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Title: “Canute”
Artists: Malcolm Tait, Alan Trench & Collette Tait
Artists Located in: East Lincolnshire & London
Format:
Sculpture/ installation / sound / performance.
Project
Description: A ladder sunk into the
sand, a viewpoint for the performer, a beacon for the audience and a
growing a geometric lattice of wooden bars, also an old chest for
paint and brushes. An accompanying sound track of dislocated world
music exploring rhythms integrated into local culture. The wooden
lattice which will be constructed as an ongoing process throughout
the project painted in shades of grey blue.
Background
Theme:
King Canute is legendary for his apparent attempt to "hold back the
tide".
Canutee is possible best remembered by people as someone who though
he had become godlike with his empowered regal status, however
Canute who sat his throne on the beach, and watched the evident
disregard of the
sea
for his commands to roll the
waves
away from the
land
was in fact proving to his over flattering courtiers of the
limitations of a king.
Journeys and
chosen destinations influence the changes that occur when we return
to the place we call home. The most overt form of this change is in
the music we listen to and enjoy, this enjoyment is almost universal
and it locates itself above our more irrational prejudices and fear
of foreign workers taking ‘our’ jobs, hearing strange
languages and seeing customs which will feel will change our sense
of identity. This continual change is a fact of life, we seek to
influence the changes but cannot halt this change which occurs more
quickly today because of advances in transport modes and links, the
modernity we embrace to take our tourist breaks has shrank the world
into a global village. The conflict between nostalgic pasts and
‘other’ narratives generated by travel is what the work seeks to
explore.
Project
Engagement: The wooden lattice will be
constructed by two conflicting systems, the first will be the
performer setting out to construct a pre-determined shape, and the
second will be generated by the audience who will be invited to
place every second piece of lattice. The lattice bars will be
painted in six shades of grey, each shade corresponding to a
pre-arranged colour band. The performer will choose the colour of a
piece of clothing worn by someone at a point 400meters away, In the
case of the participating audience member it will be from a colour
they are wearing.
The final outcome
will be neither that which the performer is trying to achieve or
reflect the choices of the audience participants, what occurs will
be a collective response. The conflict of the two systems reflecting
the difficulty we feel in influencing outcomes in reality and the
struggle to attain an independent vision in an ever integrating
world.
A soundtrack
devised by A Trench will accompany the piece; it will look at hybrid
rhythms brought about by cultural diversity, reflected in the
regular patterns which will occur in the lattice.
Experience:
Malcolm Tait has completed three
public art projects; including Stage one of this project
“In search of Albion” Alan Trench is a professional
musician/composer with experience of international collaboration and
the performer Collette Tait a graduate of the Urdang Theatre School. |