In Conversation with Sue Arrowsmith

The artist, Sue Arrowsmith, made a work with me in 1983 (exactly half my life-time ago) called In conversation with Anne Bean. She photographed me as we spoke and as I experimented with an optical lens that I had used in another work. I suggested that the leaves from the vine behind us become part of the work. We lived near each other and often spoke about work, regularly beach-combing by the Thames together. Ever since I knew her, she had been compiling a book and when she died a couple of years ago, I was sent a lot of her writing. Opening just the first page, the names of John Cage, Schoenberg, Pierre Boulez, Nietzsche, Oliver Messiaen, Michel Foucault, Ravel, Anton Webern, Stravinsky, Strauss, Sibelius and Ligeti all jumped out. After Sue’s death, I had arranged a gathering on Holy Island, a place which Sue often spoke of visiting, with the artists Shaun Caton, Sinead O’Donnell, Brian Gilson and Yol, all of whom felt a strong connection to Sue. In the wind on the island with ribbons and sea weed blowing, I thought of all these words in her head and I wanted somehow to get them soaring out into the world.

In collaboration with the artist/photographer, Manuel Vason I unfurled her words, over the Thames, giving them the life of our animated conversations, arbitrary fragments getting captured —-SHE PERCEIVING HER, LIGHTENING, TEARING OF, SPELL, MY EYES, MADE OF THE DARK CLOUD OVER YOUR HEAD COME TO US SOARING, FAR DARKNESS MADE