathering was not allowed on the pier for reasons of safety. What was this act of feathering that the sign referred to? This titillating sign sparked an act of transgression; armed with buckets of paste and posters with the word feather printed on them, we ‘feathered’ one of the alcoves and the bench within it, the thin paper left to peel and dissolve in the salty wind.

The work touches on the louche and lusty reputation of a down-at-heel seaside resort, the atmosphere of the disused café at the promontory end of the Pleasure Pier, a place of obsessive fisherman, the occasional tourist, a place where clandestine lovers might come together to be swept away by passion surrounded by the smell of dead fish and the swelling of the sea.

images Carol Laidler

The Human Library, Bristol, November 2013, organised by The Showroom Projects and Wunderbar.

The Human Library is an open-source concept that started in Denmark in 2000, with the aim to challenge misconceptions and confront prejudice. The Human Library invited people to become library dwellers, to choose a book by its cover and listen to the story contained inside.

The books were made up of a diverse group of people with different, sometimes taboo, stories to tell and reading them involved sitting down for a conversation. My book was called “We’ll Always Have Amsterdam: a story of love, loss and survival.”

The ‘books’ sat in the back room waiting to be ‘read’. I found myself surprised by the people who chose to read me. I wondered why they had been drawn to my title. Each conversation lasted 15 minutes. I had prepared some writing to share and then we talked for a while about the readers’ experience of grief and loss. It became a moving moment of exchange. I found that taking part challenged my own misconceptions.

images the showroom projects

Sculpture 2012

I spotted the postcard rack in the basement of the shopping arcade by the skip full of distorted metal shafts but drove past in a hurry to somewhere or other. I worried it would be gone by the time I returned but it was still there and I dragged it up in the lift smelling suspiciously of urine and along the back corridor to the shop.

I’d been writing to T every day since before I met him. When he died I carried on writing to him. In my thinking about his death I asked; what does it mean for a force so vital, so present to be extinguished. Where has he gone?

The postcard rack is empty. Its skeletal form casts faint shadows across the ground.

I visited the cellar of the Bristol museum. There was a large skeleton of an elephant in the room covered by a plastic see through sheet. The curator told us that a wall had been built down there since the elephant was erected, so that now the elephant can’t easily be removed from the room.

I placed a plastic sheet over the postcard rack so that the white bones of it were just visible beneath.

image Carol Laidler

The Mind’s Ear, exhibition in the Poetry Society, Covent Garden, 2008.

images Carol Laidler