While I visited the rehearsals of the Castellers, where I made early drawings that I used in this series, someone suggested to me that their performances were best described as ‘Ephemeral’, so this became the working title as I began to post work-in-progress draft by draft. However, the earliest title for this work, written in my sketchbook notes on Montserrat Oct 2011, when I began the series was “Lie down beside me said the mountain to the castle”.
This was the phrase that began the work. It suggested to me a relationship, or even an attraction between “The Lasting” and “The Short Lived”. The work that grew from this starting point was intended to be more than just a juxtaposing of contrasting forms. What I wanted was to invest the work with a sense that “The Lasting” might delight in “The Ephemeral” as though they were coming together in a kind of embrace.
On April 28th I exhibited work to date from this series at the Jiwar residency. This offered me a definite punctuation in the process and time to consider my next step, which may possibly be to explore the theme on a larger scale, but also to draw the work more closely to the central theme of the original title.
