Dreamspace

Categories: art

Date: 24 January 2006 20:03:33

Over the last few days there has been a flurry of activity as I've been *found* by various wibloggers and added to their flickr list of contacts. So I've returned the favour (and added Ian too) - thank you, it made me feel very wanted :)

This is the picture I've chosen for my flickr avatar, I took it last summer a few weeks before I left London:

It was from a travelling exhibition called Dreamspace by Maurice Agis (here's the official website) which I thought was really fantastic. It's very hard to describe - it was sort of a bit like the colourscape thing at Greenbelt, but a lot calmer because it didn't have noisy air being pumped through it but instead had quiet background music which sounded like new age ambient meets the Lord of the Rings soundtrack. The various coloured bits of plastic which formed the whole structure were stretched from top to bottom, making up the floor and ceiling as well as the columns, and you could wander throughout them (covered in a coloured cape so that you supposedly become part of the art work itself), or lie up against the columns and just take it all in. Although it was really bright, it was also incredibly calming, and in fact it reminded me of a cathedral - so big, and I thought a very profound, spiritual and sensual place (though I'm prepared to admit that maybe that was just me being poncey). I spent ages just sitting in one place, looking at this vast space not unlike a huge indoor cloister. If anybody walked past, because of the tautness of the material from which it was made, you could feel whatever you were standing on or leaning against shift slightly - very like being on a moored sailing boat, and feeling the movements of the boat as another boat sails past. At one point, as I was sitting down on the floor leaning up against one of the columns, it struck me that these gentle, soothing movements felt very much like I was leaning against someone and feeling their breathing, gradually letting my own breathing calm down and share the same rhythm. It was a really reassuring place to be, and I think it's the last place I've felt truly calm - I stopped thinking, worrying, fretting, and just felt myself "be".

[Added: here's all the other photos I took of Dreamspace.]