2021 My Life in Hackney Part Two

Process - Recording local sound. Editing printed texts. Reprinting edited versions to hang over earlier versions. Over four weeks

work in development at Hundred Years Gallery June 1 -31 2021

My Life in Hackney Part Two was the second part of the ongoing archival project My Life in Hackney which began in 1999, where Lemley began mapping her home, herself, and ideas of place by photographing each item in her home for My Life in Hackney Part One. 

My Life in Hackney Part Two shifts between notions of here and there, past and present, and text and sound, between an outdoor place and an indoor space and between the static text and the dynamic sound. Where a rich texture of everyday sounds of Hackney will emerge behind a text grounded in the geological processes of the lands that bore the personal events that are then woven together – events on Injury, Death, and Epiphany.

Using the gallery as a studio to explore My Life in Hackney Part Two, the texts were edited over the exhibition, reprinted, and hung on top of the earlier edited version. The sounds of everyday Hackney were recorded twice a week for four weeks, from nine microphones (geophone, midrange, and high frequency) in three windows of her flat on the York Row Estate. An energy of push and pull, between listening and reading, is realised from the three speakers behind each text (sub bass, midrange, specialist tweeter.) The sound held the reader in moments of seemingly disconnected elements or with serendipitous instances of sound and word. Here the sound served as a whispering ordinary, intermittently repeating, heightening or deepening, without discernible or consistent rhythm, the broken melody of the poetic text.

2020 iteration VI — fabulating

2 September — 1.30pm — 30’

William Crosby: cake tins, plant pots, metal garden ornaments, whiskey glasses, cello bow, guitar. reading - The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015), Anna Tsing

Mary Lemley: everything but the bathroom sink. voice, bass, metal ruler. Reading - My Life in Hackney, Part One (2001), Mary Lemley

Nicol Parkinson: terracotta seed bowl, guitar, 9V battery amplifier, stovepipe

From the album 'surfacings III - anything which comes forth'. William Crosby

Group sounding improvisations with Will Crosby in collaboration with Mary Lemley and Nicol Parkinson.

'surfacings III - anything which comes forth' commissioned for Modify

Exhibited through QR code @ Meno Parkas, Düsseldorf, Germany

7 August-7 September 2020.

2020 Come Hell or High Water: Thunder Moon

These Fragments We have Shored Against Our Ruin

Site Specific Process Work - One day

calico cloth/sandbags/wood/hessian rope/River Thames

Rehanging the original fourteen cloths from the 1992 These Fragments We have Shored Against Our Ruin on July 5th from morning low tide through high tide to evening low tide for Anne Bean’s monthly Come Hell or High Water programme on the Thames foreshore at Limehouse.

Press The Art Newspaper Wuhan clang: the sounds of the Chinese city ring out over London’s River Thames, Louisa Buck, July 6 2021

2010 Residency/ HMS Ganges

commissioned by Commissions East

From 2009-2010 the commissioned residency at the HMS Ganges Museum at Shotley Point on the River Orwell in Suffolk resulted in a two-screen video work Residency/ HMS Ganges. This work traced the history of the HMS Ganges naval training school between the two great Suffolk rivers, the Orwell and the Stour. Through hundreds of archival photographs of the boy seamen dating back into the 19th century, and across locations that spiral outward from the museum across the rural and industrial landscape they had walked upon.

Press

The Telegraph, The Martello towers: An artistic entente on the coast, Sophie Campbell, June 29 2010.

1999 - 2019 My Life in Hackney Part One

Digital Photographs

Ongoing since 1998. Starting with Martin Reynolds surveying my two-storey council flat and plotting it into 50 cubic centimetres, creating a 3-dimensional grid in which to harvest the objects through photographing them. Each object, treasured for a brief moment, taken from its context and photographed digitally in a nicely lit white space. Using an alphanumeric cataloguing system, the image is first given a grid coordinate, and then numbered in sequence. All stuff transformed into binary code. Everything in ones and zeros. Everything is Nothing.

Performance David Gales’ Peachy Coochy Night,  My Life in Hackney Part One: 20 Objects from One Area. 2001

Exhibited Presque Rien, Laure Genillard Gallery October 2008 –January 2009 Upside Down/ Inside Out, Kettles Yard Cambridge, July – September 2009

Published On Maps and Mapping Performance Research, Volume 6.2, Summer 2001 Art Monthly Dec-Jan 08-09  Updside Down/ Inside Out Exhibition catalogue, Kettles Yard, University of Cambridge Press, 2009

1996 tourist

commissioned by Central for Performance Research

From the On Tourism issue of Performance Research Journal (volume 2, no.2, Summer 1997).

In August 1996, I took a week holiday in Wales with Judie Christie, Trisha Rhodes and Adam Hayward from the Centre for Performance Research. They were my hosts and guides to all the sites considered for the upcoming Tourism and Identity conference in Sept 1996. They took to me to places I had never visited before. And as I was a tourist, I took photographs. 

Later, back in London, I selected 100 photographs to paint 100 postcard-size watercolours. When I returned to Wales in September for the conference across these multiple tourist sites, I placed the watercolour of that site into the original viewpoint. 

By placing each image into its vanishing point, the paintings were out there looking for their lost identity.

I did not tell anyone about my activities during the conference if they did not ask. No one asked. On the last day, I showed the slides of the original photographs, along with slides taken of the watercolours. Nobody had connected my furtive activity of placing the images while we visited the Welsh tourist sites, even though they sometimes came across the paintings. Some in the audience spoke of how they thought they had been more observant than any ordinary tourist. Bringing to light how everyone seemed to have had the mindset of a tourist while discussing the emptiness of tourism.

The photographs here represent this journey: the first image is the tourist photograph taken in August, the second image from September is the returned place of the watercolour, and the last image is a close-up of the painting.

When almost everyone had left at the close of the conference, I overheard this conversation at the reception at Chapter House in Cardiff.

“There’s a tiny picture of Chapter House sticking to the wall just outside, do you know anything about?” 

“What is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you go and get it?”

“Okay...” she goes off and gets the picture.

She brings it back and all three examine it closely.

“Is it a photocopy?”

“No, but it might be a print.” They all look again even closer, at least 6 inches from their eyes.  

One of them tilts the picture in the light back and forth at eye level, they all squint and crane their necks.

“It’s definitely a pencil drawing, look how the pencil lines glint in the light.”

“Yes”

“How do we know if it’s real?”

“I’ll take a rubber to it... but I just couldn’t. I like it.”

“Yes, it’s really very good”

“How funny, let’s keep it.”

I am standing 5ft away. do I tell them? Nah.

1994 Listening Ground Lost Acres

in collaboration with Graeme Miller

Glass Trig points in collaboration with glassmaker Jonathan Anderson

A series of walks mapping 100 square miles of landscape in and around the town of Salisbury, through artist book map with texts, glass trig points and sound installation.

Mary Lemley’s Lost Acres sited large crystal glass ‘trig points’ made in collaboration with the glassmaker Jonathan Anderson, which were placed on 29 sites both ancient and ordinary. Graeme Miller’s sound walk followed the lay line from Stonehenge through Salisbury Cathedral. Their collaboration was brought together by the audience walking the piece from Lemley’s customisable map book of individual places.

Co-commissioned by Artangel and The Salisbury Festival, and Southern Arts.

Press Louisa Buck on BBC Radio 4 Kaleidoscope, reviewed by Maureen Paley. Sept 1994

The Sunday Times, Robert Hewison, September 1994