Into the Wood with Purple Silk Unfurled

EMPTINESS

ARIANE
It begins like this. A house replete with emptiness. I tell you about it one heat-bursting day in Sao Paulo. The tale of a grey-ghost house locked in the rolling folds of the Shropshire hills - on the other side of the world, in England, 9250 kilometres away.

The Hurst - because this house, like a person, has a forename - dates from the 18th century and was last privately owned by the playwright John Osborne - the infamous angry young man of the 1950s who played an important role in English literature and inspired the founding of the Royal Court Theatre in London. Locked behind its stone walls hewn from the surrounding hills, John's House contains empty rooms which hold nothing now but silence and space - all that had been there and may very well soon be there too...It's a house awaiting a presence - with a staircase, doors and passages ready to guide you from one deep jewel-coloured room to another - rich reds, greens, golds. That's all there is: this present (of) emptiness filled. There's nothing else. Simply a promise to be (t)here.

PATRICIA
I see the images of that incredible house. We don't have houses like this here in Brazil - I mean in terms of the age, the material, the colour and the personality, the sobriety. This house could only exist in England, according to my literary England, which I know through books.

I face a very masculine house - John's House. I think the house has an experience of people: I have an experience of houses. We'll meet in a present time and see what happens. I will only know by being there. The house is empty, so I imagine I'll be able to see it as a whole. It was impossible to do this in the over-filled Chilean house - my grandmother's house - where I worked last year. I had to divide my grandmother's house into different chapters, different thoughts of being there - such a labyrinth it was. A feminine labyrinth.

I arrive at The Hurst. The cold weather is almost unbearable for me. But I trust it must be warmer in a month. I get in this grey house that reveals so many inner colours. Strong ones. Affirmations, even though they are deeply enclosed. I read Gaston Bachelard again, and Virginia Woolf, and Lewis Carroll. I try to understand how to begin...

Strangely, though I feel at home from my very first day at the Hurst. I clean the house, I open the windows, I regularly use the front door. I wander all around the house. I fill the emptiness everyday with walkings, with movement, with displacement.

I don't want to lose this intense quality of emptiness...This absence of everything that it is outside - forest, trees, flowers. Everything, but the shadows.


ARIANE
We talk about emptiness - how in a different place, it has different meanings, different sensations, different resonances. In Japan, emptiness is sheer aesthetic wonder - a revelation of the beauty of space and light. It fills a room, with a wondrous in-be-tween-ness - sheer spacefulness and a sensual architecture for the eye. But in Sao Paulo, Brazil, your city, which is constantly torn to be reborn, emptiness signals destruction. To be empty, is to be demolished - to be a void waiting to be knocked down and replaced by new fullness which empties again, 10 years later. Buildings in your city are caught in a never-ending chain of novelty and reinvention, one sequential emptiness replaced by novelty and fullness of purpose, then emptiness again.

Then there is England. Here, emptiness is full of time - all time, every time. It is the present tense, holding fast the history of the past between four solid walls, whilst awaiting the future - right now, this minute. Emptiness is a house full with possibilities. And so it is here, in John's House, where you are to be immersed in this very peculiar English emptiness, that you come, carrying in your hands an eighteenth century mirror speckled with time, like an inward all-seeing eye with which to look at John's house, roving between fixity on floors and walls...

Through the Looking Glass...

PATRICIA
In London, I visited lots of the incredible museums you have there, some of which recreate antique house interiors, like the John Soane Museum. That's where I first saw the mirror. It was round and convex. Seeing those interiors through this mirror somehow made the space more real than the re-creation of the ancient space itself. The distortion was fascinating: I imagined how it would be looking at such an image in the 18th century. I got somehow obsessed by this way of seeing.

Living at the Hurst farm, I went almost every day to Clun, the closest village, by bicycle or walking. People told me about a local wood carving studio, over the coffee shop - thousands of wonderful wooden pieces, furniture of all ages, gilded, curved, rounded, with dragon faces and flower shapes. When I spoke to the man who worked there, he showed me his mirrors, too. One of them, covered by dust for years, was perfectly round, beautifully convex and gilded.

"I can lend it to you, if you want, to make your work at the house. I'm sorry the surface is not perfect. it's a 200 year-old mirror. You can keep it as long as you need." So that's how the mirror met John Osborne's house and stayed there, gently, for almost two months.

