Trusting relationships and a journey into the home

Three Bradford residents, Geoff, Barry, and Graham answered a call out placed by artist Jez Coram in the T&A newspaper and invited him into their homes to create the corners project. They worked with him to collect material, photos and video footage of their living spaces and spoke about their homes, possessions, furniture and memories. The trusting relationships between Jez and the residents became central to the Corners project.

Jez also showed work by artist Yvonne Carmichael who approached the commission as a residency in her own home creating a series of short performances. What follows is a piece of creative writing by Jez, A Journey into the Home, based on the Corners exhibition in Gallery II and the people involved, later published in Fieldworks: Research and Experiments within Art and Culture. After the lockdowns of the Covid period, the Corners project and the home as a site for creative practice seems evermore pertinent.

1.

I stand in a white shell with a wooden base. The people that constructed this shell formed a rectangular hole into the wall of the shell and now I have a glass window with no curtains. Standing there on the first floor in that shell looking out at the houses across the street lit by the tangerine hue of the street lamps I imagine some of the residents of the homes tucked up in their beds on their parallel level. Other folk moving around their homes, talking to family members, shutting curtains, turning lamps off, putting out cats. Without due notice the corners contort popping in on themselves, an unconscious retraction decided upon minutes ago. The walls, shells, armatures and architectures pass away into the night suspending the residents in a temporary static state up and down the street. I think about how close I am to the person next door, just six inches of brick and plaster, and how close I am to the people in the house at the end. With no framework or furniture the people in this state of temporary suspension re-animate and continue to move about their business or just carry on sleeping. I watch them for a while, all in close proximity, one man is so close to the lady in the next home he could lay out his finger tips on her shoulder. All are in their own separate worlds. My phone goes and the walls reconstruct. Oscillating from the virtual to the real to the virtual I check my message and continue to hang the curtains in my new home.

…

Seeping the wrong way down my nasal cavities an acrid smell enters my consciousness. I sit at our new dining table and chairs, bought from a seller on Ebay for twelve pounds. When we visited to collect it a lady, living in the large Victorian red brick three storey semi-detached house, told us she raised her children around the table and was sad to see it go. I sit searching for an update on my phone, what position am I in the fantasy football league? As the league table slowly loads the smell continues to creep in.

Vinegar

My first home. Across the road from the vinegar factory. I stand outside looking down the path at the prefabricated patterned concrete wall adjoining the house and feel the rough skin on my hands, scuffed from climbing the wall to escape to play in the grass at the front of the factory site. Entering the back door of the house my subconscious clears the step for me and I move into the wood veneered kitchen, through the stone clad fire place living room, up the carpeted stairs, around the landing top and into my bedroom. The large white wooden box jutting into the room, housing the cut off from the stair well. I sit on the bed looking at my white wooden bookcase and the cassette box. There is something from my childhood inside that I have left behind. I glance out through the window from my interior to the exterior and see the factory dominating the view. I open the cassette box and it beeps. My phone has loaded and I am second in the league. The memory begins to fade in my mind and the smell continues to linger in my nose.

…

The spaces I inhabit continue to oscillate. I come back to that step and how you know it’s there without thinking and the step leads me back off to looking around a potential new home and the reason for getting that feeling that this is the one. Is it the imprint of your first home resurrecting itself, subconsciously recognising this new home? Are we mapping the space in our heads, without knowing, the architecture, the geometries, bringing in our other senses, the smells, is there a processing of the minute negligible detail? Looking for a close variant, could it be an acoustic memory, an acoustic awareness, are we trying to fit a psychology into the architecture? What happens when we get inside, how do we then try to affect it? There is a conscious and subconscious landscape charting itself. Is this exceptional or typical? How is the home imprinted upon us, that innate awareness of the hidden step? Do we have a preference for the virtual now? Movements through the house, moments of stillness and the vastness contained. How do I find that innate imprint? How do we map this landscape? How do I create this installation? Here be dragons.

2.

My house is a work of art, Graham tells me on the phone.

