Performance Art

click photo to enlarge
We stumbled on the subject of today's photographs by accident during a walk around Spalding, Lincolnshire. As we passed a large bay window at the front of the old house in Ayscoughee Gardens I noticed a young, barefooted woman standing inside on the wide window sill, a basket in her outstretched hand. It could only be some kind of "art" I thought, and when we went in we discovered it was just that.

The performance artist, Amanda Coogan, was working with seven emerging artists creating and showcasing "site-specific durational performances". Apparently Amanda's practice "involves communicating ideas through longitudinal performance. Her work often begins with her own body and challenges the expectations of discernible context, such as head banging to Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, and signing the lyrics to Gill Scott-Heron’s ‘The Revolution will not be Televised." On this occasion she was standing in an empty hall, her neck painted blue, weighed down with multiple bags, slowly rotating, one part of a work that also included other performers, film, text, and a link that wasn't clear to me with local ghosts or ghost hunters.

I'm more of a visual arts (and crafts) person myself, so whilst I often view paintings, sculpture, photography and associated  media, performance art is not something that I usually seek out. However, as readers of this blog will know, I'm happy to point my camera at anything that piques my interest, and this did that. The smaller photograph shows Amanda in the context in which she was performing at the bottom of some rather fine stairs. It also includes my wife ascending those stairs to join me in looking down from above on what I can only describe as "the bag lady".

photographs and text © Tony Boughen

Photo 1
Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 40mm
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/20
ISO: 3200
Exposure Compensation:  -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Big hedge

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"Love thy neighbour, yet pull not down thy hedge", Old English Proverb

The saying above has a French version: "Hedges between keep friendships green", and both echo the oft-quoted, "Good fences make good neighbours". That being the case, what are we to make of the hedge shown in today's photograph? Its function doesn't appear to be to encourage a proper neighbourliness, so much as banish everyone and everything from sight. Looking at its height and undulations, "hedge" seems be a misnomer for this edifice constructed out of rows of yew trees grown closely together, and clipped as one structure when their foliage met.

It can be found in the grounds of Ayscoughee Hall, Spalding, Lincolnshire. This building, erected as a house in the early 1400s, and given to the town in the early 1900s, is now a museum with public gardens. However, the hedge must date from its time as a private residence. Research shows the yew trees date from successive plantings, the oldest probably being eighteenth century. It is cut in a way that is fairly common in the grounds of large English country houses (and churchyards), and fulfils the purpose of dividing up the gardens, screening one section from another, acting as a wind-break, and providing a mountainous backdrop against which plants can be displayed. Oh, and it offers gardeners a scary few weeks teetering thirty feet up on ladders as they give it the annual cut!

Impressed by the oddness of this living barrier I decided to show something of its scale by including two people sitting on one of the nearby benches.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 108mm (216mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f8.0
Shutter Speed: 1/160
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On