Artangel Interaction’s Nights of London series encourages artists to develop creative projects in collaboration with people who have a special connection to the night time, taking their interests and experiences as a starting point. When I was invited to contribute to this series, I had two principal concerns: how, as an artist, could I collaborate creatively to make new work and with whom could I share my practice?
Over the last two years I have had the chance to get to know some of the members of the Heathside centre run by Wandsworth MIND. While working at the centre, I discovered some powerful work being made by individuals there, much of which, I felt, shared an affinity with the obsessive intensity of my own work, both in the processes used and the subjects depicted. These were people who, I believed, also had a very particular experience of the nocturnal city. This seemed an ideal opportunity to build an artistic partnership. A group from two MIND centres came together who all shared an interest in drawing and a desire, as one participant put it, “to work from the imagination.” All of the participants had some previous creative experience; some of them had worked as visual artists before while others were novices keen to take part.
Our journey together began with the idea of an uncharted night and mapping its real or imagined terrain. Working collectively and individually, the group began to probe their own personal night times – a process that at times was neither easy nor comfortable. Their responses to the night exposed a mixture of emotions surrounding it – visions of an outside world of excitement and entertainment were for most coupled with a fear of lurking danger. And nights spent indoors, while offering a contemplative sanctuary to many in the group, were often tinged with a sense of isolation or loneliness. Through a process of discussion and drawing it became obvious that together we were interested in those territories of the night where elements of the real were altered in the darkness to become something less defined. Each revealed some spectacular or sinister aspect of the night time, from flocking birds to sabre-toothed frogs, gothic castles to windmills.
Embarking on this collaborative exploration of the nocturnal city felt unpredictable and out of control, almost like playing blind man’s bluff, especially as my own way of working is quite controlled and hermetic. But as in any creative journey, it was these moments of uncertainty that proved the most exciting. Working within the limitations of a black and white palette and a uniform scale, each week the group would surprise and inspire me with their willingness to take risks and play with the depth and dimension of the worlds they were creating. Our experiments with form, from drawings to pop-ups to model landscapes and theatre sets, constantly expanded our ideas about drawing and making. We began with concepts and processes that were rooted in my own practice which became transformed by the group’s imagination and experiences of the night time. Over the ten weeks of the project we found ways of exchanging these ideas and working techniques that allowed me to take part in the project in a way which would not compromise the individuality of each of the participants’ creations.
These framed images reveal personal tales of what lies in the night. Whether these are observed landscapes or scenes from a play, images from the past or from the future, real or fantastical, remains ambiguous. The terrain of the night time is constantly shifting; the darkness distorts all that we perceive and creates room for the imagination to invent and play.
