Collaborations with Rose Dagul & Penny Klein
Rose Dagul and Penny Klein are frequent collaborators of mine who have a mutual interest in centring joy, enthusiasm and friendship within an art practice. We view our shared work as a test bed for expressing our ideas in a way we describe as 'quick and dirty'. Nothing we do is ever really 'finished'. It is a proposal for ways of engaging with creativity, particularly as a partnership, sometimes practically, sometimes utopian. The following is our manifesto for how we want to work with one another;
1 | We are friends and we want to enjoy our friendship
2 | We want to dance, sing, draw, play and fiddle
3 | We want to share our enjoyment
4 | We want to talk face to face
5 | We will trust each other’s vision
6 | We will be patient
7 | We will coax each other out of fear and anxiety
9 | We will be bold in the confusion we feel
10 | It will come from the heart
The videos on the right are works initially made for ourselves which have became part of our pedagogical practices.
The idea is simple; one person creates a video which they pass to the next. The second person adds a layer before sending to a third who does the same and completes the video.
I have employed this technique with students as a proposal for a DIY approach to making, and I would recommend you try it with a couple of pals.
This final example of our practice is similar to the last, but rather than adding on top, each person responds to the previous video with something to be added at the end.
This can be done with as many people as you like (I have completed versions with up to 15 students) but in this example it's just the three of us. Within this chain you only ever see the last video, not the one that came before that. We completed the version below as a prelude to a workshop on Joy, Enthusiasm and Friendship at Supernormal festival which included a performance of Pauline Oliveros' Tuning Meditation, an exquisite corpse drawing circle and a group choreography session.