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Saturday, 9 January 2010
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Telling Tales Five Times on Simon Woolham by Lisa Le Feuvre
Simon Woolham can remember things from his childhood in great detail
Memory is a funny thing. Uttering certain phrases can invoke some kind of collective knowing – a specific story from one person’s childhood memories can seem so familiar that another can feel it has come straight from their own memory banks. Often, though, such wistful reminiscences are actually based on direct connections where the association is inspired by generic ideas of growing up that are constructed as much through film, television, other people’s anecdotes and photographs as they are from direct experience. Such things are central currencies in Simon Woolham’s artistic practice. There is one phrase, for example, he has used that simply proclaims: ‘The bridge was a good place to throw stuff off’. It’s difficult not to read this as an opening line to stories of childhood pranks, perhaps of being the one throwing things, maybe it was some sticks or bits of paper. Then there are darker associations – newspaper reports of heavy objects being thrown from bridges on to train lines causing accidents. Simon Woolham has a long supply of recollections filled with ghost stories in tents, suspicious characters wearing slippers and nuisance neighbors. In a short statement he can stimulate a whole host of associations that lie somewhere between naïve nostalgia and disturbing reportage.
Jorge Luis Borges tells a story of a man named Ireneo Funes who had a memory that was so finely tuned he could perceive, and then recall in infinite detail, everything he had ever read, heard or seen. Borges describes how:
With one quick look you or I perceive three wineglasses on the table; Funes perceived every grape that had been pressed into the wine and all the stalks and tendrils of its vineyard. He knew the forms of the clouds in the southern sky on the morning of April 30, 1882, and he could compare them in his memory with the veins in the marbled book he had only seen once, or with the feathers of a spray lifted by an oar on the River Negro on the eve of the Battle of Quebracho. Nor were these memories simple – every visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations and so on. He was able to reconstruct every dream, every daydream he had had. Two or three times he has reconstructed an entire day.
What would it be like to recall everything? For Funes it was a hell that drove him to a darkened room in an attempt to avoid new perceptions that might synthesize in his mind and replay again and again as if from a tape stuck on endless playback.
In another of his artwork Woolham describes an event that took place in 1984 when he saved his cousin from drowning. Of course this may not be entirely the case; childhood memories easily warp and exaggerate as they become repeatedly retold. According to the story, the cousin was so grateful that Woolham was rewarded with a Bryan Robson sticker – at the time a gift of immeasurable value. But what would it be like to, as Funes would, recall not just the sticker economy, but also how it felt to pin the sticker on your favorite t-shirt and then remember the source of every one of its nylon fibers; of how the water felt as the children splashed about and to know the details of each raindrop that had formed the lake; to experience the fear of drowning and with it every other fear known to humankind; to experience again and again every grasp for breath and the relief of everything being alright.
Simon Woolham’s shreds of evidence are unreliable
Unlike Funes, the efficacy of Simon Woolham’s communication is not in his expanse of detail; rather it is in concise and particular descriptions that infect the listener’s own memory. The aforementioned work Saving My Cousin 1984 and The Bridge are from a series of video pieces taking the form of slow panning shots over sparse biro drawings, each depicting generic components of a suburban upbringing – a local comprehensive, a back garden and places for hanging around such as under the lamppost or the local waste ground. Starting from a specific event Woolham draws large – scale images on paper with an obsession to detail informed by his memories. Just enough information is given to make the scenes specific, but not enough to make them solely autobiographical. The hand-held camera travels across the two dimensional page, taking a path through each scene with the soundtrack providing a narration for events as Woolham imagined they were experienced, only represented with the distance of time and adulthood. The camera angles are wobbly and unprofessional, reminiscent of home video and children’s television programmes of the 1970’s – the decade that the artist grew up in suburban
In Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tapes technology is used to travel back to a younger version of the play’s protagonist Krapp, who habitually celebrates his birthday by visiting his younger years via tape-recorded diaries. Beckett describes Krapp on the day of his 69th birthday rustling through his archive boxes to seek the right tape in order to transport himself back to his 39th year, a time when he angrily reflected on the 20-year old version of himself. Searching Krapp exclaims: Ah! (He bends over ledger, turns the pages, finds the entry he wants, reads) Box…three…spool…five. (He raises his head and stares front. With relish.) Spool! (pause.) Spooool! (happy smile, Pause. He bends over table, starts peering and poking at the boxes.) Box…three…three…four…two…(with surprise) nine! Good God!...seven…ah! the little rascal! (he takes up the box, peers at it.). Here in box three spool 5 is an access point to another moment. While Krapp still drinks alone as he did three decades earlier, he suspects that his younger years might not have been so bad after all, for all of his complaining. On his final listening session of his sixtieth decade Krapp is aware that there will be few, if any, future recordings. The potential release from his activity allows him to step out of an endless loop of artificially aided remembering, as he spends time historicizing the present so that he can return to it in the future, while his repetitive archiving gives an illusion of productivity.