Its imperfection allowed the reflection of the spaces to be close to painting - the colours brighter, the light more transparent and shiney. Velasquez, Vermeer and Van Eyck came into my head. Or into my view. The mirror became a giant eye hanging from the coloured walls, lying on the floor, knowing corridors and the corners of every single room. It allowed me to look at the house in a totally different way - from a special angle, to become Lewis Carrol's little girl, Alice in Wonderland, stepping into a world with no straight lines.

ARIANE
It's a looking glass world in which you brought two glasses - your camera and a mirror - into John's House. In your reflective displacement, reality becomes a painting and the reflection of the man in a mirror standing in the present becomes a ghost from the past. This is what I see when I look at the photographs you took with your mirror-travelling eye, as it lay on the floor or stared proudly out from the walls.

But the reflections don't stop there. After all, your camera is like a house in some ways too. It houses an empty room with a mirror, catching and caught in the glories of light and space. So house-mirror-camera are linked in infinite regression: a mirror within a chamber, a chamber within a mirror, a house within a house, both containing mirrors and secret rooms.

PATRICIA
With this very ancient, golden and round mirror, I felt I was allowed to look at the rooms, with an eye which was the same age as John's House and just as noble and old - a mirror that had already seen a whole life of reflections, and now was receiving this house's inner colors.

I come from a very young country and continent, and our idea of time is very different. Our houses are considered old much earlier than English or European houses. Aging is a matter of decades, not centuries. Maybe through this respectable mirror, I would be able look at the inner spaces with eyes which are the same age as the house - over 200 years old. It means there was to be more than a sense of belonging to the place, because the mirror is the same age as the house, and so it helps me to look at it in a much closer way than I would ever be able to do otherwise.

ARIANE
Have you ever thought that by carrying this mirror into a man's house, you are really doing something even more subversive? Since Grecian times, the mirror - speculum - has been the way of medically investigating women's bodies and their innermost secret chambers which can not otherwise be seen. For me, there's a sense that with your speculum you are turning this tradition inside out, and the body of John's house is the place where this happens. Here a man is caught in the mirror's speckled reflection, leading to speculation as to who he is and where he has come from...


PATRICIA
I think you are right. The curved surface, the distortions, the rounded shape, all transformed the masculine lines into very feminine curved ones. I like the idea of this transformation of the gender of the house through the look, the pictures, the reflections - the possibility of seeing the masculine stone house through these strong and present colors, giving each room a personality, a possibility, a new relation with the light.

Vox Humana

ARIANE
But as well as reflections, you discovered and uncovered sounds everywhere in the house, by in addition bringing a man and his voice into its hidden spaces, nooks and crannie. Why did you add the additional dimension of sound to your encounter with the house? Was the mirror and the looking not enough?


PATRICIA
I didn't add another dimension, I just wanted the sound dimension to be noticed in a house that had been in silence for so long. When I arrived in London, I had the chance to hear the British singer Phil Minton at an improvisation concert, and I instinctively knew that his work would fit perfectly into John's House. My proposal to him was that he should fill the spaces of the house with his voice - one man's voice, singing alone in the empty house. It made sense to me because of his own particular way of singing - with shouts, whispers, melodies, chords, words, and all the other possibilities of the human voice - which he could fit into this angry young (dead) man's rooms and corridors, library and cellar. Also Phil seemed right because of his presence and image: he looks like a true British gentleman. So the final result is a film made of several shorts, with Phil singing in the inner spaces of the house.

In a sense, Phil's work is inside mine, because I directed his movements through the space, and he improvised the sounds he put inside each room. I was curious about how the colours, the age, the light and the echoes of the old house would influence his singing. I choose mostly to film him singing directly in the space, rather than reflected in the mirror, because the sight and sound of this singing man was strong enough on its own to interfere with the house, without a mirror to distort it even further.

Again, the voice work is like the mirror reflections, because even if it explores a different sense, I was still filling the house with immaterial things, still respecting its emptyness....


ARIANE
But nonetheless, you were also filling the house with something very material - the body of a voice, discovering and uncovering the different spaces in the house. The sound is raw to the soul - a voice made of fissures, cracks, beats, breathes, cries, notes, dischords, creaks, groans, roars, whispers, slips, breaks, explosions. There is nothing refined - operatic or classically trained about Phil's voice,

Under the stairs, he rocks backwards and forwards, too and fro in a woodpecker action, hurling his voice against the diagonal slant upwards of the stairwell. In the cellar, his guttural growls and cries, ripped from deep inside him, fill this damp clammy low-slung void. And in passing through one door into another, it is his voice which goes first, as feet follow closely behind...a bodily voice in motion.