I enter three new homes. How will I do these gentlemen justice?  Barry describes to me how he has painted a giant cricket ball onto the side of his house. Geoff recalls visiting John Braine in the infirmary, giving him pointers on his new manuscript, A Room at the Top. Writing poetry throughout his life, a master of words, Geoff has devoted sixty-two years to maintaining this one shell, accommodating a family to come to pass. Bebe Manga, plays out over the stereo in Barry’s front room. Political atrocities drift up through the space on the back of a melancholic melody that enters the coloured water visions of Yorkshire and Cameroon hooked to the walls. The VHS player clicks in and the cog catches the tape in its clockwise turn. Barry’s face appears on the TV. The armatures of the dark frames hang around us as we watch the interview recorded from Cameroon national TV during the 1990 Football World Cup. A palimpsest surrounds me, layers of newspaper headlines, a floor to ceiling collage of imagery, a fourteen year cathartic process. Graham’s house is a work of art, curated and constructed to pleasing precision. We gravitate to the kitchen cupboard together, the doors to this chamber open as the display presents itself for inspection. Graham, a gentle and hospitable man, hands me a postcard with two donkey’s on the face. They stand there chewing the cud.

Doubt has entered my house. He has taken up residence in the dining room, a stray cat hiding in the dark space under the wicker chair. I leave him there for now and go to the kitchen, wash some dishes, and drink a small cup of tea.

…

Wrestling with the joints and geometries of the internal structure, the wardrobe doors lay out on the floor in front of me like the forgotten tombstones of two Kings. Disassembling a wardrobe should be an ordered process. I rushed, following a disordered process, hasty in dismantling the enclosure, wanting to quickly reassemble in the adjacent room. I am moving bedrooms, to the back of the house. 

Detailing further these homes of wonder, I continue to explore the wunderkammer, conversations contract and expand to form circumstance and chance. Geoff, Graham, Barry and I talk at length during intimate and repeated encounters in the homes. A military van transports me alongside Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe over a jar of hot chocolate in Geoff’s Kitchen. Worries of witchcraft and Takenbeng connect across the black and white in the pages of a Cameroon newspaper in Barry’s front room. Eton Rifles, 1997, playing in bands, and Ebberston Hall attach to the collaged walls as I sit across from Graham in his front room. We map out these new territories, these landscapes we have formed between us. At the centre stands the kitchen cupboard, the opening of the doors to reveal its utopia.

…

Shadowed window frames on the back wall of the dining room pushed horizontally by the intermittent clockwork hand of the late afternoon sun. What will it take to realise truthfully? Charting landscapes with three gentlemen, conversations into homes are fabrics, weaved over decades. New relationships grow and nothing is more encouraging in their growth than the patience of time and conversation. A framework constructs itself organically from one corner to the next.

I sit at the wooden dining table with duty of care, respect, responsibility and consent. Opposite me sits clarity and over the black and green patterned table cloth we share a light meal I have prepared, vegetable soup and bread. The food is passed around, over the empty seat at the table. I think of Geoff raising his hand to his head to salute me as I sit looking at him through the car window on the driveway outside. Framed by the overbearing presence of his architecture I see his life tessellate in his eyes.

On the floor I leave a few bread crumbs from the meal and the cat peers its nose out from the under the wicker chair, a concave reflection of the room lights up in the curvature of his eyes and for a moment I pass through and into his being. With a few more crumbs I tease him out and stroke the white hair which malts onto my hand. From the dark space I lift him up and carry him through the hall catching our combined definition in the mirror. If you were to cut our shadow the line would force my back to hunch as he rests his body over my shoulder. The cat purrs, I open the front door and drop him down onto the mat. His white and black body slivers up the undulating slab path, he  carefully entertains a final glance and ceaselessly slips away.

3.

Mirrored by the rectangular glass, set into the jointed corner of the drinks cabinet, the symmetrical tableau of the dining room and its contents is framed, superficially present in the reflection. Standing in the gallery I look into the cinematic presence of the rectangle on the wall holding the projection of the dining room and the mirrored cabinet, the light of the moving image offering me the image of my home space in real time. Fragmented across the gallery space, screens display the layered images of the gentlemen collaborators’ homes, disordered and abstract, photos and memories play out as I walk through the projected space to the light at the end of the room. Fighting with the familiarity of the live link and the strange physicality of the screens I meet with Caroline and we talk as we move anti-clockwise and encounter Akeelah’s moving image layered from video recorded in both Graham and Barry’s homes. Passing the mountainous perspective of the Cameroon in Barry’s paintings and Holly’s stencilling of Geoff’s poems we arrive at Graham’s open cupboard and pause.

