I have received a catalogue from an Australian artist friend,
Jo
Darbyshire, whose work shares my pre-occupation with undersea
worlds - she describes her floating worlds series as concerned with
the body in the landscape, sensuality, immersion and imagination
" Although abstract in nature, my paintings reference bodily
experience 'moving over' a landscape, …'flying' or 'floating' over
mountains or underwater reefs … a bodily 'letting go'; Pleasure."
Reading two downloadable essays written about her work I am struck
by Gall Jones's references in The Erotics of Immersion -
Responses to Floating Life to Calenture, a kind of fever
whereby sailors would imagine the sea to be rolling fields and
throw themselves ecstatically into it (a misrecognition she
understands in terms of sensual desire). So much so that I have
taken the term as the title of a new piece of work, produced as
part of Land Use Poetics a group workshop and
show in which I have just taken part at The Museum of Sketches,
Lund, Sweden, in which I jumped 'blind' from a diving board, in a
kind of homage to Yves Klein's Leap into the void
This series of photographs was taken in Scotland in 2005 while I
was undertaking a research residency at the Scottish Sculpture Workshop in
Aberdeenshire. For me the tidal character of the site is central to
its potency, the gradual erosion of walls which previously
contained and utilised the energies of the sea, seeming to
physically and conceptually question ideas embodied in its
modernist design; formulated in an era when drawing the lines
between nature and culture seemed possible.
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