My final “Encounter” was with writer/artist/performer/psychogeographer/life model Ursula Troche and our work began before Ted Eames launched the project. I met Ursula briefly at the World Congress of Psychogeography at the University of Huddersfield last September, and started reading her blog shortly after. I liked her wide-ranging perspective on experiences often derived from walking, and how she combined fresh instinctive responses with careful research to build interesting pieces on subjects ranging from mining and pit-closures to mapping to women’s rights to train journeys and so on.
We struck up a dialogue and began discussing a project on the theme of borders and boundaries. Ursula grew up in Germany, and although she has lived in the UK for a long time, she is aware of an unseen “border” between herself and people she meets in this country, which perhaps allows her a slightly different, objective perspective on what she finds in the UK. I was moved by her poem “Circular Ritual Insight” – simple ideas about migration/immigration and regretting a loss of humanity and kinship, but sincerely written with an insistent repetition that is hard to ignore. This became a clear starting point for me to respond to once we began considering taking part in the Encounters project.
Meanwhile, Ursula was busy writing poems in response to some of the artwork she saw on my website. This began with my Traces series from the In Parallel exhibition and she also responded to one of my mixed media collages from the In Parallel and Entwined book I made last year. Circles and lines interest Ursula and she finds connections with these forms and subjects that she is investigating. So for example, my works incorporating maps and landscape features of Shrewsbury, drew attention to the river loops around the town and adjacent Frankwell, and the line of flow of the River Severn.
“…
Sweet settlement behind the riverbank
Town in a circle, Frankwell in the other
River circles, flowing in a line
Town circles, lying side by side
…” (Extract from Severn Circles Traces © Ursula Troche 2017)
The poem Circle World takes a wider view considering what is needed for more harmonious global relationships. There is a link back into Circle Ritual Insight too.
“Circle-World
Large point of ever-return
Held in its four corners, four
Directions, four hands, of
Time and continents
Hold it! Together!
Finger by finger, wind by earth
…” (Opening to Circle World © Ursula Troche 2018)
As my original collage was bound into a book, I produced a similar larger version for the exhibition:
Circumscribed, mixed media collage
I was running short of time before the exhibition, in order to produce another work in response to Circular Ritual Insight, but then by chance found a couple of images in a magazine of dancers from Gabon in Africa, and two mannequin hands touching. They fitted the poem perfectly and were of just the right size, so they were destined for a collage. I managed to obtain a suitable map of the globe and, with a bit of precise and intricate scalpel work, there was my collage:
Circular Ritual, paper collage
As a further reflection on the holding of hands, I recalled my series of works about the relations between successive family generations in my exhibition Imperfectly Natural. This piece seemed to tie in with the poem, as it considers how despite strong parental bonds, we are all alone in the world and must forge new bonds and make friendships with our fellow humans. Hands, of course, are how we begin to feel and explore the world from a young age.
Working with Ursula is very easy going, with lots of ideas flowing. As with both Kate Innes and Paul Baines, it is great to find themes and beliefs in common that can feed into new art works. I’m looking forward to continuing with our borders and boundaries work.
No Time Like the Present 