KdP: We met at a residency in the mountains outside of Barcelona in May 2018. At the time, we were working on separate projects. I remember giving you a copy of my poetry collection Ekke, which had just been released. I also remember helping you take some multiple exposure images as you posed on the eerily white terraces of the residency garden. You ended up including a recitation of part of my poem “Someone other than else” in your final moving image work, Moon bathing.
As I lie here now, felt up
in complete tenderness, it occurs to me
that my body drops like a wave,
breasts trickling off my chest, thighs fighting
then collapsing, spreading, expanding
and thinning out, limpid and clear,
before retracting, climbing into themselves,
refining their pores
a pool of water collecting itself solemnly
to return to solidity.
The difference between inundate and undulate
is so slim, yet I master it
within the time bracket it takes to pour this glass
of water and drink it.
– Excerpt from “Someone other than else” by Du Plessis
KS: Yes, the work Moon bathing (a black and white and hand-coloured film made entirely from still photographs) was my first moving image work. Prior to this, my practice was mainly sculpture and photography. During the residency where we met, I was free to experiment beyond the still image and think about the photograph’s historical role in film – the streaming together of hundreds of still photographs to create a sense of movement, narrative and time.
For each body of work that I have made over the last 20 years, I have always written a short text or poem during its production – expressing the narratives I was exploring in my sculpture/photography. These poems/texts were sometimes exhibited alongside the works as wall-mounted vinyls or exhibition handouts, but more often than not they were left unseen as a private collection of my thoughts, my artwork in words.
Moving into film allowed me to reconsider the role of text in my work – thinking about how text, when recited and recorded, has its own time and rhythm and how that can be used to create movement in stillness with the photographic image.
I was fascinated by the recorded voice – climbing up words, tumbling and jolting – raw and intimate, guiding the viewer through the images which mirror those tumbles and jolts, the rawness, the intimacy. The importance of the voice in adding a layer to the narrative that already existed in the photographs, while providing rhythms that would move with the changing tempos of the film, led me to your work Ekke.
In many of my photographic works, I use multiple and long exposures to capture intimate scenarios between two or three women; the relationship between these women is unclear – they could be lovers, friends or relatives. But on closer inspection, you realise it is actually the same woman – me. The work then crosses over into something more intimate, sensual or violent, an exploration of multiple selves, female desire and fantasy. Moon bathing was taken with your help. I used a medium format film camera, which required someone to move the film forward for me manually between poses. I also drew on Jean Rhys’s book Wide Sargasso Sea for inspiration. I was, at the time, exploring the historical relationship depicted in art and literature between women’s sexuality and hysteria or lunacy.
Moon bathing, hand-coloured black and white photograph (30 x 30 cm), and still from film (duration 2:30 mins) (2018). Kadie Salmon
I’ve gone on a tangent, but this returns me to the use of your poem in the final work. I had, as I always had, written my own poems while developing the work in the studio. However, when I tried using them over the finished film, I felt that they were too close to the work. I needed a different voice of sensuality, something that would speak to the intimacy of the film but hold its own narrative. I was reading Ekke while making the work, and there was a particular excerpt that I fell in love with. After getting your approval, I tried reciting it over the film. It was incredible – the flow of words, the words themselves, sensual in the way they made the tongue move across the mouth and lips. Lingering over every syllable, they moved rhythmically in tune to the movements of the figures, their caresses mirroring one another. I had never used another writer’s work in my own individual work before (and haven’t since), but your poem, your words, became intrinsic to the film – as if they were meant to be together.
Moon bathing is a special work for me. It marked a clear development in my practice, a move into film and a chance to collaborate with you (which, of course, was only the beginning); it also made me think more about the role of text in my works.
KdP: In your next, major moving image work, Hunting razorbills, you wrote and recited your own poems as soundtrack. I think you also worked with a composer and sound engineer. You shared this work with me in-progress, and I was actually inspired to write three poems in relation to it. You opted for the intimacy of your own texts, though, and they work extremely well. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that return to your own poetry and the decision to make it public, especially in terms of your method of often keeping it private as process but not product?
Rushing
For a stolen breath
As gasps of stinging spume
skelp the body in motions that swell and rise
Every prickling sensation a comforting collapse
Into the Baltic deep of the North Sea
Muffled sounds filter through porous skin
Stroked by the whisperings of tongues
From times long afore
Voices carry on billowing currents
Weaving between the outstretched arms of kelp
With every gentle caress
We are bound to the coorse,
laughing sea
Crumbling as it pulls heavy limbs
Through tiny openings
On the surface of stone and sand
—-------------------------------------------
A thick haar
cloaks the morning twilight
As precious particles dance upwards
Soaring and swooping as one
They gather in rookies
that lift the sheltering protrusions
from the past
A stillness resonates
with movements that shiver and jault
ushered by the birring sound
of the gannets’ cry
a high-pitched chiming
of the wrangling of birds
A patter that warns of
The sleekit stare of beady eyes
is cut by the chanting melody
of seafolks’ song:
“I make for you feathered slippers
my lover the hunter of birds
Earliest home across the channel
my lover the mariner of the deep”
– Excerpt from “Hunting razorbills” by Salmon
KS: Ah, yes, Hunting razorbills was another shift for me – exploring my own writing and its relationship to my art practice. Hunting razorbills was shot using multiple and long exposures on medium format film along the north-east coast of Scotland. This is where I grew up – in the Highlands. The majority of my works are site-specific. I have travelled to countries such as Norway and Finland – places that remind me of the raw beauty of the Scottish landscape – but this was the first time I had returned home to shoot. This work is a very personal one for me. It speaks of the history of Scottish fishing communities, folklore and the relationship that such communities had/have with the sea – the fear and love of it. But it also speaks of loss, grief – loss and grief that come hand in hand with living off such a dangerous element, and also my own personal loss. I lost my stepfather just before making the work, and so through it there is an exploration of pain, desire, love and loss, identity and connection to a place, to a landscape and a heritage.