Roland Barthes in his essay ' The Grains of the Voice' says the voice is at its most unique in its breaks, uncertainties and its hidden reverberations. He could have been describing Phil's voice and Barthes goes onto say 'the grain is the body in the singing voice.' That's so true. It is so bodily.

In a way, your invitation to Phil to make an intervention in John's house could be described like this: you are putting a man's body back into the house where a man's body once belonged, by Phil responding to every crany of John's house, and to the memories, and feelings he senses embedded there, making new memories and feelings in sound.

Crossing Unequal Spaces

PATRICIA
That's true. In a sense, I had thought about this man simply walking and throwing his voice inside the house, then leaving, with only his sounds remaining in the memory of the walls, floors and windows which had witnessed the action. They would be accumulated in every corner, as if after a flood. They would then become part of the house's history and its past, left by this brief but intense inhabitant who had come after the previous inhabitants, Lord Morris and John Osborne. But the truth is that Phil's image remained too, together with his voice, and it was very strong. His voice is terribly human, in all the capacity and universality of its definition. Extended beyond the possibilities of human hearing, unbearable and fascinating at the same time, full of as many marks and colours as the house itself.

For me, the sound pieces are the closest of my work to John Osborne himself, because of this terrible and wonderful dimension of humanity, and also because of its essentially masculine character. After reading his famous play, 'Look Back in Anger', it had to be a man walking and singing around, dominating the sonorous space - never a woman.

Your Barthes reference reminded me of another one, by Bartolome Ferrando, a Spanish vocal performer and writer who was my teacher once. It is another way of describing Phil's walks in the house:

"I cross unequal spaces. I listen to its rhythms and pauses. Sometimes I see the colour of an object loosing the balance, when the slight stem that mantained it, raised, begins to become sleepy itself. I come near to the things to see them close by, and to discover some imperceptible detail. The words cross each other in a footpath seeded of silences. Sometimes I let myself drop inside to be able to touch the voice. I know the acts have skin, like the language. (...) I touch with my hands what have no weight. I cross unequal spaces. I cross unequal spaces." (En la Frontera de la Voz, editorial Huerga y Fierro)


ARIANE
Your obsession with space is not surprising, because you trained as an architect and a musician, before becoming an artist who works in sound, photography and film - media which all explore space. Another space you explore at John's House is outside the house and is a transparent one - a glasshouse or greenhouse as they are known as well. Movement is caught in the cold glass, one frame at a time, with no continuity. Just glimpses of a hand, the side of face, then a leg, as if caught in a dance of imprisonment, trying to get out of the glass, amidst a suspension of roses. It's unclear if you - because it is you in the white shift framed in the greenhouse - are a specimen under the glass, trying to escape this peculiarly English invention to capture heat and light so that plants can grow. Or whether you are dancing behind glass, revelling in the blooms which accompany you like tributes...

HOUSE OF GLASS

PATRICIA
I simply couldn't resist to this huge glass box...When I first got to the Hurst, spring had just come. This is very different from Brazil, where it is green the whole year round and we hardly notice the change of seasons. At the Hurst, spring was making a great advertisement: thousands of flowers, colours and different qualities and tones of green were everywhere. I couldn't ignore all this explosion of life, while the ancient greenhouse was almost empty. So the first action was to fill the greenhouse with all the plants and flowers which I cut from around and about in the gardens and forest, creating a small version of them, where I could lose myself.

Walking around the grounds, I thought alot about Klimt, and another artist I had just seen at the National Gallery, Eduard Vuillard, and of course Millais's Ophelia, which always haunts me from time to time. I wanted to disappear between all the colours, mixing together figure and wall, between the plants that would devour me, inside this glass room designed to organize and classify nature. Whilst I was making these self-portraits, the air inside got warm and very humid with all the plants, which were full of insects, and I had the impression that my first action in England was creating my own little Brazil. My tropical room of English plants, where I could breathe warm air and rest, as if in a vertical coffin, before creating the courage to face the great House.


ARIANE
Why do you refer to the greenhouse as a vertical coffin? After all, the greenhouse was invented to nurture not kill new life in the English cold climate which militates against wholehearted flourishing. There seems alot of death in life in this self portrait of you in the greenhouse - or should I say transparent tomb?


