The Future Library or A Story is in the Telling

Some thoughts…

This most recent studio enquiry builds on Trace Dance, narrative, lines and stories as troublemakers. Play and menace, exploration and discovery, open and closed, inside and out. First there were drawn portals and tangled lines creating paths through space. Then lit cutouts and physical portals through the work. Books, and a departure almost exclusively to  working on paper has changed the nature of these pages. Moving from looser, reduced information to an illustrative style, which is not illustration, plays with narrative, bookness and storytelling. The figures, predominantly children, inhabit the space inside the book where the story has yet to be written. Gestural marks mirror the marks traced in the air by the storyteller; these create a landscape in the anatomy of the book which the storytellers can explore. Portals emerge, figures disappear and weave between the gestures. The significance of hair, representing the woven threads and connections, particularly by traditional hair plaiting  (and tapestry weaving) is important. This comes from the traditional gathering of women to make and share their stories. I am exploring migration, children moving from place to place without barriers of land or language. They carry the stories that they encounter in their journeys. Of course the book in itself is important, or the  page; the ability to hold the book and turn the pages as you wish, seeing the different configurations of space, lines, stories and tellers. Does this give the viewer power to become the storyteller themselves as they read these encounters. Will the stories escape from the book and be carried somewhere new? I need to go back to Frank’s ‘Letting Stories Breathe’…