This personal connection to the work and the landscape is what made me decide to use my own poetry. It became more and more important to me that I used Scottish words, that the poems were really able to speak of the landscape I know so well, and reference the folklore and local histories that had become entangled in the work. Using words such as “quine” (a Scottish word of endearment that my stepfather used for me) brought the work back to my own loss and connectedness to the work.
In the past, my poetry felt separate from my artwork, but in Hunting razorbills it became a significant part of the work and moved, as you said, from “process to product”.
Hunting razorbills, hand-coloured black and white photograph (40 x 40 cm), and still from film (duration 11:48 mins) (2020). Kadie Salmon
KdP: This progressive integration of text and image seems so linear in retrospect! Especially when the next big project is our collaborative one, Incipit. Scree. Explicit. In 2021, we did a collaborative research residency at Artexte, an archive of books about art in Montreal. While immersing ourselves in the wealth of strange documents, texts, critical essays, photobooks and more, we decided to create our own artist’s book, one which would be sculptural in form. The artist’s book resulted in 20 new poems and three main sculptural parts, as listed in the tripartite title.
Our process became a conversation between text and image. I would write a poem and immediately send it to you without editing it or waiting for it to settle. You would then respond to the poem in sculptural form, using the printed poem and paper as medium. I would respond to your visual shapes, using their physicality to lead my words, sometimes even in the shape of the following poems, sometimes citing my own poetry from the warped and excerpted textual glimpses visible in the sculptures. This was a deeply immersive process, bringing our respective disciplines into the closest possible relation.
Scree (Cut-outs II), mixed-media artist book, giclee photographs, giclee poem prints (2021). Screenshot of poem from Explicit. Photo credit: Kadie Salmon
KS: It was such an exciting collaboration for me, waking up each morning to a new poem (or several!). It was incredibly inspiring. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so exhilarated during the production of a work. We really fed off each other’s creative energy and helped each other find new ways to explore the relationship between text and image with a real sense of freedom. For me, there was a significant shift in the way I saw and used the poem, responding not just to its content but thinking of it visually – words as forms, shapes, spaces and rhythms. In Incipit, I started to mimic the forms of colons and commas, then playfully balance them as sculptures in a three-dimensional state, suspended in air like they are on the page. It was incredible to watch your poems begin to reference the forms and shapes of my sculptures, and I remember feeling so excited to see your lines begin to disappear, and words become more isolated and/or taking up more physical space. Can you talk a bit more about your journey from the traditional structure of a poem to using the whole page, and how you explored that, especially in Scree and Explicit?
KdP: That’s such a great question! Before our collaboration, I had always actively resisted using the page in my poetry – that is, in an open field, Olsonian sense. If it wasn’t serving a purpose, such as scoring breath, for example, it seemed pretentious to me to work against the fairly traditional left-margin page justification. I generally have an urge towards minimalism in my poetics, in the sense of holding back on gestures that aren’t functional for the words themselves. But when we started working together, you mentioned at one point that poetry running down the left-hand border of the page was limiting its visibility when transformed into three-dimensional forms. Imagine scrunching and mangling a page of poetry that has words running down only one of its edges – a lot of the page is simply blank. This fact, as well as my desire to respond textually to the shapes you were creating, challenged me to think more visually about my writing. It gave me the permission, in a way, to work with the page, to fill the page, to play with layout and spacing in ways that I’d never done before. You can clearly see the visual conversation of our work in the diptych above.
Scree means the fragmentation of stone into gravel. The playfulness that I employed in the composition of these poems emphasises this fragmentation as words scattered across the page. I should note, though, that even though I was moving words across the pages, this set of poems is actually a set of sonnets. They all have 14 lines and end on a (semi-)rhyming couplet. Even in their splintering and experimentation, they are thus much more formal than one might expect. In this sense, too, they function according to visual constraints.
Scree (Boulders), close-up, mixed-media artist book, giclee photographs, giclee poem prints, flour, water (2021). Photo credit: Éliane Excoffier
KS: What I’ve found so special about this particular project is its potential to continually grow and evolve. For artwords, we are also exhibiting a short video of the artist book, specifically Incipit, being built, collapsed and rebuilt into its many different forms/poses. Accompanying the video will be a soundtrack, an audio recording by you of the Explicit sonnets, thus further exploring the relationship between text, image and the experience of the reader/viewer. I am excited to see how the project continues to develop in the future and where it takes us.
KdP: Incipit. Scree. Explicit. was first exhibited at Artexte, the archive, research centre and residency programme already mentioned. It’s nice to think that it’s moved into a gallery space now, as part of the artwords exhibition at Glen Carlou – from a textual to a visual context.
The post artwords – "Text creates movement in stillness": A conversation between Kadie Salmon and Klara du Plessis first appeared on LitNet.
The post <i>artwords</i> – "Text creates movement in stillness": A conversation between Kadie Salmon and Klara du Plessis appeared first on LitNet.