Simon Woolham chews paper to ease boredom
Filling time can happen very easily – an over obsessive drawing can do it, as can repeatedly telling and listening to stories. Tall tales are time fillers, constructed to propagate yet more anecdotes when it comes to childhood recollections often a competitive cataloguing of half forgotten experiences begins, with the listeners waiting to have a turn too. Generally these tales are dull to all but the narrator – the listeners simply are biding time until they can have their say. I have a story that Woolham’s more recent work brings to mind. One day on the way home on the bus ride from school, a boy called Nick (who always impressed me because he was tall and sat on the back seat with the older ones) asked all of us smaller ones for our bus tickets. We handed them over diligently, and he started chewing them – I think in fact he might have even swallowed them. At the next stop the ticket inspector came on to check tickets, and we could not show them as Nick had eaten them. We told the inspector the truth, but I can’t remember of not if he believed us, or if we got into trouble. The details of such events disappear over time.
I suspect that Simon Woolham might have done the same kind of thing as the boy on the bus. I do know that he has a habit of chewing paper when he has time to spare. Here at the
Simon Woolham puts paper where it shouldn’t be
Time spent waiting for someone to arrive or something to pass can be whiled away and sped up by finding something to fidget with – be it looking through spools of tape or tearing up paper and rolling it into a ball. Simon Woolham has a tendency to do the latter, and the results of his time-wasting activities are scattered around the
Inside a bell jar, used to keep young plants safe from frost, a mass of tagliatelle-like black strands weave around, with the odd frond just escaping around the edges underneath the glass. Rather than protecting these Japanese knotweed-like strands, the bell jar seems to be protecting the space outside from the encroaching material as the paper slivers poke around menacingly. In another showcase strands of grass-like paper grow out of the floor and high up on a ledge some black grass sprouts – both growth spurts silently making passes for taking over the building. These two incursions, though, are sheets of paper Simon Woolham has distractedly sliced up; once he has run out of paper he has sneaked around the Museum under the noses of staff popping paper shreds where they should not be. Amongst this collection, standard sized paper sheets become fragments of the natural landscape, alluding to potential relationships between the bizarre objects in the collection of gardening mementoes. Woolham’s narratives open up to more tales that are out of his control as they collide with the materials and technologies that have been used to manicure nature.
Up on a ledge by the windows sits some material that looks like corrugated iron – but it is not: the rough surface is of chewed and rolled A1 paper. For many years this church building was boarded up with soot stained corrugated iron, awaiting demolition. Instead of being razed the building became a museum that now holds a collection of objects that includes a vegetable-lamb, pony shoes, seed packets and wheelbarrows. Some shears that, romantically, intertwine into a heart at the meeting point of the blades hang on the wall , chastened in a display case that has been filled with cut up pieces of paper, just seeping out of the edge. Perhaps these shears, in a night of passion, took on a life of their own and stated cutting up an errant sheet of paper left by Woolham after a long day of passing-by-the-time. In another display, a 1950’s scythe made from discarded razor blades has a smattering of black stubble around the curved blade. Perhaps the gardener saw someone approaching for whom he wanted to look his best, and quickly shaved his five o’clock shadow with a handy tool. Of course both of these descriptions are nostalgic conjecture driven by some kind of desire for narrative – in reality it’s just that Woolham again leaving his mess around when he thought no one was paying attention.
Simon Woolham has an over productive imagination and probably watched horror movies as a small child
Simon Woolham describes the sites he creates as ‘scenes of humiliation as well as innocent play, of rejection and failure as well as fantasy and adventure. They are as sweet as other people’s children and as deadly as your own worst memories.’ His infections throughout the Museum have been recorded on video – almost as if surveillance cameras caught these paper interruptions after closing time and these shreds of evidence are defiantly put on display despite their seemingly unauthorized status. It’s as if someone has stolen into the building at night and placed these objects amongst the collection, hoping that no one will notice.
In the films the corrugated iron shivers, paper stubble agitatedly shifts and strips of paper breathe to a soundtrack as portentous as a horror film, open to be interpreted in whatever way one might choose. Like Woolham’s simple spoken narratives there is no reason for these scenes and sites to be unsettling, yet in their very over-familiarity they encourage all the clichés of a too-quiet empty scene. Somehow Woolham encourages stories to be told that should have been left in the dark corner.
