The Visitor by DesignRaphael Ltd

The Visitor Judith Alder & Clare Whistler

The Visitor

Writers

Judith Alder & Clare Whistler

Kay Syrad Martha Stutchbury Seb Doubinsky Martin Welton

Cell Redoubt Fort Eastbourne East Sussex Brick ruin Bunces Barn Battle East Sussex Tithe Barn Great Dixter Northiam East Sussex Freud Museum Camden London

Clare Whistler

I open my skins, let the atmosphere permeate my whole being and wake up to unknown impulses – it is a sensory listening to the place, with a lifetime’s responding through movement.

The Visitor. Who is speaking through whom?

Resonating, relating, echoing, imbibing, in an intuitive, instinctual, poetic, thoughtful, way to places rich with history, and seeing where this embodiment leads. At the same time the watcher captures, experiments, follows, decodes and interprets whatever happens.

From the damp and draughty cell, housed in a Napoleonic fort with endlessly changing occupants, no one’s home except the pigeons’, we experiment with feathers and light and find the first visitor. To a circle of bricks overgrown by hawthorn trees. In bird song, open air and green moss I start the exploration – branches catch my hair, my legs, the nightdress, my bare feet are jagged by the edges of bricks, the soft moss is illusory, pain is felt with every step. It is entirely unexpected. This time it is the physical sensations, thorns scratching, my ungainly shifting and stumbling, that create the discoveries. The watcher moving around the periphery and through the trees, enjoys the fall from grace. The white nightdress, actually my grandmother’s, still with its name tape, has become the garment that ‘visits’. A magnificent barn full of soil, dust, webs, rubbish, plants growing through holes in the roof, and unsafe floors. Breathing the dusty air into me, I disturb the place. With a child-like instinct I gather, place, tend – finding store rooms, hop floors, cellars, staircases, unknown machinery. It’s a slow journey, searching in the stuff to find a detail, light striking the floor through a crack, racks of plastic plant holders, a green tendril. After a storm the house greets us in bright winter sun. We were minded by caretakers, extra presences in this overcrowded atmosphere. Closed curtains, Persian carpets, book and statues hold me as I lose my arms into the bookcases of the library, roll by the couch and under the desk, feeling the layered nightmares and dreams that have been voiced in this still air weigh down and echo through me. The threshold of openness I present is vulnerable. Upstairs, I find a place to move, repetitively, white gloves for holding history become paws, a loom and baskets, boundaries. Light releases oppression.

Judith Alder

Redoubt

Bunces Barn

Great Dixter

Freud Museum

war/peace home/away barracks living space for soldiers and their families war violation of, and in, the home

nature/culture/agriculture natural, what is natural?

wonder dust light sunlight â&#x20AC;&#x201C; shafts, chinks magical playful dancing childlike simple innocent exploration

dark/light upstairs/downstairs public/private

inhabitants, past and present pigeons pigeons at war carrier pigeons heroes in peace pests, vermin feathers duvet comfort/no comfort cell enclosed trapped (no) means of escape dark

the idyll beauty life struggle pain death nature in peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s places tidy, ordered

appearing disappearing

wild(erness) tangled, complex

oppressive suffocating forbidding hidden things nervousness discomfort fear confusion who lives here? watched watching wolf dog wolf man hunting/hunted haunting/haunted

incongruous presence of humanity in a wild place nature rules birds mocking territory keep out power struggle who will win reverting to nature and the wild letting nature take its course

sleeping dreaming waking sleeping

I was taken to the cell, eased over the threshold, pushed. I faced the wall, beseeched the wall. Above, one high window light began at my shoulder. I was low in the silence. Soon I raised myself up, lifted my arms, noticed the absence of footholds. The bricks were porous, the air damp, air-less. I heard humming outside and the rushing in of dark. The wall was cold but you, you were here in the dark with your feathers and your strange lights. I could see your form emerging It was only then I heard the rock-doves – a burbling that didn’t come from the throat. Then I was you, and me – and the dark keeps me from the light – the light keeps me from the dark. There is light between my skin and my gown. My heart surrenders light. Light burns through the defences.

Kay Syrad 9

All that remained now was a thick jungle of brambles. She scratched her hands until they bled as she ran. Grasped at the thorns of grey and withered roses that snagged at her clothes determinedly, leaving behind long shreds of her cream-coloured clothing on plants that grabbed and reached for her with long, scaly fingers.

She ran like never before. Fear clouded her vision and thoughts with such a brutal and relentless vengeance that her sight did not permit her to see more than two or three feet in front of her. He would never find her. As she raised her head, a small fraction of her mind remembered the sunlight that once seeped determinedly through the now deadened and lifeless tree leaves and left dusty, mysterious patterns on the forest floor. Light that butterflies and squirrels had followed and traced, and wild animals had basked in. The same moss-carpeted floor that had once been dotted with the most beautifully scented wild flowers, in such rich and mesmerizing colours, like a broken up rainbow.