PATRICIA
I hadn't thought about it consciously as a vertical coffin when I was actually making the images, until I looked at the pictures afterwards. I love this act of creating this little rainy forest inside a small glass room in such a cold weather, so typical of English culture - so delicate and almost heroic. But I think all this human care and concern about preserving life in a glass box, at the same time establishes very defined limits as to its size and growing, and the ways of growing and flourishing. So it's a wonderful paradox thinking about the greenhouse as both a coffin and a nursery... and the glass window, at the same time generates, contains and limits my performance, freeze framing it like a photographical action.


THE COLOUR PURPLE

ARIANE
So...on to the colour purple...and a performance not limited between walls or glass panes. Instead you walked 40 metres of purple indian silk through the grounds of the Hurst as well as in the house itself, photographing your crossings in the landscape around the lake, through and up the redwood forest, under a greenwood tree in a meadow, and then entering a dovecote which looks like a tiny castle. The latter is a very medieval image with a horse grazing in the long, lush grass. Why did you decide to place yourself in the open landscape, and displace yourself from your glass nursery tomb? What were you hoping to find by doing this?

PATRICIA
John Osborne said that at the Hurst, he had the most beautiful view in England. From the moment when I read this phrase, I was sure that the landscape was part of the house itself. An extremely present external space, that composed the inner rooms, the inner views, that allowed everyone's mind to escape from inside, as you said, with no limits at all...

So I had great walks around the house, going to Clun, to Aston, or just to the forest around, walking high up into the hills. I thought this was as important as walking from room to room, or climbing up or down the stairs. And the landscape was so incredibly green, that it made me want to see another colour urgently, to have a kind of a relief, or a reaction in colour form. I thought the green fields needed the purple colour. It's the complimentary opposite, the purple (blue and red), in relation to the green (blue and yellow). And the purple also came to mind because I identified it strongly with England, as well - a kind of noble colour. But I found the purple I imagined, at the end, in Indian silk, which was for me an interesting paradox. The largest former British colony would give me the colour I couldn't find in English textiles, India being simultaneously an opposing as well as complimentary country to its former ruler, just as green is to purple.

I then had to place the purple colour in several situations in the landscape, normally centered in the image, and in relation to the landscape and the feminine figure. I felt like wrapping myself inside all that silk, on one side, and never showing where the tissue ends. I had seen Hamershoi paintings at the National Gallery, and was a little obsessed by all his paintings showing women, in inner spaces, with their backs to the viewer... I fell in love with these incredibly mysterious images. And also when I was thinking about the action of wrapping myself into a colour like that, I thought alot about Helio Oiticica, and how the simplicity of his parangolés were such a vibrant, living action... the colours that came into life through people dancing and moving inside them...

Putting myself into the image also could give an idea of the scale of the nature around me, which had such a giant and ancient presence in relation to my ephemeral visit...So I started inside the front room of the house, which is also green, looking outside through the giant window ... and then walking through all these almost unreal landscapes with this almost unreal dress, dragging the Indian silk around the British fields, constructing these purple tracks over all that wonderful green, under a shiney and transparent light.

It's great to think about this now, to notice that my first action was so contained inside the green house, and that in the final one (until the day before I left the Hurst) I just wanted to get lost in the landscape outside, to get as timeless and uncontainable as the medieval horse, the lakes, the giant trees...


ARIANE
Gaston Bachelard, who I know you love, had a beautiful phrase for this sense of getting lost and daydreaming in nature and open spaces. He called it 'intimate immensity' - the sense of self which becomes transformed and transported by directly experiencing landscape in all its vastness. But as well as space, aren't you also by walking this silk through nature saying something about time too? The two, after all, go hand in hand...


INTIMATE IMMENSITY

PATRICIA
Exactly. I showed this image to a physicist and he told me his impressions of seeing the silk were as the mark of a walk, a displacement between two points. This displacement takes time to happen, and the silk makes visible the track I made to get to that position in the photograph. For him, these purple walking pieces were mainly about the time it takes for a displacement to happen. It was a wonderful way to see them, I thought.

Bachelard was really important to my residency, and in fact I often go back to him to find out more about my own work. It's amazing too when he talks about the immensity of the forest: "you don't have to remain too much time inside a forest to have the impression you dive into a world without limits." And he says: "Immensity is in us. Connected to a kind of expansion stopped by life, by prudence, but that always gets back in solitude. (...) Immensity is the movement of the immovable man. " And I love when he mentions the poet Jules Supervielle, who knows we are, in the calm hours, "delicate inhabitants of the forests of ourselves".


