Between
Anna Searle
Two artist friends strive to begin a project together.
Transcript
My friend Lucy and I are both artists and for some time have entertained grand thoughts of collaborating, merging our ideas together into something greater than these two parts. After a series of false starts, the project has laid dormant for a while as we tended to our other things.
And I think what it is, what it all boils down to, is the inability so far to bridge the space between us. Like creating pathways for new knowledge in the brain, we need to forge a direct route for exchange, both physically and mentally.
My own daily path is so well worn I could do it with my eyes shut. The steep hills and centric pathways constrict my movement around the city, generally eliminating the meandering that usually familiarizes me with a place. This feels small and bound up, like I travel in a tunnel back and forth, back and forth, the same few streets often several times a day. So this is my line traced over and over, but I need to extend it.
Lucy and I don’t live far apart, relatively speaking, but we each live out of the other’s general patterns of movement. This results in our usual meetings being held in the city centre, over a coffee or a pint on some neutral ground. This space is far removed from each of our loci, the heart of our individual operations, each of our collection of books, photographs, music that are so bound up in our own work and, while it slots conveniently between our jobs and our social lives, is generally more conducive to gossip and banter than creative and critical thinking.
I’ve gone to her house a number of times but never can quite remember the shortcut she showed me the first time, and I’m always quite aware that I might be about to make the wrong turn. I have always prided myself on my failsafe sense of direction, but I admit defeat in this unmapped territory.
So the centre has become something of a hollow. We end up there again and again, as if there’s some invisible border around the back of Arnolfini for me, and somewhere amongst the fountains and the sails for Lucy. We’ve been caught in a whirlpool, surrendered ourselves to the centripetal forces, and it’s just not happening. I can’t speak for her, but I feel there’s a membrane of sorts between our two poles that is blocking the transmission between us.
So, we’ve been prodding the project again lately to see whether it will go anywhere this time. I sense that to make this collaboration work we need to first create a pathway that stretches the whole way between her and me. We need to bring my place and her place closer together, knock through that block and move into each other’s space, still a mystery now. Perhaps travelling the whole distance over and over, examining it, memorizing it both together and separately would shorten it, would create some shared space from which we can start out together.