He would never find her. It was still beautiful in a way. Moss remained like a head of witches hair, on rocks that littered the floor in place of the exotic flowers that had once carpeted the soil. They were surrounded by trees, some of which still looked alive. She could see the subtle shoots of the leaves sprouting from the bark. She tripped, scraping her foot violently and suddenly against a rock. Clutching her bare, bleeding ankle, the fear that had been postponed momentarily returned with such a passion that she screamed aloud.

He would never find her. The same ancient and somehow intelligent tree trunks that she had spent hours studying. She remembered tracing her long dirtied fingernails through the grooves of the gnarled bark and watching the squirrels and birds nest in the branches. She had always thought that baby birds looked ugly. Their pulsating, tufted necks and blank looking, sunken eyes constantly facing the sun, as though praying for food. How they grew into something so beautiful and graceful always astounded her.

She ran. There is no end to her tale. As she runs petrified through the woods, oblivious to the nettles and brambles that relentlessly attack her as she flies.

He would never find her.

Only she shall know where she is going, who she is running from. We only know one thing. He must never find her.

Martha Stutchbury 13

I remember I would go down the steps, yes. To look for the leaf beneath the stairs. Fallen. I could not hear the leaf, just imagine it waiting for me in the darkness. Maybe I was frightened. Yes. Maybe I wanted to hide like the leaf too and be silent. And wait to be discovered. By the woman. By me, when I was a woman once. Yes. Maybe.

When I was a woman, I. No. When I was a young woman, I. Yes. When I was a young woman, yes, I used to leave things behind. Things behind things. I left behind. Like memories and most importantly myself. Things behind myself I used to leave behind. A hand, for instance. I used to. Behind my hand I used to leave, sometimes a leaf I would hold. I used to leave a leaf behind. My hand. Myself. Yes. Most importantly. Yes.

My eyes looked for the leaf, even when they were closed. Yes. Even when they were closed by darkness. I had to trust the sunspots and the creaking of the wood. The smell sometimes helped me, I think I remember. sometimes not. The house changed smells. My perfume. Oh yes. I remember. I think I do. My smell, so young. I smelled like a leaf slowly drying under the sunshine.

Sometimes the leaf would I not leave behind. It would come there. It would remind me of what I had left behind, but was still there. Myself. Behind my hand. Yes. Five fingers. No. Ten fingers. No. Five fingers. Yes. Holding a leaf. Or leaves. Holding behind myself, to remind me. The leaf, sometimes I picked, sometimes it was a gift. I don’t remember. My memory, sometimes, is misplaced. Behind things. Like myself. I remember I am in a house. No. I dream I am in a house. When I was a woman. Yes.

Always, on the steps, I came to a door. It was closed. The sun was shining through, but I couldn’t find the leaf. The smell of sunspots. Yes. And the weight of my body on the steps. Yes. I had a body, once. Like a leaf. Hidden sometimes, sometimes not. When I was a woman, in the house of my own body. The door is always closed, but I don’t want to get out. I want to stay. I want to find my leaf. And stay. Yes. No. When I was young, I. Yes. I dream I remember. My thoughts hidden by things. By my two hands, my twenty fingers, my house, me, the thing of things. I smell of dried leaves. I creak. Gently, gently. Hiding and waiting for the door to open and the sun to come in.

The house was full of leaves I could hide behind. Like myself. Ten fingers holding the leaf against my breasts, yes. I existed then. Why was I hiding? I don’t remember. Maybe because I was frightened. Yes. Or because I was playing. Yes. Maybe because I was playing to be frightened. Yes. My memory hides behind things. Like myself. Frightened of myself.

They say that when you dream about a house, you dream about your own body, I hide behind. In my house, there is one staircase. Only one, so I can remember. Yes. So I can remember things like the sunspots on the steps and the creaking of the wood. Sometimes the leaf would fall and disappear. My hand would open. Yes. And the leaf would fall and hide somewhere. Behind the sunspots. Underneath the steps. It would not creak, the leaf. It would just disappear. Yes.

Steps

Seb Doubinsky 17

What it is to see clearly, and how we desire insight into hidden workings – not least of our own mind. In the dark recesses of ourselves lurk shadows and phantoms of the past, and of the others we would rather be. What a gift would be that of clair voyance, of seeing clearly through and beyond these shadows, to find our true selves revealed in the light at last.

Under the gaze of the MRI machine, your body reveals its secrets, and the physician takes a reading. Even the darkness of your thoughts has become a world of moving colour, a marvellous optics of the world within. The rise and fall of your arousal runs from green to red and back again. In his Vienna office, Freud kept a portrait of the actress Sarah Bernhardt, the incarnation of wild emotion and the oriental (namely Jewish) object of late nineteenth century European desire. Like Freud, she studied the hysterics of the Salpêtrière hospital, learning the signs by which the malady made itself manifest. Women were a dark continent Freud surmised, but of the Divine Sarah, he experienced a surprising intimacy: ‘I felt I had known her all my life’. The movements of her body, learned from the Salpêtrière patients affected him so powerfully, that he developed a migraine, and retreated, presumably, to a darkened room.

