Ways in to Ways Out – Joe Wild (Staycation Blog)

Joe Wild - Staycation

Joe Wild – Staycation

This August artist Joe Wild was in residency at CDS for a Staycation. Here is a text about the development of his new work:

I’m lying on the floor, paying an unknown track with heavy bass. My body is vibrating, and I am thinking about about vampires.  

This is my first time trying to make work in a studio alone, and as many solo artists will know, getting a ‘first something’ from the inside out into the space can be a torturous process.

I’m thinking about human contact as a basic need. I’m thinking about what it means to get your needs met. About the expectations and responsibility we put on the people in our lives. I’m thinking about the comfort of strangers and how they allow us to reinvent ourselves, to change. I am thinking about an audience as what they are: a room full of strangers.

I am trying to deliberately not start from concept. I am trying to start working the clay of my body first and trust that these thoughts will sing from the sculpted form.

I’m thinking about becoming unstuck in time. About being able to watch biological evolution of homo-sapiens, like looking at a mountainside from a distance, a shared landscape- both experienced and seen from afar.

 I’m tracing a journey through fields of consciousness:- a Venn diagram with three overlapping circles – Idea, Emotion, Sensation… or Image, feeling, touch. As one circle falls into focus, the other two shift to support the experience of the leading point of focus.

I am thinking about how the binary view of relationships – like an on/off switch – does not match my experience. That connections overlap, and how violent forced exiles feels.

 The studio is not a good collaborator. It is not a mirror to bounce ideas back at you. It will not watch you while you ‘try something out’. Performing to the studio is a fight with your imagination, will and self-criticism. The studio does allow you to find your own rhythm. The studio does sometimes wake you from your white noise with the answer sharp and clear. The studio is an echo chamber of your reoccurring nightmares that once interrogated start to solidify into a single whispered voice.

I am thinking about coming to terms with the horror of ones own existence. Sunlight on skin.