Telling Tales Five Times on Simon Woolham
Simon Woolham can remember things from his childhood in great detail
Memory is a funny thing. Uttering certain phrases can invoke some kind of collective knowing – a specific story from one person’s childhood memories can seem so familiar that another can feel it has come straight from their own memory banks. Often, though, such wistful reminiscences are actually based on direct connections where the association is inspired by generic ideas of growing up that are constructed as much through film, television, other people’s anecdotes and photographs as they are from direct experience. Such things are central currencies in Simon Woolham’s artistic practice. There is one phrase, for example, he has used that simply proclaims: ‘The bridge was a good place to throw stuff off’. It’s difficult not to read this as an opening line to stories of childhood pranks, perhaps of being the one throwing things, maybe it was some sticks or bits of paper. Then there are darker associations – newspaper reports of heavy objects being thrown from bridges on to train lines causing accidents. Simon Woolham has a long supply of recollections filled with ghost stories in tents, suspicious characters wearing slippers and nuisance neighbors. In a short statement he can stimulate a whole host of associations that lie somewhere between naïve nostalgia and disturbing reportage.
Jorge Luis Borges tells a story of a man named Ireneo Funes who had a memory that was so finely tuned he could perceive, and then recall in infinite detail, everything he had ever read, heard or seen. Borges describes how:
With one quick look you or I perceive three wineglasses on the table; Funes perceived every grape that had been pressed into the wine and all the stalks and tendrils of its vineyard. He knew the forms of the clouds in the southern sky on the morning of April 30, 1882, and he could compare them in his memory with the veins in the marbled book he had only seen once, or with the feathers of a spray lifted by an oar on the River Negro on the eve of the Battle of Quebracho. Nor were these memories simple – every visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations and so on. He was able to reconstruct every dream, every daydream he had had. Two or three times he has reconstructed an entire day.
What would it be like to recall everything? For Funes it was a hell that drove him to a darkened room in an attempt to avoid new perceptions that might synthesize in his mind and replay again and again as if from a tape stuck on endless playback.
In another of his artwork Woolham describes an event that took place in 1984 when he saved his cousin from drowning. Of course this may not be entirely the case; childhood memories easily warp and exaggerate as they become repeatedly retold. According to the story, the cousin was so grateful that Woolham was rewarded with a Bryan Robson sticker – at the time a gift of immeasurable value. But what would it be like to, as Funes would, recall not just the sticker economy, but also how it felt to pin the sticker on your favorite t-shirt and then remember the source of every one of its nylon fibers; of how the water felt as the children splashed about and to know the details of each raindrop that had formed the lake; to experience the fear of drowning and with it every other fear known to humankind; to experience again and again every grasp for breath and the relief of everything being alright.
Simon Woolham’s shreds of evidence are unreliable
Unlike Funes, the efficacy of Simon Woolham’s communication is not in his expanse of detail; rather it is in concise and particular descriptions that infect the listener’s own memory. The aforementioned work Saving My Cousin 1984 and The Bridge are from a series of video pieces taking the form of slow panning shots over sparse biro drawings, each depicting generic components of a suburban upbringing – a local comprehensive, a back garden and places for hanging around such as under the lamppost or the local waste ground. Starting from a specific event Woolham draws large – scale images on paper with an obsession to detail informed by his memories. Just enough information is given to make the scenes specific, but not enough to make them solely autobiographical. The hand-held camera travels across the two dimensional page, taking a path through each scene with the soundtrack providing a narration for events as Woolham imagined they were experienced, only represented with the distance of time and adulthood. The camera angles are wobbly and unprofessional, reminiscent of home video and children’s television programmes of the 1970’s – the decade that the artist grew up in suburban
In Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tapes technology is used to travel back to a younger version of the play’s protagonist Krapp, who habitually celebrates his birthday by visiting his younger years via tape-recorded diaries. Beckett describes Krapp on the day of his 69th birthday rustling through his archive boxes to seek the right tape in order to transport himself back to his 39th year, a time when he angrily reflected on the 20-year old version of himself. Searching Krapp exclaims: Ah! (He bends over ledger, turns the pages, finds the entry he wants, reads) Box…three…spool…five. (He raises his head and stares front. With relish.) Spool! (pause.) Spooool! (happy smile, Pause. He bends over table, starts peering and poking at the boxes.) Box…three…three…four…two…(with surprise) nine! Good God!...seven…ah! the little rascal! (he takes up the box, peers at it.). Here in box three spool 5 is an access point to another moment. While Krapp still drinks alone as he did three decades earlier, he suspects that his younger years might not have been so bad after all, for all of his complaining. On his final listening session of his sixtieth decade Krapp is aware that there will be few, if any, future recordings. The potential release from his activity allows him to step out of an endless loop of artificially aided remembering, as he spends time historicizing the present so that he can return to it in the future, while his repetitive archiving gives an illusion of productivity.