…

Villa Park. Twenty minutes into the first half. The Ipswich fans, segregated in their corner, are up on their feet, chanting their songs. In the palms of four geometric giants the Villa fans seated and quiet create the outer shell of the stadium. Thirty thousand people and I contained and focused over ninety minutes on a quadrant of grass, eleven people and a sphere. Villa win a free kick and bodies begin to stand, the smack of skin on skin, I’m taken over by the urge to stand and clap, not uncommon at a football match but this is different, this is collective, something is present with us. Morphing us like the preformed plastic seating dark arms melt around mine forcing my hands together, holding my body vertical, one organism moving in synthesis, our combined shadow. Play resumes and the free kick passes. The phenomenon continues. We are in ordinary play, the excitement has lifted but we are still standing, the entity has entwined us and is leaching onto our skins. Taken over, our surrogate shadowed being presses our hands together once again. Our new collective self thrives in the moment, moulding us with instinct, smacking flesh on flesh exponentially across our new form. We stand and clap. We stand and clap. Then, as quickly as that first person rose to their feet, and with no marker for this timing, we are released, one by one. A man sits down, and then another, the dynamic shifts, the atmosphere rolls over drawing out our shadow into the space above the ground. I sit. An individual. Released by the shadowed arms of the collective conscious, I breathe again.

…

I breathe again. 2pm. A psycho-architectural landscape, the intention. Outlining the half assembled wardrobe in the corner of the room, Conscious, a shadowed figure stands at the end of the bed, limp with paralysis from his walk of sleep. My eyes strain to define his face, darkness upon darkness, the edge of his silhouette blending into the room without definition. Building up the layers of thick oil to form the contours of his exterior flesh I imagine attempting to paint his portrait with only a black hue. Lying in the dominance of the geometric giants the atmosphere rolls over in the space above my head drawing the surrogate shadow and the stadium’s architecture into conflict with the black oil portrait. Corners and facets tar with the thick residue as the mass exterior gloops into interior, turning in on its self, dripping viscous drops of visceral change onto the white linen fabric of the bed. Portraits and people. Videography. Narratives. The gentlemen collaborators. Drop by drop the sticky consistency brings its corporeal presence to the darkness and as the body starts to set, a new shape forms. Small and shiny, I pick the embodiment up and examine it, multifaceted but echoing a person, I run my hands over the figurine letting my fingers define the edges of the faces following the lineage to present its shape. Holding it up to my eyes I peer into the crisp black exterior, under the pellucid outer layer the shell holds the shifting essence of my shadowed experience at the stadium. I stand the small figurine on the bed side table and my thoughts return to the gentlemen collaborators, as I fall back to sleep I begin to reconstruct the installation, reforming landscape into psycho-architectural portrait.

…

Utopia. Graham’s cupboard. After tweaking the polo mints we move off on our anti-clockwise journey entering Yvonne’s stairwell as she conducts her Chore-ography. Leaving the bread maker mechanically turning the dough we stand at the crossover point from light to dark. Easing through the transition two newly formed embodiments exist in front of us,  suspended in animation, simultaneously grounded and in flight. Familiarity invites us through into the cinematic presence of the rectangle on the wall holding the projection of the dining room and the cabinet. The light of the moving image offers me the sanctuary of my home space once again. Framing the dining room and its contents as a symmetrical tableau, the reflection appears superficially in the rectangular glass, set into the jointed corner as a mirror.

4.

Articulate creaks resonate from above. It has been snowing for over a week and the intermittent clockwork hand of the sun is firmly plunged into the dark slip of his white fluff lined pocket. Across the blanket white indents form a slippery trail with a lineage that stretches from the street and stops at my door. Below the cat sleeps perched on the black brick holding the timber door solid, denying access to my hall.

An echo of a window scene the camera is in the gentleman’s hands. Graham and Barry both plot a route through their homes. Geoff’s words stencilled to the wall. Twelve minutes slowed down to two hours. Time stretched. Frame after frame offering closer inspection. Opening a route, a silent journey. Dual embodiments, suspended in space. Sculptural form synced with video sequence. Shifting perception from physical to virtual. Lapsed time shutters out onto the gallery walls offering enclosure, connection through the space. Holding a magnifying glass up to the negligible detail, the predetermined journeys through the gentleman’s homes. What is over looked, silent, resting, invisible, what is with us day to day? Is this enough?

