Thursday 10 June 2010

Location of the Ladies At the Far End of the Pier

Blackpool was the traditional pleasure garden of the factory workers who took to the resort en masse for the annual holiday, alongside a strong gay history and hen/stag party culture. In its heyday millions promenaded the Golden Mile and for many their visit would not be complete without a consultation with one of the many fortune tellers dotted along the pier in their colourful booths.

In more recent years, the resort has suffered a protracted decline with the rise of cheap air travel luring the holiday maker away from the area with the promise of warmer climes on the Continent. The pier and its fortune booths are now a little the worse for wear and imbued with an air of melancholy, their vibrancy long faded, especially out of season.

These women are perhaps the last of their kind, guardians of ‘the gift’ or 'second sight', invariably portrayed as true descendants of the authentic Romany travellers who plied their trade from their gypsy caravans at numerous resorts and fairgrounds across the country.

The Far End of the Pier

Throughout my degree a recurring motif has been a compulsion to create experiences such as 'The Waiting Room' where the audience is invited to intuitively associate and identify common experiences. Visiting Blackpool and paying to experience Ripley's Believe It or Not illustrated how people are encouraged to suspend their disbelief, and allow themselves to journey outside their own everyday experience.

Blackpool is strongly associated in my own childhood as a site of wonderment and spectacle, embedded deep in my own cultural identity, for despite an Art History degree and long career in the creative and educational institutions I am still drawn to its trademark kitsch. The initial visit into a Fortune Tellers booth was largely an act of curiosity on my part. As a child I had often wanted to enter these seemingly private but public feminine spaces. Following my continuing interest in the idea of surveillance I embarked upon secretly recording these renewed encounters. A visit to 'The Spy Shop' in Leeds confirmed what a seedy clandestine world this was, which made me question the validity of what I was attempting to do. Instead for my initial recording I used a spy camera bought from Maplins. Not only was the sound quality poor but I realised that I didn't want to record head shots of the women I was meeting, so this was subsequently abandoned for a more makeshift device, created from an ordinary video camera in a cardboard box inside an M&S shopping bag. The perfect disguise!

Originally envisaged as a gallery based installation, the changes needed to find more suitable accommodation for my degree show resulted in the adaptation of a more domestic, intimate space instead. The decision to replicate the atmosphere of the booth inside my Motorhome meant starting afresh, reconsidering not only the films and the experience of the audience, but the particular cloistered world of the fortune teller herself. Whereas in the ‘neutral’ space of the gallery, issues of voyeurism, eavesdropping and ethics of secret filming were foregrounded, in this domestic space other questions and responses were highlighted and a different curation soon developed. Now the work seemed less about voyeurism and more about the subtle interplay between intrusion and invitation implicit in the films and the relationships between the women I encountered and myself.

Whenever art enters the domestic space there is often ambiguity for the audience, an unease despite the invitation, an ambiguity mirrored upon entering the fortune tellers booth. Often I would enter on a quiet afternoon to find the psychic idly watching television, a portable hastily tucked away under a table upon my arrival, marking the end of one use of space to another.

In this installation, when the visitor crosses my palm with silver, they are re-enacting my own encounters with the world of the fortune teller, symbolically consenting to cross the threshold into their inner sanctum and agreeing to suspend their disbelief at the experience ahead. Once over the threshold, past the fussy beadings, sideshow glitter and coloured fairy lights, a dimly lit hallway offers a first encounter, glimpsed awkwardly through a narrow crack in a cupboard door.
This short loop is deliberately difficult to watch as well as less coherent in style, exposing the mechanics and difficulties of filming, echoing the project’s early dilemmas and my initial inexperience and hesitancy. This contrasts with the 'staging' of the sitting room, an inviting space where a more polished and coherent film can be comfortably enjoyed from inside a fully accessible if rather low cupboard. As with much of my work I am interested in blurring the lines between art and artifice, between public and private, between audience and practitioner.

Here, in this both familiar but claustrophobic setting complete with fortune cookie and love hearts is the heart of the project, one that asks who if anyone is the charlatan - the artist, the audience or the ladies at the far end of the pier.