The starling has a particularly good memory. Curlews in the fields around Stonehaven are in sharp decline; their calls a hauntingly familiar sound whilst in my garden and walking the surrounding farmland 10 years ago but heard infrequently now. The reasons are all well documented, but locally there are increasing domestic cat and wild fox numbers; both devastating for ground nesting birds, the lack of wildlife friendly borders to ploughed land and intensive monoculture. The vast majority of the fields in this area are ploughed and sown to the fence; rapeseed oil plants often spilling out into the surroundings. Passing tourists, when met on the path, will enquire "what is that striking plant?", mistaking it for some unusually exotic native. One of the first plants to regenerate a major road building project nearby the town was rapeseed; the local authorities promptly dispatched spaying gangs to combat it.
Listening for and sometimes to what's not there, so as to concentrate more fully on what you can hear, is something I often engage in whenever I'm on the sea cliffs and in the fields and woods around my home. In poetry, particularly performative poetry readings, this is termed close listening or the 'aural ellipsis'. Simply put, aural ellipsis is a term used to define ambiguity or indeterminacy within the written, but most often the spoken word, whereby the reader/listener "tends to fill in or 'weave' into any elliptical speech act certain elements of his or her internal experience," when "listening to becomes listening for." (Nick Piombino 1998).
Piombino likens such poetry and written word to "holding environments" or "transitional objects," (terms first coined by psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicot) which allow the audience to potentially inhabit a space which facilitates the projection of the listeners' own experience into and onto contemporary poetry. However, in his essay 'The Aural Ellipsis and the Nature of Close Listening,' Piombino does not limit his investigation into ambiguity and the 'spaces left' exclusively to the aural: he cites the films of Jean Luc Godard and Michelangelo Antonioni, with their structured but simultaneously innovative loose narratives, as containing good conditions for the formation of the aural ellipsis. In both film-makers' work the juxtaposition of recognisable visual and cultural content together with paradox and indeterminacy, form fertile ground to encourage the audience to bring their own experiences and linkages to the work.
Let's for a moment replace looking for listening, visual for aural; when looking at becomes looking for.
In making collage works especially, but probably in all the work I make, I am always seeking to leave spaces; visual spaces. My collages are never densely packed, there are always intervals, visual rhythms and places for the eye to rest and then move on. Spaces for the viewer to make personal connections between sometimes very disparate images seemingly without connectivity or conversely, images and objects which share commonalities; superficially they may look similar but are subtly different. I want the viewer to see the differences. Often the images and objects are commonplace or may be at least, familiar. Both the collages and more frequently now, the three dimensional objects I work with become what Winnicott described as "holding environments"; images and objects onto which emotions and sensations can readily be adhered.
Like the masquerading starlings, images within my collages are often not quite what they seem. Stuck down jackets become personages, ciphers. Fabric fragments recall moments and sensations. Skeins of colour create a palimpsest where meanings and connections can be made, unmade, re-made.
Piombino, Nick. (1998). The Aural Ellipsis and the Nature of Listening in Contemporary Poetry.