| Tract Live A rt |
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| Site specific live art and performance in and around Penzance, Cornwall, over three weekends. Summer 2006 | ||||||||||
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| Information on this site will be updated as part of the Tract Live Art Programme | ||||||||||
Archive Alastair MacLennan THYME MITE Performed at Penlee Park Saturday 23rd September
Alaistair’s piece for Tract possessed a quiet intensity and drama and, fittingly for this grandee of British performance art, it ended up bringing the curtain down on the last weekend of Tract.
Alaistair, who had performed in Newlyn around 10 years ago, started the day sitting in an empty greenhouse blowing up white balloons slowly and methodically and dropping them so that they scattered around his feet. The greenhouse, with its futuristic silver frame, had been especially chosen for the event, and had acquired a row of filleted fish that peeped out from each of its gutters.
For the next 8 or 9 hours the process continued without respite until slowly Alaistair disappeared under a rising tide of balloons. Filled with his own breath, and punctuated by the occasional black one, the bulk of them were a translucent, milky white colour, and so together they looked like a clump of frog’s spawn.
It was a Saturday afternoon and the park was busy with kids playing football and Mums walking pushchairs. The fact the piece was so visible was important to its success, as were the materials which were familiar and accessible and seemed to serve to lure casual passers-by into studying the work more closely.
But it was a performance that reached a number of deeper levels. The emotional pitch slowly cranked up as the greenhouse filled, and towards the end the viewer was confronted by a subliminal awareness that, with the all the glass sealed up and dripping with condensation Alaistair appeared, bizarrely, in danger of becoming suffocated by balloons filled with his own breath.
The symbolism was deliberately ambiguous and polyvalent – but I could not help thinking that the performance was in some way a powerful demonstration of the effect of greenhouse gases on the earth’s atmosphere.
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Web site www.art.ntu.ac.uk/liveart/maclennan/
Photography
by Steve Tanner