GOLDEN

I’m beginning with an evasion; it’s actually day two of my residency at Beaconsfield – a little easier to start writing when the imagined pressure and significance of first words on the first day has been side-stepped and deflated, despite knowing full well that ‘first’ is merely a notional moment / place from which to depart…

Everything is in its temporary place now:

Lower Gallery – Vistas (2005) in a split-screen version on an LCD screen, Songs (2005-ongoing) on headphones hanging on the opposing wall, lightly ‘braced’ by the score for Chorus (2006), a sequence of A4 sheets.

Arch Space – Years is projecting onto two tarpaulin screens at either end, image sequences opposed where they have previously been juxtaposed on adjacent walls or, on a much smaller scale, monitors.

Upper Gallery – Lighting filter in ‘rosy amber’ (described by its manufacturers as ‘warm, emotional, romantic’), covers every pane of glass of the arched windows, flooding the space in a pink wash. Once in the space, looking back, the light beyond the entrance takes on a green hue; I imagine the threshold as a sentimental cusp between a proverbial rose-tinted nostalgia and hint of an envious green. The temperature is up, psychologically and literally it seems – the space feeling distinctly warmer than the rest of the venue. (I later learn that the thermostat had been turned up…) Yesterday, the gold shimmer curtain went up too, hanging from rectangular lighting rig to sloping floor (a drop of some six metres or nineteen feet). Voluminous and luminous, it dominates the space, yet its weight shifts with the light, now heavy, now almost transparent, gold veering from fire to white, a million movements, surprising and mesmeric.

Records played:

• Big Ben Hawaiian Band: Hits Hawaiian Style (Columbia, 1964)
• Mona Fong: East and West (EMI, 1968)
• The Elegance of the Waltz: John Pritchard Conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra (Pye, 1967)
• Foong Gok Yan Sau Mai Liu Ching¹ (Kun Lun, 1964)
• Must Be Madison, Must Be Twist: Joe Loss and his Orchestra (EMI, 1963)
• Lazy Latin (Morgan, 1968)

Note

¹ My Cantonese romanisation is improvised.