Sat 19 Apr 2008, ICIA Arts Theatre
Polly Gould’s engaging, intimate piece considered the im/possibility of finding a lost loved person through the reading of their inherited library. It was about searching for someone in the things that they leave behind.
The audience was invited to sort through her father’s books, boxes of old photos, old letters, fragments of type-written text, clippings from newspapers, binoculars, scissors and tape cassettes, as she took on the task of mapping the past. Her recollections of walking and talking with her father in the fens showed how orientating ourselves in the past can be like finding ourselves in a landscape. Time and memory play tricks: what seems present is absent, what seems close is distant, sound becomes image and vice cersa, in the never ending process of looking at the past.
Polly’s performance revealed her fascination with the relationship between performer, audience and setting, and our desire for stories, both to tell and be told them.
Associated exhibition: Peninsular, Art Space 1, Sat 1 Mar – Fri 20 June 2008