Helen Douglas: Border Practice
These notes were made before I interviewed Helen Douglas in May 2007. I'll be working on material using the interview shortly,
Helen Douglas: Border Practice
In devising these notes I want to set out a number of the themes I have picked out in Douglas' work. Rather than looking at the visual aspect of her books exclusively, I have decided to quote extensively from the artist's writings on her practice, since they are unusually lucid and helpful. Since my research will bring me into contact with Douglas, I have looked on this case study as preparatory research to inform a critical position to her work which I can use in an interview situation.
I have set out my study under a number of related headings that express important themes in Douglas' work, proceeding very often from the ways in which the artists herself has described her practice.
On Inside and Outside
"Nature, landscape and the book surround me.
They are out there and they are all absolutely within me too.
Inside and out. I Live them." 1
The subjects of Douglas' practice also inscribe points in her artistic hermenuetic. The inside and outside are part of her metaphorical gear for drawing material into her practice. The concepts of inside and outside are mediated by the book, which makes concrete the work of enclosure and release that Douglas’ investigation is involved with. The inside and outside involved here are very particular, though: “I live them” the artist tells us, so her involvement is not merely with space in an abstract sense, but with place. The relationship that her practice engineers is between her environment in the Scottish Borders, and the places poetically constituted in her books.
" I have decided to speak from the book, the place of my making, the place where my expression is made concrete and where all three Nature, Landscape and the Book come together."2
The book is the external site of the process, of the hermeneutic, of all that thought and action. The visual hermeneutic, working on 'nature, landscape and the book' , shows itself as
* questioning spaces, presentation
* the book as an arena for spatial understanding. In its metaphorical enclosure place is transformed into identity and vice-versa.
* as connecting spaces and times in 'woven'/gathering movements.
* punning on 'bookness'= investigating, ironising and metaphorising its forms through narrative.
Speaking of her book Real Fiction, she expresses her project to create artworks that express these strategies,
" Here from the inside, the interiority of the book, the outside world is embraced... to make concrete this fusion of inside to outside that I found. This is the narrative. Its expression is found and constructed in the making of the book. It is the Book." 3
The narrative of the book is about drawing-in nature, landscape and the book, into the physical codex- as in 'creating a magic space'. What kind of space is this?
Here the artist writes of the space in her book Chinese Whispers,
"Within the making I found the internalised cupboard. The book located this place and enable the safe expression of something within me. Safe because like myself and the cupboard the book not only opens but also closes...But there is another. Through the published form...the book is opened.. and what is contained, the thoughts and feelings, are expressed to others, to the viewer one to one." 4
The space created is a safe one, one in which thought and feeling can be built up, and subsequently shared. It is a space that shelters intention, shelters story, and it opens out onto a wider world mediated by our understanding of its content.5
On Enquiry:
Douglas’ work with Telfer Stokes Real Fiction is 'an enquiry into the Bookeresque': a quasi-experimental investigation. Douglas is an investigator: gathering and interpreting. Books in this sense are seen as enquiries, excursions into the ‘data’ of practice that test hypotheses. (Or, better, as, perhaps, essentially, mysteries: not pressing to be solved, but asking to be interpreted for the richness they bring forth.)
"As well as the book as place, the book's open-
ness in sequence enables me to;
EXPLORE
whether it be the nature of the water mark,
word as image
Be lief-
-The leaf sublimated to the leaf/folio of the book, or
the willow herb plant disseminated leaf by leaf and
revealed layer by layer within the book/box
It enables me to
INQUIRE
as in MIM, inquiring into the concept of mimicry,
revealed on different levels within pattern, texture,
facade, clothing, text, interwoven stories, text as
texture and as textured paper itself.
It enables me to
PEEL
&
FIND... The Cabbage Heart,
The pod within the body of the book
The stell within the landscape"6
Douglas offers descriptions of her inquiry and exploration in her essay for the 1996 artists' books yearbook, quoted above, that seem to link the rhetorical processes of - on the one (inquiring) hand- repeated viewing that takes us deeper, and on the other (exploring) hand, work that forges identity in pattern and abduction of metaphor that weaves formal elements together. These two currents of investigation exploit aspects of books' ability to hold and narrate inquiry and exploration simultaneously through story, which crosses syntactic with paradigmatic function in a way that seems linked to, respectively, the crossing of exploratory and inquisitive function. Such activity enables Douglas to "Peel & Find" the heart of the book- the identity of the book which is the key to its' poetic logic.