Simon Woolham chews paper to ease boredom
Filling time can happen very easily – an over obsessive drawing can do it, as can repeatedly telling and listening to stories. Tall tales are time fillers, constructed to propagate yet more anecdotes when it comes to childhood recollections often a competitive cataloguing of half forgotten experiences begins, with the listeners waiting to have a turn too. Generally these tales are dull to all but the narrator – the listeners simply are biding time until they can have their say. I have a story that Woolham’s more recent work brings to mind. One day on the way home on the bus ride from school, a boy called Nick (who always impressed me because he was tall and sat on the back seat with the older ones) asked all of us smaller ones for our bus tickets. We handed them over diligently, and he started chewing them – I think in fact he might have even swallowed them. At the next stop the ticket inspector came on to check tickets, and we could not show them as Nick had eaten them. We told the inspector the truth, but I can’t remember of not if he believed us, or if we got into trouble. The details of such events disappear over time.
I suspect that Simon Woolham might have done the same kind of thing as the boy on the bus. I do know that he has a habit of chewing paper when he has time to spare. Here at the
Time spent waiting for someone to arrive or something to pass can be whiled away and sped up by finding something to fidget with – be it looking through spools of tape or tearing up paper and rolling it into a ball. Simon Woolham has a tendency to do the latter, and the results of his time-wasting activities are scattered around the
Inside a bell jar, used to keep young plants safe from frost, a mass of tagliatelle-like black strands weave around, with the odd frond just escaping around the edges underneath the glass. Rather than protecting these Japanese knotweed-like strands, the bell jar seems to be protecting the space outside from the encroaching material as the paper slivers poke around menacingly. In another showcase strands of grass-like paper grow out of the floor and high up on a ledge some black grass sprouts – both growth spurts silently making passes for taking over the building. These two incursions, though, are sheets of paper Simon Woolham has distractedly sliced up; once he has run out of paper he has sneaked around the Museum under the noses of staff popping paper shreds where they should not be. Amongst this collection, standard sized paper sheets become fragments of the natural landscape, alluding to potential relationships between the bizarre objects in the collection of gardening mementoes. Woolham’s narratives open up to more tales that are out of his control as they collide with the materials and technologies that have been used to manicure nature.
Up on a ledge by the windows sits some material that looks like corrugated iron – but it is not: the rough surface is of chewed and rolled A1 paper. For many years this church building was boarded up with soot stained corrugated iron, awaiting demolition. Instead of being razed the building became a museum that now holds a collection of objects that includes a vegetable-lamb, pony shoes, seed packets and wheelbarrows. Some shears that, romantically, intertwine into a heart at the meeting point of the blades hang on the wall , chastened in a display case that has been filled with cut up pieces of paper, just seeping out of the edge. Perhaps these shears, in a night of passion, took on a life of their own and stated cutting up an errant sheet of paper left by Woolham after a long day of passing-by-the-time. In another display, a 1950’s scythe made from discarded razor blades has a smattering of black stubble around the curved blade. Perhaps the gardener saw someone approaching for whom he wanted to look his best, and quickly shaved his five o’clock shadow with a handy tool. Of course both of these descriptions are nostalgic conjecture driven by some kind of desire for narrative – in reality it’s just that Woolham again leaving his mess around when he thought no one was paying attention.
Simon Woolham has an over productive imagination and probably watched horror movies as a small child
Simon Woolham describes the sites he creates as ‘scenes of humiliation as well as innocent play, of rejection and failure as well as fantasy and adventure. They are as sweet as other people’s children and as deadly as your own worst memories.’ His infections throughout the Museum have been recorded on video – almost as if surveillance cameras caught these paper interruptions after closing time and these shreds of evidence are defiantly put on display despite their seemingly unauthorized status. It’s as if someone has stolen into the building at night and placed these objects amongst the collection, hoping that no one will notice.
In the films the corrugated iron shivers, paper stubble agitatedly shifts and strips of paper breathe to a soundtrack as portentous as a horror film, open to be interpreted in whatever way one might choose. Like Woolham’s simple spoken narratives there is no reason for these scenes and sites to be unsettling, yet in their very over-familiarity they encourage all the clichés of a too-quiet empty scene. Somehow Woolham encourages stories to be told that should have been left in the dark corner.
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