2014 / Performance, Poetry, Hamilton, Toronto
This summer I took an opportunity to discard any sense of established safety, or comfort in my life and wander, or explore the different vantages defining it. One vantage was from a completely different angle of Toronto, the East End, the Danforth. Another was my, what I generally and defaultly entitle “home” because of my parents in Oshawa. The third was Hamilton, a city I had a romantic vision of because of its rough but so inspiring sense of promise and revitalization. I put all of my belongings in boxes and into storage or on the side of the curb and lived the last three months out of two pieces of luggage and my backpack. Some really interesting moments of realization came out of this choice, both artistically and personally.
I began writing with a pen in a notebook. This is a big deal for me. My fingers don’t like pens. They want to move individually to express my thoughts. They do not want to operate as a whole hand-unit. But I forced it, and recognized a difference in my writing style, something about having to focus on moving and creating each letter, something about not being able to relate my thoughts quite as fast as on a computer made me think about them a bit more, made me contemplate their sentence structure and the information within.
From this notebook, I began picking entries I believe spoke the most to my experiences during this time and created a blog to chronicle it all.
hill & harbour is what emerged. It is composed of a series of writings and pictures. And not much context. Because of this simplicity, I am happy of its ability to be a somewhat naked relation of existence and contemplation.
On top of this:
hill & harbour has been developed into a short performance, using some of the theatrical research and training I underwent during this time and was presented at the James North Studio Gallery as part of the 2014 SUPERCRAWL in Hamilton.
a field of crowns 