Let us return to Douglas’ assertion that nature, landscape and the book exist inside and outside of herself. Douglas’ practice moves from one to the other: from the book to the environment and back, from the body to the world and back. Douglas’ verbal images of the stell (enclosure) in the landscape, and the pod within the book are telling. They tell of her ideas’ relationship to a larger reality. Each is an enclosure that is germane to the greater world, a construction that is the heart of the world around it, but also a retreat from it, a meditation on it, and a miniature of it. They have the twin capabilities of taking salient features from the landscape in one case, or from the wider awareness of practice in the other, mediating and metaphorising it into a construction that bears the weight of purpose, whether it be shepherding or storytelling. In both cases, the presence of these structures gestures towards a wider landscape, an ongoing practice. The inside again moves to the outside.
On Dancing and Looking
Movement as a conscious theme is something Douglas has often spoken about. In interview with Cathy Courtney she gives us a glimpse into how movement , with its sensual awareness and sense of unfolding truth informed the production of the (at that point in time nascent) Wild Wood.
“…I’m interested in trees and would love to do a book with them…I began to dance in 1992 and, recently, have been doing Authentic Movement, and I’ve consistently found a link with trees… I have a sense of twist within myself… I would like to get the energy and twist and turn of a tree into a book…”7
and latterly, writing of her practice’s involvement with nature and landscape,
“Dance was a revelation: I discovered that narrative resided in the body and really did not need to be put into words. I learnt to trust my visual making, how, like in dance, one thing/one movement could lead or be set next to another to create sequence. To make sense.”8
"through my experience with Movement I have learnt to listen to the 'wisdom of my body as an original text'- and this has influenced the way I work with the camera and the book.”9
The experience of movement has become part of what Douglas is ‘listening to’10 in her practice. In her work with her environment she begins, through the expressive grammar of dance, to tune into what the landscape is telling her body as well as her mind. The sense of flow that bodily movement can have, the different rhythms knitting together become an assurance that one’s visual work can likewise flow. Douglas' identification with the landscape is not one merely of looking, but of feeling bodily, and her movement into the landscape is not merely mental but physical. Accordingly, there is a sense of unfolding understanding that proceeds from the physical. A syntax of movement that is informing the visual construction of her books. Rhythm, movement, travelling, unfolding just as the body does, the truth in movement becomes a trusted part of Douglas' artistic vocabulary. In 1999 she wrote,
“Over the past five years my experience of dance and movement has helped me, through following my body impulse, to understand how narrative resides not only in the head, but also within the body. This has encouraged me to trust in a new way, the unfolding and peeling of narrative within book... [working on Between the Two in 1997] I worked on and across the floor and let the areas of feeling unravel in both directions. In this way I found the narrative journey as I had in dance.”11
In the same article, Douglas goes on to explain how in her book Chinese Whispers, she has begun to apply this understanding of movement to the way she uses the camera. Contrasting with the static, setup work of her early books, the camera is not a fixed, all-seeing panopticon, but to an extent a moving being, a proxy for dance.
“the camera movement was conceived in three panning loops...moving up with each pan...[describing] the form of a spiral...the movement of the camera creating a spiral journey through the book was fundamental to the narrative of Life in Chinese Whispers...”12
The way in which movement traverses and invests structures has been expressed through the movement of the camera across and into the pictorial space, a space further articulated and arrayed by its sequential enclosure within the book.
Douglas wrote of the sort of 'informed looking' she was doing with her camera,
“It was through the physicality of dance that I realised I could open the aperture of my camera lens to move closely with my subject, to follow, be drawn and draw the images into the camera and the gatherings of the book. I felt this was a female bodily language I was discovering, it had nothing to do with phallic projections and shots.”13
This camera is not a prying, incisive presence, but one that conducts its enquiries just as Douglas herself, examining and entering into a relationship with the world around it. It is a practice that gains by embracing its subject rather than making off with it. Douglas' visual language in Between the Two (the book she is discussing in the above quotes) goes a long way towards expressing a sensual aspect to this looking. It is a looking informed by the body, by dance. If Douglas has a relationship with the subject that is not a sort of visual rapine through the omnivorous camera lens, what could it be?
On Gathering
Douglas’ use of gathering puns on the two meanings of the word. One refers to the gatherings of sheets that go to make a book, and the other to Douglas’ now habitual ways of collecting material14. This aspect of her practice depends on suspending interpretation, contextualising rather than analysing at once. This gathering has a historical aspect. It is not a lancing, lightning strike of insight (or, at any rate, not that alone), but a relationship, a gathering that implies accumulation, over time. This is an aspect that is true of the artist as a person, gathering personal relationships to the place, and also of the way in which this relationship drifts into the body of practice. It is also true of the small time, the small relationship, the small gathering of the book itself. As viewers, we echo (in just such a small way) the work of the artist as we take the time to work through the book, to make the movement from ourselves to the book and back, relating to it, and in this way performing our own gathering. We echo Douglas’ work:
"And yes also to Book
That is the place of my making
where I can gather all within the gatherings
and weave my visual narratives as text to the page"15
Our work as viewers is, like Douglas’, not only to gather the syntax of the relationship through time, (as Douglas does with the landscape’s ongoing presence) but also to weave significance into our relationship to it. We draw it into our interior worlds, our practice, our stories, our culture. We draw threads from the world and weave them.