The clair voyant shines a light through the darkness, on the shadows within. You are surprised, and unsettled by the power of his reading. He has seen through appearances you yourself held to be real, by means of an optics you grasp, but cannot comprehend. The ancient Greeks termed the study of appearances optics, which the Romans later termed perspectiva ars – the art of seeing, from the Latin perspectus, the past participle of perspicere to ‘inspect, or look through’. The clairvoyant takes a reading. He shines a light through a dark place, and an order at last reveals itself. A pattern you had not previously known.

We see better in the dark sometimes. In the theatre, the house lights dim and we are focussed on the spectres on the stage. In remembering we close our eyes and strain to see the movements of the actress. ‘My head was reeling’ Freud wrote to his fiancée Martha ‘How shall I begin to tell you about it?’

‘In a very dark Chamber’ wrote Isaac Newton ‘at a round Hole, about one third Part of an Inch broad, made in the Shut of a Window, I placed a Glass Prism, whereby the Beam of the Sun’s Light, which came in at that Hole, might be refracted upwards toward the opposite Wall of the Chamber, and there form a colour’d Image of the Sun.‘

You cannot see the analyst behind and beside you as he gives you his reading, but with his voice he tries to shine a light through the darkness within you.

Shining light in a dark place, Newton’s optics found that its appearance too was deceptive. Within the light were colours, chromatic ghosts, spectres in the spectrum. Things are not what they seem, but for those who care to look, and care to do so carefully, there is an order which reveals itself. A pattern which can be read, from blue to green to red.

A Reader

Martin Welton 21

Judith Alder I am a visual artist whose practice forms an investigative process. Through my research I attempt to make sense of the world and our place within it, considering the every-day concerns, contradictions and conflicts of life; questions which have no easy answers. My work often responds to people, place and time, and takes form through an accumulation of intermingled ideas and experiences from past and present, the physical manifestations of which range from carefully crafted artefacts and drawings to texts, photographs, videos and installation. Often poetic and beautiful and yet, at times, uncanny, uncomfortable and, perhaps, uncompromising, it is difficult to distinguish the point at which my work, rooted as it is in fact, metamorphoses through invention, into fiction.

Clare Whistler My work is aiming to create an art that breaks down boundaries between the disciplines and artists, an art which in turn can be a metaphor for opening up perception, experience, time and focus. To find ways to offer insight, feeling, and moments of timeless beauty, whether in performance, sitespecific work, text, music, visual art and landscape. With a source in movement, dance, and gesture, I respond, interpret and collaborate. As an artist I am always looking for ways to encourage, ignite and inspire creativity in others. www.clarewhistler.co.uk

www.judithalder-live.co.uk

Seb Doubinsky is a French bilingual writer of fiction and poetry. He has published novels and poetry collections both in English and in French. He currently lives in Aarhus, Denmark, with his wife and two children sebdoubinsky.blogspot.co.uk

Martha Stutchbury I have had the honour of working with Clare for the last few years, acting and/or writing for 6 performances including Navigators and Ghosts, 2009, and Down a Garden Path, 2011, and have cherished every moment. I also attend Glyndebourne Youth Opera, and have recently started Cavendish Secondary School, Eastbourne.

Kay Syrad is a poet, novelist and writing tutor. Her publications include a novel, The Milliner and the Phrenologist (2009),Breath of Heaven (2002), a history of All Saints Hospital, Eastbourne; Objects of Colour: Baltic Coast (2008) (poetry and photographs), and a new poetry collection, Double Edge (forthcoming April 2012). www.kaysyrad.co.uk

Martin Welton is a senior lecturer in Performance in the Department of Drama at Queen Mary University of London. His research centres on questions of perception and embodiment with regard to the senses in performance, and in particular the condition of â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;feelingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. His monograph Feeling Theatre is published by Palgrave Macmillan. As a performer he has worked recently with Theatre ASOU (Austria) and Sound and Fury (UK). A new work with Clare Whistler (Footage) will premier in 2012.

Thank you To the writers; Seb Doubinsky, Martha Stutchbury, Kay Syrad, and Martin Welton for their responses to The Visitor.

The Visitor is a series of photographic and video works born from a collaboration between artists Judith Alder and Clare Whistler. Engaging with place and time, the work responds to special sites and our attempts to understand them by tracing our own and othersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; real and imagined histories.

Thank you To Mark Hewitt and Freya Wynn-Jones for words and music for a performance at The Visitor exhibition, Eastbourne Redoubt.

April 2012

Acknowledgements Fran Stovold and all at Eastbourne Redoubt High Weald Landscape Trust, Bunces Barn Victoria Williams, Great Dixter Carol Seigel, Freud Museum Raphael Whittle, graphic design

Judith Alder & Clare Whistler ÂŠ2012 26