Loughton to Lambourne End

LOUGHTON TO

LAMBOURNE END

Allotrope Press edition thirteen (limited to copies) ISSN 2046 - 2859 Texts by Bernard Walsh and Keef Winter Photographs by Le誰la Pereira Edited by Le誰la Pereira Published by Allotrope Press Printed in November 2014, United-Kingdom

LOUGHTON TO LAMBOURNE END Yuki Nishimura

Wednesday 15th October 2014 King’s Oak Hotel Loughton, Essex

Launched at X Marks the Bökship Thursday 4th December 2014.

NEGOTIATIONS In Hegel’s sub-chapter ‘Lordship & Bondsman’ from his 1807 work Phenomenology of Spirit he opens up a position on opposites; the opposition between two extreme consciousnesses (Hegel also cites these as ‘things’) and what happens when they confront one another, attempting to achieve ‘self- consciousness’. The conflict between these ‘extreme things’ sets into motion a relationship known as the ‘Master/Slave Dialectic’ where one party acquires the role of the Master and the weaker contestant becomes the Slave. In this relationship the Master has his duties fulfilled by the Slave who is bound to service. However, the power struggle also flips. The Master, with his duties carried out, expects no more and his vision is limited.

The Slave bound in his duty is unsatisfied and can therefore afford to dream of an alternative life, another kind of existence. The Slave then finds himself in an unusual space of potential. During this process, in-between these things emerges a construct that Hegel calls the ‘Middle Term’. The Middle Term can be viewed as ‘space in-between extreme things’ that are in ‘acknowledgement’. In an opposition only two parties can exist, but here a polarisation permits a third space; a Middle Term. This construct suggests a third party, one of facilitation and negotiation.

Yuki Nishimura’s artistic practice owns similarities to Hegel’s Master/ Slave Dialectic. In his experimental performances Nishimura assumes the role of a mediator between things, but also becoming the obedient Slave to the Master object. Nishimura role switches as he operates within various constructs of Middle Term, perhaps at times even as the Middle Term, negotiating conditions between one space and another, one object and another. His work deals with material, endurance and risk. Nishimura looks to activate and give life to inanimate material, almost in a spiritual way, like the ranked relics of Catholicism in their various object-orientated worship. Nishimura says ‘I want to talk with concrete; ‘I want to become a piece of furniture’; ‘I want to lose myself and become a thing, just another thing’. So perhaps then it is more reductive, Nishimura wants to level the playing field, a kind of fatalistic approach to biology, matter and the ephemerality of life. But there is levity in his approach that lifts his work out of the mundane into an energy-filled exciting series of actions. Here, in ‘Loughton to Lambourne End’, we are set into a

curious swimming pool locale deep in Epping Forest, Northeast of London. Simply, Nishimura’s objective is to navigate the length of a large outdoor swimming pool while talking to a sunken piece of concrete and aluminium. It might be that the sunken object is the Master and Nishimura is the Slave. The water is perhaps the Middle Term in this case as it acts as a conductive material that permits a controlled resistance as he passes through it. His tools include a map of the local area used to assign himself moves and also his skilful swimming abilities. His aim is to finally arrive and dive down to join with the aluminium over two metres below the surface in the ultimate seal of acknowledgement. The map begins to dissolve, Nishimura’s stamina is stretched and the aluminium and concrete await his arrival.

Lastly, a brief note should be made to connect Nishimura’s challenge with ‘My Mother’s Mother’ by Bernard Walsh. Walsh hands us a treat here with a vivid window into his Mancunian-Irish upbringing, illuminating the characters of his mother and other family members and their relationship to objects, sacred and not so sacred, valuable and not so valuable. The value of the inherited objects within Walsh’s family is subjective and sentimental, similar to Yuki’s servitude to his concrete and aluminium Master. In both cases we are faced with the acknowledgement between things; the systemisation of objects and their importance, worked out within a physical context, pressing hard against the elements and always with a smart sense of negotiation.

Keef Winter

‘Loughton golf club cp to Debden green 1 square’

‘Strawberry hill to Nursery 1 square’

MY MOTHER’S MOTHER My mother’s mother was a gypsy.

That’s what she told me.

And I believed her.

She said our people were descended from the missing tribe of Israel, who left the Holy Land a long time before the birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

She bowed her head at this point, and made me do the same.

You must do this, she said, whenever you mention His name, or, she continued, His mother the Blessed Virgin Mary.