Over the baron dining room wall the clockwork hand of the sun fails to arrive again. A grey area, minimal light, the absence of the sun provides a dull wash of tone. Silence settles as another creak vibrates its track down through the bricks and mortar and reverberates away across the floor boards at my feet. Circling the house the cat hops up onto the window sill, stretches his front paws, arching his back and settles into his nook, peering in through the glass. Moving my gaze to the bleak sky flakes continue to fall in their unique frozen form. Each tiny flake plots its path. Time moving slowly as the fingered ice frame reflects its internal molecule order. Arranging growth, narratives crystallise in predetermined space, on route from sky to ground.

…

Emptiness. Frames click by. I sit at the wooden dining table with duty of care, respect, responsibility and consent. Opposite me sits clarity and over the black and green patterned table cloth I look at these brothers. Growing reluctance. The empty space at the table. Conflict will not eat with us, he is in every room that we are not. I recognise his passing silhouette quiver in the opaque glass. Time stretched over screens, renewed immersion as Phill’s subtle sound compositions embody narratives through the domestic space. Frames click by. Details emerge. Portraits hold true to the gentleman collaborators, the journeys and our conversations but as I stand there reviewing the track the captured pass, something is missing.

…

Arising from the carpet the elderly armature precariously cuts a skeletal burn into my bedroom space. Frame with in frame I stand inside the half complete wardrobe with one hand on the semi erect structure and a screwdriver in my hand. Reluctance grows out of my fingernails and attaches to the frame forcing the wood out of reach. Jabbing, prising the growth with the screwdriver I hold firm to the wooden skeleton and close my eyes.

Vinegar

Jutting into my bedroom the cube that covers the stair well, sitting atop the white box, dark confined space below me enclosed by the wooden panels I feel the scuffed skin of my hands rub against the shiny plastic of my cassette box. Red and black with a metal clasp it holds twenty-five cassette tapes, a few items and something that I cannot trace. Through the window I see the smoke rise from the towers of the vinegar factory, the malt smell apparent in the room and my nasal cavities once again. Rummaging through the box I quickly dismiss the cassette tapes. Rummaging, a small pink plastic brain, the size of a jelly bean, I consider popping it into my mouth and chewing it with my teeth. Instead I roll it around in my fingers. A torn photo of the front of the house, the small patch of grass, the bare tree centred in the grass, the path leading down to the gate and the prefabricated concrete wall adjoining the house. A home, a door, three windows, brick, wall, garage. Torn down the photograph into the roof of the house the white edges reveal the pink flesh of my hand. Placing it in my palm I let it rest with the pink plastic brain. Opening both my hands out in front of me I stare at my left hand, pink brain, torn faded photograph of my first home, my right hand, nothing just the empty flesh and the scuffed marks scattered across my palm. In the distance a rumbling sound grows from the factory. Brick by brick the claret cylindrical chimney begins to crack and crumble.

Eyes open, I sit at the dining table, my palms out in front of me, empty. The joists in the apex structure of the roof space articulate their dissent one last time. As the snow shifts in one unifying slump a crash echoes out down the street bouncing from house to house. Rushing to the door I slip the catch, pull inwards and stand facing out into the cold. Atop the white crystalline lump in the front garden the cat stares back at me as I push my hand out into the air. Drifting down, the unconscious self of the six sided shape shifts sublimely by the atmosphere. A singular flake rests, centre of my right hand.

5.

Prism flecks shatter, white light bounces, my eyes squint as embers spit and haze drifts at the boundaries of my vision. Deep in the distance the dark arches form. Desecrated coals drawn dormant from their dance of death lie miscast in the fired circle. Wakefulness grows, my vision restores focus, and I lie motionless with the remnants of the fire by my side. Gracefully snipping his teeth at the ends of the green blades my companion raises his head from across the field. Sleek and healthy his muscular frame renders its hazel contoured beauty by the crisp early morning broken shine. Slowly he rebalances as the Victorian viaduct arches, holding a forgotten line, push the hillsides apart to reveal his majestic composure. Vascular velvet skin lost to boned antler he stands rightful keeper of his architecture.

Messaged, mourning deer I wake. I check my phone. Sanctuary is the four corners of my bed and Adam is my lost connection. After fourteen days I am conscious again. Back in the real world. Reassembled, my first person observer residing in my body once again. I have not seen the cat for days, not since the snow slipped from the roof, crashed and melted. Negotiating the stairs dressed in only my dressing gown I enter the dining room and seat myself at the table.