ARIANE
Did you discover anything about the 'delicate inhabitants of the forests of yourself' in the procession of the purple silk through the landscapes? Through the woods, and then around the lake and to the dovecote with the gentle horse standing by?


PATRICIA
I think I can answer with some phrases I wrote while I was living at The Hurst, from this very informal diary - a notebook of thoughts and drawings...

The tower (dovecote) is the shell of the horse.

The thing that surprises me more is to have placed myself in the same situation of all those dead writers I visited. The house as a time necessary for contemplation. I just passed the last moments, I don't know how long, looking to the forest by the window and how it constantly changed because of the light. Today the light is quite dramatic. Changes all the time. The spectacle had as soundtrack Opera Soprano Strauss from the radio. Just perfect.

...and after all that houses I visited, I see myself in the same situation. Surrounded by silence and absence, with all the space available in the world, to fill with my inner tensions. As in that higher places, where it happens with the diference of pressure between the person and the site.

I can't remember before England. I can hardly write e-mails to my friends in Brazil, Chile, to my family. It's almost scary how I can easily forget about everything before. Or let it standing by, while I construct this reality here. Time seems to be impossible to separe from space. Memory as well.

I want to melt the bookshelves.

I go outside to collect flowers for my vases. I come back carring a lot of them. Totally Jane Austen.

The stairs. Blue.

A convex mirror, to leave to the house its own reflection as a gift

I think, while working over the purple green work, I felt very feminine all the time, as a process that had begun at the green house.
I felt like searching or waiting for something, and some verses from one of my favorites poets in Brazil, who is a musician too, Paulinho da Viola, I used to hear thousands of times, until memorize it and sing it myself while working:

"Silence, please,
While I forget for a while the pain in my heart
Don't say a word about my defects
I don't recall any longer who left me like this.
Today all I want is a pause of a thousand measures
(...)
Whoever knows it all, don't speak
Whoever knows nothing, stay silent
If necessary I'll repeat
Because today I'll make,
in my own way I'll make
a samba about the Infinite."
(from "Para ver as meninas")


HOUSES AS BOOKS
ARIANE
We began our conversation about you potentially working at John's House nearly a year and a half ago. You said to me then that you believe houses are like book: their walls are like pages waiting to be read...what is the story - or are the stories - behind this?


PATRICIA
The main phrase of my project was "Houses are books with very thick pages". Starting from this idea, I thought I could give the same weight to the houses I knew and the books I had read. It first started with a desire of carrying with me the old house of the family, where my grandmother had lived at Santiago de Chile. I would love to appropriate that house, so I decided to reconstruct it from room to room through my visual work. Giving the house the weight of a book, and fitting each room in a different chapter. So the house would become a book with this chapters made of images. And I would be able to carry it with me, wherever I go.

John Osborne's house was the opposite process, in the sense that the house started as a book, having access at first to a play where the whole action is contained in a living room, which is very internal. And then the action expanded to a house, and to a forest, to a town, to a language and to people... it became very physical, in order to support my commentaries, my own actions.

I like to think about the two houses, the Chilean and the English, as complimentary processes. But I don't know what is going to happen at a third house, probably a mixture of both things, and something else... I think it is also curious that I've been looking for houses to work away from Sao Paulo, away from my own home. Maybe is necessary to be a stranger to be able to exercise a condition of freedom, as Edward Said said...

I have just read a wonderful short story written by Bernard Collet, a writer born in Morocco, called "Elle, si proche de la mer", where he tells us about another house: "She is laying a few centimetres over the ground, as in light levitation on her white concrete base, she says that she could be elsewhere, dismounted, reconstructed, and she would always be held where she is dreamed, inside this narrow edge between reality and fiction. She knows that it is there where I am well."

This edge between reality and fiction is also the place where I want to put this house. Or the place where I think is possible for me to inhabit one or more... My main source for working inside houses is literature, so working inside a writer's house makes this relationship even stronger and clearer for my artistic process, for myself. John's house has the memory of a writer living inside too, and his texts become for me my material just as much as the stones, the wood and the glass. Again I need to transcribe a writer's text to explain myself, now from Lewis Carroll, when Humpty Dumpty (Alice Through the Looking Glass) says: "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less." I think when I'm inside this narrow edge, I'm able to choose the house, the emptiness, the forest, the light...to mean what I choose it to mean, and neither more nor less.

ENDS