Prints and Jam

The longer you stay in the piece – a black box, with light projection and smoke – the more you experience.  The mist makes light ‘solid’ – the viewer can walk into it or around it, become part of it or watch other viewers as they interact in a strangely ‘apart’ experience, a little like the feeling of being alone in the dark of a crowded cinema.  And, like a cinema when film was still projected via light onto the screen and smoking was allowed and you could see the cigarette smoke curling in the projector beam, here in this room the beam of light projects an image – or to be exact, three images: a line, a curve, or ellipse, and a wave – and light bends and describes space, until it is intercepted – hands, arms, backs interrupt the light, and these three lines which are projected in a constantly changing, random pattern on the wall opposite the light source also slide across the bodies in the room, so that the viewers become the receivers of the image and a means of display.

An old man enters the installation with an equally old woman.  She walks in, purposeful, he takes his time, questions what it is, stops, seems unimpressed, then walks towards the light, stands close, looks into the light source, blots out the projection and plunges the room into darkness.  ‘‘It’s a tunnel’’ he says. ‘‘When I look into the light, I see a tunnel’’ – then he turns, walks into the side wall, tells his wife ‘‘there’s a barrier here’’.  She shrugs and leaves the room.  But he stays on, walking through the planes of light, as around him children jump in and out of these curves and flat surfaces, adults play, their hands outstretched, cutting the light with their fingers, moving from foot to foot to try to catch the edge of the light, to try to grasp something that can’t usually be seen or touched.  This is light as a physical presence, an embodied and also meditative experience, calm but playful, dark but joyful.  Some people approach it with caution, some wander in, others stand still, backs to the wall, and watch.  The presence of the viewers in the room has its own ebb and flow, like the light piece itself.  The room fills and empties; empties and fills.  The old man is still here, standing in the dark, standing in the light.

Light Show is on at the Hayward Gallery, London until May 6, 2013.

Today I have a migraine and I’m finding it hard to think.  Silence is something that has been on my mind – both longed for to ease my head, but I have also been thinking about how it can have an almost physical presence, for instance in my relationship with my father, which, looking back, I realise was often conducted without words.  I was going to ask you to also think about silence, to turn things off, sit quietly, listen to what is left (every ‘silence’ is subtly different after all), and see what comes out of this, and if there is a starting point for a poem in what you hear or what comes to mind.  But I also wanted to ask you to write about family, and as chance would have it, while I was trying to put this prompt together, this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn2UVaPx5AU popped up on my timeline – it features my mother, the song is by my brother, and it is a great soundtrack for a summer day.  So, you have a choice – listen to silence, or listen to music, and let whichever you choose inspire you. For form, I’d like you to choose either the form you’ve enjoyed using most during 30/30 or the one you’ve really struggled with.  As for the family theme – I leave that up to you…

This is a rather unlikely prompt from me, but I heard something on the radio this morning about Wisden (I admit, I thought they said wisdom to start with) and I was surprised to learn that the famous cricket almanac covers social history and is not just a list of matches played.  My father, a keen sportsman, always listened to cricket coverage on the radio – something that I found quite strange at the time – and recently we found amongst his things a long poem about a cricket match at the Oval in 1963.  My mother thinks that he probably went to this match, but we don’t know anything about the poem – we have no idea who wrote it, why he kept it in his family history file, what significance it had for him.  All our questions will have to go unanswered because he is no longer here to ask, so all I can do is make up my own history for this artefact, or maybe check in Wisden’s Cricketers’ Almanack…

My prompt for Thursday 11^th is to ask you to write about something that has been handed down in your family, or something that you have found, for which you do not know its origin, or to ask a question that you know will go unanswered.  This could take the form of a letter poem,  or just choose your own form.