Artists' Spare Room | Kit Hollings
A week as the Spare Room Artist with EdenArts.
At the Old Fire Station, Penrith.
GIVE WAY says the sign if I glance up from the desk and look out of the Spare Room window, my home for a week by kind invitation of Eden Arts. There’s a B and M sign behind it, over the busy road that brings traffic off the A66 and into town. Now and again an ambulance races in or out, all sirens and flashing lights (the hospital sits the other side of this building, across a couple of NHS carparks), giving a certain kind of energy and commitment to the place - which I like. I’m going to harness this vibe.
With its connotations of ‘wait’, ‘let’ and ‘allow’ – ‘give way’ seems almost an invitation to let go, to allow full immersion in my current project, to wait and see what these next days bring.
The loose plan is to curate the gatherings, verbal, visual and written, of a summer-long watery adventure last year when two friends and I swam our local river, the Eden, from source to sea. The ragbag of riches gleaned from this microadventure range from 90 hours of GoPro footage to a library of shared photos, blogs, posts, articles, diary entries, letters and emails.
I begin with a day of drawing in threads from all these directions – as if choosing colours of wool to weave with. And I write the frame for a day. It is slow, painstaking stuff, each day has hours’ worth of footage, and transcribing our conversations, muffled by river movement, proves tricky. But the way those conversations bring back the immediacy of a day is a kind of magic. How we moved, how we interacted with one another, in quiet or in talk, gives me a whole new route into the story, new layers of complexity.
The idea to overlay some of the better bits of footage with poetry or short bits of narrative, takes hold. And this is where Stuart, Eden Arts’ Film Director Extraordinaire, comes in. At his desk we enter the control panel of Davinci Resolve. It feels like I’m in the cockpit of a Boeing 747. Over the course of the afternoon, we play about with sound and colour, font and timing, and soon my words dance about in a new landscape where nothing is real, everything’s blue and the sound is found in an online sound library – this legal thievery and wizardry feels totally liberating.
Another morning and I’m working on a zine with a working title Curriculum of Waste, based on the photos I took of a day’s worth of rubbish we collected about halfway down our Eden swim. On scraps of paper I respond to the photos, many of them close-ups of corners of plastic retrieved from the riverbed. Plastic that might have once held animal feed or sileage or takeaway dinners. It’s a quick ekphrastic exercise – I love this kind of work, time-limited, just seeing what comes out of the pen.
I’m so grateful to the team @ EdenArts for giving me this Time-Out. Being here at the Fire Station has been the best sort of sixth-form experience; conversations, connections, discoveries, ideas, laughs, cups of tea, random turns of events. So much to take away, so much to carry on with, so much to look forward to – I feel new - THANK YOU!