She said our people moved through the desert, over mountains, and across allsorts of foreign land, until they reached the most beautiful place on Earth.

Where’s that? I asked.

Ireland, she said.

Do we live there?

No! She hesitated before saying, we live in Manchester.

Every week I watched her try to find the exact spot on a photograph, which she asked me to cut out of the newspaper, where a ball had once been in-between one of the player’s legs, or in the air, or next to the goal.

One day, she said, we’ll all go back to live in Ireland, when I win Spot the Ball. ˜ She looked like what I thought a gypsy should look like.

In her youth she used to raise money for the I.R.A. (Irish Republican Army) by telling fortunes. She said she could see through the pattern of leaves, left at the bottom of someone’s teacup, what the future had in store for them.

Can you see this shape here? It is a continent.

Do you know someone; could be a relative or a friend, who lives in America?

She might have to wait for a moment … or in Australia or New Zealand?

And the shape next to the continent is a bird.

Can you see it is flying?

That means they are sending you a letter.

And it’s good news.

No, wait until I turn the cup around.

The person, or someone very close to the person you know, has died.

But they want you to know they are happy. They are at one now with Our Blessed Lord Jesus and His mother the Blessed Virgin Mary and all the saints in Heaven. ˜ She knew how something should be done in the same way it had always been done in the same way her mother had done it in the same way her mother had done it, and so on, until we were heading back down through a long line of matriarchs until we reached the desert and that first gypsy encampment. ˜ We lived in her house filled with her most sacred possessions.

The chair, over there, wasn’t just a chair. It was her mother’s chair.

The green leather sofa used to belong to a priest.

There was a picture of Christ crowned with thorns on one side of the fireplace, and a Virgin Mary crying tears of what looked like real blood on the other side.

And along the mantle-piece a row of plaster-cast saints moved through a solemn procession toward a central figure of Christ being crucified on a gilded wooden cross.

Above the sideboard, three framed photographic prints of popes Pius IX, John XXIII, and Paul VI in their pontifical regalia. And on the wall facing the fireplace, two more framed photographs of President John F Kennedy, and his younger brother Robert.

At Christmas the crib in our house was filled with the usual characters; Joseph and Mary, baby Jesus, an ox, an ass, three shepherds, two kings, and an Archangel Gabriel stuck on the roof.

I remember asking my mother: why do we only have two kings?

I knew there was supposed to be three, because we had just been singing a Christmas carol at school called We Three Kings of Orient Are. She said: There were three but your Grandma threw one away. She said he was too black.

Too black for my grandmother so she threw him away, replaced him with a statue of St Patrick, and an Irish leprechaun with a thermometer stuck on his back.

When my grandmother died my mother and her sister, my Aunty Moya went through my grandmother’s things to decide whether to keep this or that.

Aunty Moya wanted all the pictures, and most of the statues.

We inherited the green leather sofa, and a statue of Our Lady of Lourdes.

There were suitcases and quite a few boxes in the loft, including, I remember, half a dozen or so Quaker Oats boxes filled with various newspaper cuttings, letters, postcards and photographs that related to the time my grandmother called the best days of her life, when she had been an active member of the Cumann na mBan (the women’s league of the I.R.A.). My grandmother told me the boxes were filled with memories of the people she loved, including letters from her comrades; Eva GoreBooth and Eva’s sister Constance, who was better known as the Countess Markievicz, the first woman to be elected to the British House of Commons, but she refused to accept her seat. My grandmother told me Eva and her mother were great friends who worked together to try and secure a reprieve for Roger Casement after he had been sentenced to death.

She said: I remember one morning walking through the streets, and all I could see was where my mother and Eva must have spent the whole night chalking across all the pavements in Manchester: free Roger Casement an innocent man ˜ A little while after the funeral, I am not sure when, Aunty Moya showed me a small piece of paper, she had torn off one of the envelopes before she threw all the letters away.

Look at this, she said, can you see the stamp? It’s really old.

I could see it was a green halfpenny stamp with a picture of King George V’s head in the middle of an oval crest beneath an imperial crown.

And I could read the postmark. The letter had been sent from Dublin on the 26th April 1916, two days after the beginning of the Easter Rising.

Aunty Moya said: And I bet it’s worth a bob or two. ˜ Bernard Walsh

‘Lambourne end to Crown park farm 4 squares’

‘Park cottage to Currance house 7 squares’

‘Battles wood to Queen’s wood 1 square’