Matt
Hawthorn
Friday
21 Saturday 22 July
Shanty
Shanty describes the act of creating place,
a site of belonging. The act of creating place from space is a process
of creating a mythological layer that lies between the interaction between
the person and the space. Shanty is a history incorporated into the
body and expelled as song. Shanty is a dwelling space that sits perpetually
between the transient and the permanent.
In this durational work ‘Shanty’ is the marking of objects,
inscripted fragments, moments which reconstruct a place. Matt Hawthorn
will aim to intervene in that mythological layer of experience through
marking a set of objects with records of fragments or moments which
incite the viewer to reconstruct the space as a place. The public will
be invited to participate in this process of marking by offering their
own records to be inscripted onto the objects and distributed into the
environment. At the end of the performance, objects will be further
distributed into the wider public domain through gifts, donations to
charity shops etc.. At the end of the project a visual / textual document
will chart the distribution of the objects.
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Archive:
Matt
Hawthorn Shanty
performed
on Friday
21 July at Jubilee Pool, Penzance Promenade
On the Friday evening in gloomy failing light Matt was first glimpsed
by visitors on the far side of the Jubilee pool working intently with
nearly 200 little wooden boats. Initially it was not clear what he was
doing, but by the following day it became apparent that he had carefully
inscribed these perfectly made little wooden vessels, bought originally
from a well-known internet auction site, with the names of houses.
Matt had originally been inspired by the story of the slum clearances
in Newlyn in the thirties – roughly simultaneous with the age of
the pool - that provoked a protest by their inhabitants: Newlyn residents
who took their case, by boat, up to Westminster. The names of the houses
written on the boats were therefore part real, part imagined by Matt as
a response to the story.
The climax came when Matt, with help from family and onlookers, threw
the boats onto the waves from rocks adjacent to the pool. There was a
strange sense of shared catharsis and release that accompanied this moment,
like the launch of a ocean liner on her maiden voyage, and though some
were dashed against the rocks, most of the boats floated happily across
Mounts Bay and into the distance.
Matt’s performance had a discursive and informal quality and appeared
to evolve in an effortless way. Although superficially based on local
history the piece seemed more about language and the process of naming,
categorising and objectifying the world.
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