Below are personal statements from each of us about why we think Lying Fallow is important. We’re keen that these statements do not define the event - they are merely our personal reasons for being invested in this project. We are looking forward to adding 26 more statements to these!
Mary Paterson
Why do you care about this?
For all or any of these reasons, in no particular order:
I think that there is a difference between the way that our society defines its values in thought and in action. In particular, there is a deep hypocrisy between the theories that surround publically-funded artistic practice and the actual structures and institutions that claim to support this practice. There is a similar hypocrisy snaking through the structures and institutions of politics, law and the media. I hope Lying Fallow will be an opportunity to think about different kinds of social organization.
The last time I stayed up all night talking with a stranger was in 2010.
Whenever I have the opportunity to concentrate on listening, I am surprised at what I discover.
Have you ever seen a fox run across thirty acres of freshly fallen snow?
I would like to explore types of social organization that are based on the principle of individuals listening to individuals, and that take into account the complexity and contradictions of individual lives.
Sometimes I feel trapped inside a world of production and showing off. Produce. Network. Produce. Network. Are you trending? Are you liked? Are you worth it? Are you available at short notice and for a nominal fee? Can you grasp this opportunity? Can you tell me about it in 30 seconds? Are you busy? Are you terribly busy? Have you Tweeted about it?
I think that finding ways to communicate with people outside the manifestations of dominant cultural values is one of the occupations of art. By the manifestations of dominant cultural values I mean the stories that are told to justify and explain the passing of time in public discourse, including market-driven usefulness, individual branding, profit, novelty and the ostentatious production of meaning.
It is an ambition of mine to stop using the word ‘I’ so frequently.
I wonder if it is possible to redefine ‘professionalism’ in order to include the complexities and contradictions of individual lives.
One definition of sanity could be the ability to understand two or more opposing thoughts to be true at the same time. In this context, ‘time’ is what makes the impossible possible.
I have no idea what will happen with Lying Fallow.
It is an ambition of mine to spend time by wasting it frivolously.
I think about Lying Fallow as an artwork and as part of my artistic practice, which is concerned with meaning, communication and social organization.
This morning my one year old son spent twenty minutes carefully and delicately emptying my wallet and placing all its contents, receipt by receipt, penny by penny, outside the window.
It is difficult and important to do things that have an unknown outcome.
Have you ever seen a double rainbow in an indigo sky, heavy with rain?
I have more books and bookmarked web pages than I have time in my life to read them. I have more ambition than I have talent. My eyes are bigger than my intellect.
I’m not sure I believe in knowledge anymore. Not in the acquisitional sense, anyway. I don’t know anything. I circle things. Return to them. Find out later what they might have meant. Change my mind.
A few years ago I sat in a bookshop and asked people for their questions. One of them was, “Will I ever have enough time in my life to read all the books I want to read and listen to all the music I want to listen to?”
I wonder if I there is enough time to understand the complexities and contradictions of any individual life, even your own, or if the occasional glimpse is the best we can hope for.
It is an ambition of mine to use the word ‘we’ more often, but without sounding pompous.
I think that glimpsing into other people’s lives is one of the occupations of art. It is a type of recognition that also recognises the unseen.
I have not found a way of communicating that does not presuppose knowledge or destroy meaning. But I am ambitious.
I like to think of ‘we’ as a contingent and temporary state of being, and a request for somebody else to hold my hand.
Rajni Shah
17/08/2014
My favourite way to describe Lying Fallow right now is this:
an invitation to experience the changing light together
It’s the simplest collection of words I can find to describe the project that doesn’t involve loads of backstory. It’s an invitation that doesn’t make assumptions about who will be there or what they will choose to bring with them. And in that invitation to experience lie a myriad possibilities of ‘how’ Lying Fallow might happen.
But there’s a whole lot of thinking behind that invitation. And maybe it’s useful to hear something about that too.
So, if you want it, here’s some backstory:
A few years ago, for a whole number of reasons, I decided that I needed to step away from directing performance and to see what else might emerge as a way of being in the world. Figuring out how to do this has been a long process. In fact, it continues to be a long process; years and years of a kind of waiting, a kind of widening of the gaze, slowly attuning to what might be next, loosening my grip on to the way things have been and even the way things are.
This decision has prompted a series of discussions within my company, currently called Rajni Shah Projects, about what that means for us, since for fifteen years the company has supported projects initiated and directed by me. In the past three years we held three company Away Days, sent out a questionnaire to all the different people we’ve worked with, formed a working group which met regularly for a year or so – in short, we’ve initiated a whole number of conversations about the future with all kinds of people. And yet ‘nothing’ emerged as a clear way forward for the company.
When I say nothing, of course I don’t mean nothing. In a way, this series of activities was its own project: a thinking process for a group of people who had gathered around a particular way of working. We collected beautiful texts and testaments, we feasted and walked together, and other projects and writings spun out from our time together. But I think I now understand that what was preventing ‘something’ from ‘happening’ (and that something always included the option of closing the company) was simply an attachment to the idea of ‘something happening’.