Douglas, writing about her work with Zoë Irvine on the book Illiers Combray, writes of Proust,
"his embroidered effect, his interjected detail, all brilliantly observed with his eye and bodily understanding of his text. All this was part of my own exploration and that of Zoë Irvine who made the two soundscapes) of the town Illiers Combray and its surrounding countryside. On foot, on bicycle:
Allowing for associations to be realised overtly as part of my looking and gathering.
Tapestry"16
What this weaving is, what this tapestry is, is something Douglas addresses explicitly.
On Weaving:
"It is in the countryside that my being and seeing is Interwoven with nature. And here I allude to weaving, something also inextricably connected with the border landscape: tweed being both a rough woven fabric and the main river that flows through the Border countryside.
(I myself worked for 19 years at the Scottish College of textiles a place that grew out of the Tweed industry. I did a PH D looking into woven fabrics and the developing aesthetic taste for texture).
Textura, the Latin word for the woven web is also the root of the word texture. When I saw the thickets in my gathering for Wild Wood, I was excited and perplexed by them, and wondered how I would ever sort them to the book, and then finally understood within the narrative of Wild Wood, that began [to] emerge, that their intricate interwoven beauty should be sorted and laid to the page like tapestry"17
The ideas of inside and outside above, and of investigation, are encapsulated in the metaphor of a heuristic weaving: one which seems evident in how Douglas describes her work as a mixture of things from outside and inside, things brought together and assembled, interpreted in new contexts... what this means is that these things are, in a way, interwoven. The texts of the textile are historical, natural, personal, in both the tweed textile and the books. They have common roots in the landscape and in the hands of their creators who live in this landscape. The books’ texts also derive from the books’ material presence and qualities, which are part of Douglas' contextual analysis, but in an ironic turn, also part of the presentation. Douglas' real world, and the boundaries between herself and her world, are worked into her books. This theme is touched on in the sense of movement between inside and outside I wrote of above, with its continuous movement between inclusion and exclusion, and the way in which this movement reflects the cognitive process of mediating the landscape and practice that I touched on in the section about Enquiry. These themes recur in the section On Borders.
On Borders
Helen Douglas' Illiers Combray is a long accordion-fold type book full of pictures of the countryside around the town of Illiers in France. Combray was Proust's name for the town in his celebrated extended novel À la recherche du temps perdu. Much of Proust's remembering takes place in the environs of the town, and so a trip to the real-life location (even though actually conflated with instances drawn from the real life town of Auteuil) would be a must for any devoted Proustian.
Douglas' work has long been concerned with notions of place, and in particular with border lands, zones of doubtful demarcation. We can take her books Wild Wood: A Border Ballad, and Unravelling the Ripple , dealing as they do, In Wild Wood's case with the wood as a metaphor for the disputed (or at any rate outlaw) history of the Border country between Scotland and England (where Douglas lives and works). The wood's untamed quality comes to represent something of the history that informs the identity of those who live there: untamed: unclassified, and carrying the influences (scars?) of historical conflicts in their nature.
Unravelling the Ripple consists of images of the seashore, the zone between sea and land which teems with life that must survive across the differences offered by the twin elements. Here, too there is a zone whose definition is constantly under revision, a shifting world.
Here in Illiers Combray, Douglas seems to be examining another kind of border country in tandem with Proust's own traffic between the actual and the remembered. Proust's readers encounter Proust's world at least partly through his books: they encounter books as places, and the places they visit as Proustian tourists, they encounter at least partly through the books. Our experiences are mediated through the remembrance of cultural experiences we've had, reading being one of them. That, in Douglas' own words, is why the book's visual journeys are bracketed at the begining and end by images of women reading: "I wanted to bracket my seeing, and immersion in this place through these women reading"18. There is a real town, Illiers, and a fictional one, Combray: the experience of one coincides partly with the experience of the other.
Proust's reflections are part of the subject Illiers Combray embraces. These perambulations through the town and country are marked by their reference to the real and the imaginary: in their conscious referencing of Proust, they refer to an imagined, rather than real world alongside that which actually exists. Similarly, the work exists between a present and a past time: the presence of historical stained glass figures and tapestry testifies to the continuing presence of the past haunting the spaces the book traverses. The glass, the tapestry, the legends seem woven into the landscape which erupts into fresh spaces as if manipulated not by the rules of topography but by the metaphysical camera of reverie: here we're back with the experiences offered by Proust.
