JENNIFER LINDSAY
jennifer lindsay (canada/the republic of ireland) is a tkaronto based artist-researcher working in theatre, video, ceramics, and sound. spanning art and health sciences, her practice is informed by memoirs of the body, language disfluency, and crip time.
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SCORE: LESSONS FROM AN ANDMAN AND OTHER SHORT STORIES
photos by mkMON TON WINDOW GALLERY
dec 3 - 30, 2015
in summer 2015 i temporarily stepped away from theatre projects because i was recovering from a brain injury and an encounter with a predator. i still wanted to make things, but i needed quiet. ceramics and a corner in my friend harry’s studio gave me that.
everytime i wrote about what my bodymind was healing from, i drew parallels to the definitions of score. parallels in: lessons from an andman, short stories about the people and places that carried me during those lessons, and the literal act of making impressions in clay. a trip to the stacks at the toronto reference library expanded my knowledge on the etymology of the word score and confirmed the definitions that meant the most to me.
score is defined as a crack, a crevice, a notch, a mark, a line drawn with a sharp instrument to denote a boundary, the crossing out or cancelling of something, a track, a slash, a gash. weaving. it is the name of the game, the record or register of points during the progress of a match, the place in which the competition stand before beginning a race or shooting at a target. in measurement, a set of twenty, a weight of twenty-one pounds (specifically pigs or oxen), a percentage, a debt, a tally, a bill of reckoning. a grievance. further, numerically, the combinations “three score” and “four score” are archaistic synonyms for sixty and eighty, as in the gettysburg address. nautically, to fracture or shipwreck. musically, it appears as a written or printed piece of concert music in which all the vocal and instrumental parts are noted on a series of staves, one under the other; it is also a song on the fugees album. in sex, a conquest, to copulate outside marriage, to procure sex for a third party, or for a prostitute to secure a client. in money, any form of material gain or consumption. in crime, swindling, gambling, robbery, drugs, a cache of illicit goods, a planned killing. in merit, used as a humongous acknowledgement of a correct answer, to succeed, to do well, to get.
from these places i created SCORE. pressed into porcelain clay using letterpress type, SCORE is displayed in a poem of sorts, where each number, word, and sentence tells it’s own story. the project is divvied up between lessons from an andman in twenty tablets, and other short stories in ten tablets.
though it never showed up in my scans, i felt a “crack, a crevice, a notch, a mark, a line drawn with a sharp instrument... the crossing out or cancelling of something, a track, a slash, a gash” in my brain, for several years after my traumatic brain injury. as for the predator, i felt like “a form of material gain or consumption,” in their presence. one of many objects in their collection.
special thanks to lynn fisher for her education and encouragement, harry tiefenbach for his care and a space in his studio, the shop studio run by michelle organ for their lessons and support, rochelle rubinstein for doing our first install together and for her generous donation of gallery space, as well as jaana bohr, jina park, and mk for documenting this project and showing up for me.
photos by mkselections from lessons from an andman
27
my age when i met them
fee-fi-fo-fum warning signs from my bodymind and sarahsage green exterior the colour of the outside of their studio signaling welcome
tender tantrum their well of care and unpredictable anger
do what you think you can manage being groomed. veiled by the idea that i was given options
powder
my experiment : their addiction... another boring binary
mahogany
the colour of my blood before it turned brown from internal bleeding. a memory from a bicycle accident when i was 6. thinking about the colour of my blood changing as i become infected by this person.
you are a far way from home
i can never go home
(box of compartments)
their ideas of my worth: i am one of many
boxes
everywhere and all the time
haunted, hunted?
stalked
skinny a nickname reserved for me and all the others
take it
their expectation of me and all the others
that is all you are for
their denigration of my body makes them feel powerful
grey county
the smell of dead farm animals across a valley in southern ontario. the last motorcycle ride. the end.
selections from other short stories
555 where we grew up
with you i could steal horses true love
white horses in a fisherman’s garden translated from gaelic, a story about a poetic warning against transportation across the sea, told to me by uncle joe
the liberties dublin and ideas of class and liberation
thunder clap a warning sign during the early days of brain injury
a fish is a fish wisdom from mr.k
photos and video by mk
a year or two before exhibiting SCORE, i started taking classes at the gardiner museum under the direction of lynn fisher. i learned quickly that i was hopeless at wheel throwing and glaze recipes and that i preferred mimicking cuneiforms by pressing letterpress type into handmade tablets. mostly monologues from theatrical scripts or collections of short stories i was writing. i could tell lynn was on board with my handmaking right away because her feedback shifted from hilariously asking me, “what possessed you to do that?” to helping me think through my ideas and cultivate my underglaze techniques.
photo by mk