Allan Kaprow wrote of the courageous, obsessive and meticulous work of an unnamed woman. Each day of one week when the wind rose on the dunes, she took a walk and watched her tracks blow away behind her. Each evening she wrote in a journal. ‘She was afraid of the imbalance and disorientation she experienced in a vast space defined by rhythms but not by boundaries. She was afraid of being lost.’ Each successive day, she read her journal entry and attempted to repeat exactly what happened. A daily, un-witnessed cycle of repetition and erasure. I have chosen to inhabit her process. The Telling is the audio remnant of my endeavor.
‘She was afraid of the imbalance and disorientation she experienced in a vast space defined by rhythms but not by boundaries. She was afraid of being lost.’ What does lost mean in a landscape of shifting tides, between the high and the low where not even a pebble is a point of reference from one day to the next? What does time mean when the tides have their own rhythm? And the moon influences the height and force of each tide, the day has its length, the weather; wind direction. Within this mesh of cosmic rhythms that determine the invisible boundaries of my task, my own physical and emotional cycle has no influence. I have lived her fear of being lost.
I chose to walk in my personal dunes, the Suffolk coastline, tracing a line at the turn of the tide. Rootedness and being lost. Steps that slip into an endless depth, halted by falling into the next. Shifting tidelines, shifting emotions. I found the trajectory of my emotions measured the trajectory of my steps, marked over time. Duration expanded, contracted, time became irrelevant. But time became vital in bringing me back to ground. Without a task I would have drifted out to sea. The task that bound me to the shore.