If Douglas' work is often about 'beating the bounds' of border spaces, there is a pathway to be trodden in such cases: through a wood or along the seashore for example. In this case we walk two 'ways': Swann's way and Guermantes' way, typified by the town and the country, and existing on either side of the long straight track of the accordion-folded book:
"I conceived my book as a long concertina strip with two sides in reference to his [Proust's] two ways and long flowing sentences"19
Each of these walks or ruminations contain visual equivalents of what Douglas refers to as Proust's
"embroidered effect, his interjected detail, all brilliantly observed with his eye and bodily understanding of his text.", something Douglas achieves herself in the digital interpolation of imagery woven together into one long continuous textile in which one horizon merges seamlessly with the next. Douglas explicitly acknowledges this technique of visually weaving things together in the digital medium, comparing the matrices offered by digital imagery to those offered by Jacquard looms. But there is more than visual weaving taking place: in Illiers Combray, Douglas is weaving together the real, the imaginary, the remembered in a traverse through the space and time of a book form.
A famous couplet of Emily Dickinson’s reads:
"There is no Frigate like a book/to take us Lands away/Nor any
Courses like a Page/Of prancing Poetry"
When we travel in a book we affect any travels we might make in real life. Can we ever experience France's Illiers for its own sake having first encountered Proust's Combray? Douglas seems to be saying that the experience is always one woven from the contradictory realities of the world as experienced and of the structures that reflection (here gifted in the form of À la recherche du temps perdu) informs our experience with.
Illiers Combray is an example that drafts these relationships in a context away from Douglas’ previous ‘home’ territory of the Scottish Borders, site of Wild Wood, for example. But what Douglas has shown in both these works is a meditation on place and practice, one that enfolds personal place and history, into practice. This is a practice of gathering, which I have referred to above. Douglas’ work weaves her gathering into books which express her journey across her subjects, in processes of inquiry and exploration, inside and outside: crossing borders all the while.
1 Douglas, H. Nature, Landscape and the Book, accessed online at <http://www.bookarts.uwe.ac.uk/hdtalk.htm>
2 Ibid.
3Ibid.
4Douglas, H., Why the Book?, pp30-36, in The Artists' Book Yearbook 1996-97, Ed. T. Peixoto, Middlesex, Magpie Press, 1996
5 This bears comparison with the notion of ‘refrain’ examined in a currently unpublished paper by Iain Biggs, The Cultural Politics of Re- and Dis-Enchantment” Place and ‘Visual Refrain’ in Recent Work By Helen Douglas. Biggs discusses aspects of Douglas’ Wild Wood with reference to concepts of ‘Attachments and Refrains’ set out by Jane Bennett, who in turn draws on work done by Deleuze and Guattari.
“Bennett [discusses] song as both ‘shelter’ and ‘borderline’.”, p.8
Refrain is described as
“sung, hummed or chanted sound [which generates] qualities of “shelter” and [gestures] towards “the uncharted territory beyond the wall” that such shelter “has just built” (Bennet, 2001,p. 167)”p.8
Biggs goes on to relate this to the subtext of Wild Wood: A Border Ballad, where the cultural refrain of the Border Ballad remains just such a shelter that indicates a world beyond itself.
If books create a space that indicates a world beyond itself, but also creates an enclosure for performative utterance in the form of narrative (written narrative being before all else the common form of repeatable performance), then they share many features with the concept of refrain as a shelter and borderline in their enclosure of intention and their function as intermediary between living and telling in the practice of the artist.
6 Ibid.
7 In Courtney, Cathy, Speaking of Book Art, p128, London, The Red Gull Press, 1999
8Douglas, Helen, Nature, Landscape and the Book, op.cit.
9 Ibid.
10 If Douglas is listening to her body, is she listening for a voice quieter than that of conscious, mind-based narrative? Is there also a quality of music to it? When Douglas is asked by Cathy Courtney in an interview about Between the Two (Art Monthly, May 1998), whether her work alone was silent, because there was no verbal interplay with Telfer Stokes, Douglas reply relates the element of ‘discussion’ to the place of dance in this new solo work. Is there a song the body is singing? Is it a refrain, in the sense that it is both a refuge and an interface?
11 Douglas, Helen, Narrative and Book, JAB (Journal of Artists' Books), no. 129 Fall 1999. Accessed online at <http://vnweb.hwwilsonweb.com>
12 Ibid.
13 Douglas, Helen, Nature, Landscape and the Book, op.cit.
14 In contrast to her earlier work.
“…in the very early books it wasn’t so much a system of gathering material so much as scripting a book and then creating sets.”
In Open Book: Publishing Art in Scotland, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 2002.
15 Douglas, Helen, Nature, Landscape and the Book, op.cit.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.
19Ibid.
Comments