…

Oscillating. Flitting room to room shadows slip through doorways passed, immersion on multiple levels. Consider individually or as a whole, a meditative response, perception constructed as the sum of the parts. A preference for the virtual now? I stand, the viewer, in front of these two embodiments, reworking and reconstructing the elements, video, sound, projection, narrative, material. Loose fragmentary screens, the initial form forcing the viewer outside the virtual onto the physicality in the space. Figured reconstruction opens the bodies up, the viewer enters the virtual, narratives of the home, perceiving the blur, and frames click by as the embodiments hang. Portraits. Cinematic presence, my rectangular screen, a virtual space for a new perceptive construct, sitting quietly in the corner offering its familiarity. 

Movements through the house, moments of stillness and the vastness contained. The step. Did I find that innate imprint? Is there an innate imprint at all? What is stored in our unconscious? What is constructed for us? Making my mind up, knowing it’s the one. Dijksterhuis, his study, choose an apartment by one of three methods, one, instant decision, two, weigh up the pros and cons, three, think about something unrelated, a distracting problem, then make the decision. Objectively, the best decisions made on the apartment are by using the distraction method, the unconscious working while the conscious is elsewhere. Does my unconscious really have this power, laying a path for me? Sorting complexities, processing external information, ordering events, experiences. Assembly. Sensations, thoughts, perceptions, emotions, and the subsequent internal force to arrange, build, construct, creating moments of understanding and learning, lining a narrative, a reflection sculpted by the environment. Procession. Memory, a pool allowing for bathing or just dip a toe in to ripple the present transient truth.

Three gentlemen. Conversation and contact. Reforming a self with the knowledge of each other, culture defining its shell. Sentience and the awareness of location, space, and point embodied, physical and metaphysical, consciousness looking to form for affirmation, narrative coherence, a truth to oscillate to and away from.

…

Arched chestnut faces align as I move the door of the wardrobe into place. Flat headed screwdriver in hand I begin to turn my wrist, threading the brass screw through the hinge, reuniting hole with bore. Accommodating the final screw I stand back, open the doors and look out, into its assembly.

A construct of perception, sensory regions of the brain combine in the unconscious, releasing information, ultrafast brainwaves connecting, my conscious awareness emerging. Do I trust this silent thinking partner, shadowed, the unconscious? Do I have a choice? Is the self a construct, sensory coherence, the brain building an order, unifying the world. Writing this sentence I am conscious, I am aware but what is this terra incognita, this unchartered territory, why do I feel? Why do I feel I need the answer to why do I feel? How often am I tricked by my innate narrator, manipulated, coerced into constructing perceptions unreliable to the core? My identity, my narrative, constructed how, by me, or for me? Self. An illusion? Who am I without it?

Sitting at the dining table in my dressing gown I pull a single white sheet of paper. Pushing pen, forming the black arch, I lay my conscious line to print.

Epilogue

I board a plane to Greece.

Faced with the chaos in the break of everyday routine the holiday makers at the Diamond Deluxe Hotel begin to order their days amidst the newly constructed man made resort. Forcing only the white blocks from the Lego set up out of the ground the apartments rise from the terrain, probably a construction attributed to ages 10+ on the side of the box. Collective refreshment joined later by observant anxiety lingers in the faces of the guests on the first day of breakfast. As the week moves through its legitimate course the certainty that the same linen towels will appear at the same resting bricks in the same order each day becomes almost significant in its regimented form.

…

On return a mist has started to form in one of the upstairs bedrooms. It lies at our feet during the evening, thick and heavy, giving clearance to the room, we stand like awkward obtrusions above an alien skyline. Across the street a lamp flicks on warming up a silhouette looking back at us and waving. It’s Douglas Smith from number 23. I have something for you he tells me when I explain the mist to him the next day. In the morning light a deeper more impenetrable mist rises to suffocate the room. Standing with my back against the chimney breast unable to see anything I may as well as be in the mind of Douglas Smith as standing in this bedroom. The outline of a dragon forms in the mist. I plug the fan in and turn the dial to its maximum spin.

Unexplainable, the utility service’s one word review on the phone, we’ll send someone out

For the love of people, the call out man’s initial expression on entering the room