The term ‘lying fallow’ has come up several times during this long thinking process, and I’ve always been drawn to it. But I realise now that I associated its connotations of unproductiveness with the idea that it only held value in the context of what came next. And in the case of the company, this prevented me from seeing what was obvious: that we were already engaged in a kind of fallowing, but that in order for it to have any value, I simply needed to stop observing it through the lens of ‘what’s next’.
At the end of 2013, I invited Mary, Susan, and Tiffany to work alongside me for a year, in an attempt to find our way towards a more collaborative company structure. Lying Fallow is the project that we have created.
It is, above all, a way of providing a frame within which a group of people might work through some of these ideas together. It’s a simple premise but feels urgent and exciting to me, because it invites the possibility of great change without determining how that change might happen, where it might come from, or what it might be. It feels important to be clear that Lying Fallow isn’t about Rajni Shah Projects any more than it is about any one of the people who might attend. But I hope that this rather long backstory helps explain the context within which I have come to be a part of the project.
There’s one more thing I feel I should mention here. Whilst Lying Fallow is a collaborative project that is being led by all four of us, I’ll also be submitting it as part of a practice-based PhD I’m undertaking at Lancaster University. This doesn’t affect the project in any way, but it would feel strange not to mention it to you up front.
To close, I’d like to offer a few words that describe ‘lying fallow’ for me.
A clear space.
A state that is neither active nor passive.
A frame that can embrace the exhausted and the silent and the passionate and the engaged in an act of listening.
Maybe see you there.
rajni.x.
Susan Sheddan
One way I would introduce Lying Fallow to you is as a constellation, formed by the spatial relationship between a set of stars. I enjoy the way the mapping of space between the stars creates the shape of the constellation, that the constellation frames space, yet in itself this space can remain undefined.
My commitment to this project, the reason I care about it, follows a through-line back to when I had an art practice and was captivated by the idea of visual dialogue. I was intrigued by the dialogue of experience that an art work could initiate within its encounter.
For me it was all about what happened in the moment of engagement - the seduction, an interruption, the hook that catches in its twist from beauty to the unknown, uncertainty, repulsion - and then what unfolded within the space of that meeting.
Sometimes there could be a feeling of loss accompanying it, akin to that I can still experience in front of work I greatly admire; a sense of something being unanswered in this meeting, of everything it raised being left unmet.
When I started working in art education I found the role of facilitating engagement with art offered a different way-in to the encounter that I found so intriguing. The receptivity within this role enabled a dialogue from which the engagement emerged. It felt like a more real and live version of the part of practice I loved as an artist, the part where I didn’t know what was going to happen next because it hadn’t happened like this before, where doubt is part of process.
I shifted my focus away from making to facilitating. Because I noticed how I was able to get closer to what I was most interested in by stepping a bit further back, holding with my attention rather than defining, creating a frame rather than content, opening the space a little wider.
Lying Fallow offers a further stepping back, and in that stepping back a space is created, framed by attentiveness and care. A rare space of alerted quietude without the need of productivity, of dialogue and listening in its truest sense.
I'm as excited by the Lying Fallow gatherings as I am by the emerging practice this project developed from and how this will expand with the involvement of others. If we’re interested in creating different spaces, relationships and dialogue, we must test models of practice that prioritise the personal. Models of practice that are integrated with and reflective of our lives. How rich and generative could a practice be that encompasses the personal, life? I'm excited by the possibilities of this and where it could lead us.
Another way I would introduce Lying Fallow to you is simply as a space of listening, of a quiet receptiveness with no agenda, of an open welcome to however it is, without needing to get anywhere else.
It’s recognized that companionship is important for a state of lying fallow to be held and sustained. Most simply, this project is the rare holding of lying fallow, that we offer to each other with our presence.
Tiffany Charrington
In July, I attended The Poetry Society’s Annual Lecture at The Southbank Centre, London, which was delivered this year by the American poet Carolyn Forche titled ‘The Poet as Witness’.
After the lecture, there was a question and answer session in which one particular response Carolyn gave to an audience member, who asked about how she writes, stayed with me.
Carolyn spoke of her writing practice with a great humility. With the blank page in front of her she explained to us that she doesn’t know what is going to come out, or that she has a particular agenda in mind. The not knowing – the unknown – is a very important process of being a writer, for her. Letting words emerge, as they will and trusting in this, is a life’s work.
I mention this particular experience I had that evening, in July, as it is at the heart of why Lying Fallow is poignant for me at this particular time in my life. Carolyn’s words came to me when I sat down to write my personal statement, putting preconceived intentions to one side.
Over the last year, I have done a lot of waiting, despite my impatience. I have attempted to give way to listening regardless of whether I have been heard, myself. And I have done a lot of writing when my tools seemed redundant and I wasn’t sure what I was trying to convey.
In truth, how to define or describe what has come out of a time in which I felt I was giving way to a kind of ‘fallowness’, I am still figuring out myself. But I think that is the whole point – process sweeps product out of the room. My tentative explorations in writing and beyond wave no flags and draw no borders – I observe the changes and formations, as they appear.
As the blank page, lies fallow.