Alex Flett
Molde in Norway, or filling twelve painted canvas bags with soil form twelve different locations in Scotland, now in the Smith Museum in Stirling, Scotland – takes a lot of time, and demanded concentrated effort to bring them to fruition. Works such as these have complex reasons for their existence. I have never taught for any extended time, prefering instead to give the occasional lecture, because I have no wish to cauterise myself into only dealing with my own work at evenings, weekends, holidays and limited research days. I did not want to be known as an artist because of a teaching post. Any job which means being in a certain place by a certain time doing certain things, for example I worked in a Woollen Mill for a while in the mid eighties, can become unbearable. But that job combined with my wife Eunice’s one women textile business which she ran at that time, are where my use of yarn came from. Even though I experimented a bit with yarn at that time during the eighties, the idea of building yarn into my work didn’t fully happen until the mid nineties. This again an example of why the recording of ideas is so important. They are where imagination can be explored. And if those ideas gestate for ten years, then that is all part of it. I was in the house of the English painter Patrick Heron one day and saw a small canvas on a wall which had yet to have the last area of colour added. I asked Patrick why he hadn’t finished it and he said because he was still deciding on what the final colour would be. I asked how long it had been there, to be told 8 years. Using everyday life material not perceived as ‘beautiful’ you establish an effective symbiosys between Memory and Experience, that takes an intense participatory line with the viewers. While creating such intimate involvement, you seem to remove the historic gaze from the reality you refer to, offering to the viewers the chance to perceive in a more absolute, almost atemporal form. So I would take this occasion to ask you if in your opinion personal experience is an absolutely indespensable part of a creative process... Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience? The old Celtic Druids were said to have to pass a test
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where they were made to lie all night in a coffin like bath of cold water, and during this immersion they had to compose in their heads a poem of a given length and on a subject and in a metre, which was only given to them as they were being put into the water. In the morning they had to get out of the water and recite the poem. Not only had it to be on subject and in the correct metre and of the required length, it had to have an aesthetic. It had to be a thing of beauty in itself. I dont put myself through such an extreme measures to create anything, but the point is there, that it is possible to create from an extreme experience. The nearest I have come to the Druidic form - which gave me the idea - is lying in a 8000 year old neolithic grave and having myself photographed. The great thing about history is that it can be there but not there. Its hidden. Few are going to start saying “Hey he got that from reading about the ancient Druids” If they discuss it, the discussion will more than likely be in different terms such as the the AIDS pandemic about which it was made, my involvement in the battle against the virus, and the fact that it went to Washington for an AIDS Conference there. There are two forms of historical memory. There is history in the large sense, thats history like the battle of Bannockburn or the battle of Waterloo, and included in this larger history is the History of Art. The second history is the personnal, and that includes what you did yesterday and what you had for breakfast. By the following week, unless you are in the habit of having the same thing for breakfast everyday, then you have more than likely forgotten what it was you ate. On a scale of important memories, it is low down on the list to remember unless it is utalised as part of an art project. But given the extension for everyone to record personnal historical memory technologically, and for those things to be easily stored and passed onto others in real time through social media, how much of our lives do we want to record? Are our descendents going to actually be interested? How many “selfies” are enough? The technology is becoming not so much an aid to memory but the memory itself. Taking everyday items such as a button, or yarn, or reminding an audience of imagination which has