Hello, Dreamworld

Today is the trees, the birds, laughter and a song. 
Today is the wind, the water, a pipe band, and a standard lamp. Today is a herd of cows, a sheep bleating, and the sound of footsteps across old slate.
Today is many doors, tunnels, switchboards.
Today is a memory, today is a dreamworld.

The title of this exhibition, I’m attended as a portal myself, is lifted from a poem by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge:

I attend to the portal effect, sun doubling in a cloud reflection, array of filament recordings, and I’m attended as a portal myself.^[1]

Poetry is a good place to look for portals. The poem is part of a larger collection of works Hello, the Roses (2013) which explores our active relationship with the natural world through coexistence and communication, deepening our awareness to the sensorily perceptible. 

For the first words of a dreamworld is a 16mm film that combines audio field recordings, found material, movement and energy practice in a poly-sensorial experience. Standing within the work we are caught between times, rendering time itself as changeable and undefined. We pass through portals in the work: both audio- and image-scape, a repetition of movement and language to suspend us in a dynamic state between collective and personal experience.

Both the title of the exhibition and of Bobbi Cameron’s work take from literature; both, in some sense, explore the shape of invisible or imagined worlds. I am attended as a portal myself. Here, language breaks its constraints and the object subject relationship: we, ourselves, become the portal, the interface or opening between worlds through this awareness. In Cameron’s work we see how this awareness, this sensory encounter, is omni-directional when faced with a cow looking back into the camera apparatus. As an audience we become aware of our position as mutually active.

The title of Cameron’s work, for the first words of a dreamworld, signifies language on the way in. A time at the beginning where the words for it have not yet been defined. Voices move in and out of clarity and between places and times. We are in constant dialogue with awareness and perception, communication within the confines of language itself falls short of describing these encounters and experiences. Instead, we are brought to a place of considering our total environment when rendering meaning; for words and sounds and images to refract through their audience. When experiences become physical and touch one another, us, we could call this interaction.

Sound appears as a cloud in the sky.

Sound moves spatially and away from stable identification. Sound creates a relational framework through which to encounter the work. Recorded conversations, sounds, journeys, places, move in and out of earshot to form a multi-dimensional sound world. Later in the work we hear the voice of Stevie Nicks, which is both familiar and new. Conjuring itself in the way a memory would. These voices bring us to a shared or collective past, defining our interconnectivity and our part within the work; we participate. There is no hierarchy to sound. The human ear is often drawn to language but we are taken to a place often beyond coherence and intelligible speech to decipher new ways of perceiving. Language itself is a limit, time is another, as is our physical body in space.

Sounds return in the work and reorient us constantly to the idea that our position is an inconsistent one. We see this mirrored through a sequence of movements performed by a dancer. Dissolved here are the preconceptions of how time meets the body. These rehearsed and repeated movements take place across places, both domestic and within the natural landscape: in a wooden-clad living room, a slate beach, and the defunct slate quarries of Easdale Island. The film is shot exclusively across a small group of islands referred to together as the Slate Islands, off the west coast of Scotland, a place that the artist calls home. These islands take their name from and are known for their slate production, active until the late 1800s when they were flooded by a storm surge. The slate from this area was exported across the world and used across Scotland. It was even used in the construction of Glasgow Cathedral, just a stone’s throw from the exhibition, north of the river. The quarries were protected from the sea by a narrow sea wall and quarried to depths of 250m in some places. Some of the smaller islands such as Belnahua were almost quarried to nothing. Excavated beyond their existence. 

At the quarry, at the water’s edge, the body meets place and time on the precipice. The body draws out the human relationship to place, at a minute distance in the expanse of geologic time. The repeated movements of the dancer’s hands pulsing in and out of the space in front. The dancer keeps time, becomes time, using her body as a symbolic structure, just as the portal. 

The work brings us into a vibrant co-presence, with past and present, with place and memory, with sight and sound, with experience and emotion, with one another. Everything recorded here becomes relational: the clouds; the voices; the cows; the repeated movements of the dancer; the phone ringing; the band playing; the waves; artist and audience. We find ourselves in a new social realm. Here we say,

Hello, the Roses!
Yes! Hello! 
We say Hello, 
the cows, 
hello, 
the clouds, 
hello 
past and present, 
hello 
dream world!^[1]

 

^{[1] Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Hello, the Roses (New York: New Directions, 2013), 72.}