Compass_North
The odd time I get terrible pain in my centre – just under my rib cage – it’s hard to describe where it is exactly – it’s hard to describe pain and the location of pain – it’s there sometimes and then sometimes elsewhere and other times it’s not there at all – where ever that is. But usually when it comes it’s at my centre. And I try to figure out why the pain comes – and it’s not food specific, or air specific, or posture specific – a doctor once decided that it was provoked by viral things – ‘bugs’ – viruses really – I thought this was reasonable – we all have weak points I suppose – Achilles heels or, what’s the geographical term? Is it ‘seams’? That point between tectonic plates…it’s on a fault line – ‘fault’ line – fault lines and seems seams – points of weakness; for me it’s at my centre – and it’s disabling, on-your-knees-sort-of-gasping-for-air-tears-in-your-eyes-panic-moaning-sort-of-disabling – maybe I’ve a low pain threshold – but whatever I have it’s at my centre, that’s for sure – so whatever is good, bad or neutral, it’s reasonable to hypothesize, might lodge there, where ever that is. It’s hard to locate anything the best of times – often I find it hard to know what plane I’m even on – what dimension am I in – what direction am I in – I’m on a road but I don’t know what it’s called or where it is exactly but I know I’m on it – when did presence become not enough? ‘Where ever you go there you are’, where ever that is – at least, from what the geographers and scientists tell me, (or us rather) if you go down you’ll get to the centre and I suppose if you get to the centre of things then you could always pace out from there with a ball of thread perhaps, or even maybe a compass – of course if you go straight down you might simply end up ‘bisecting’ the side of the planet – cutting straight through one circumference to the other – maybe the key would be to find north, find south and then make some kind of educated guess for the centre, and head there…where ever that is.
Compass_North is the first part of a developing mixed media body of work initiated specifically through Difference Engine. There are a number of underlying emerging themes which I would like to explore through writing and through image making, though, unhelpfully, so far these are relatively unclear. What is clear though is that at each stage in this working process my wish is to develop a ‘voice’ of some kind that will carry a story of sorts, an unraveling story, which in some way or other will tap into the actual spaces of exhibition, so that these spaces become a kind of muse in a way. Compass_North has tentatively become the first manifestation of this voice, a voice that is grappling with weighty themes of, well, existentialism, and of navigation; a voice in the throes of an effort to establish a meaningful sense of location & gravity…
Jessica Foley, 2009