As I am lying on the couch, free associating my earliest memories of creation, two of them compete. I don’t know which came first. They seem like chicken and egg when I think about the impact they have had in my current life. I cannot decide. They have common elements: from childhood, I seem to be quite the conceptual artist, appropriating other practitioners’ scores and making them my own.…
The memories are in full color, brighter than the rest. They are sensorial memories too, with tastes and touch. There is something strange about them. Could it be that they are but a screen memory, things I wanted to do? It is quite fitting that my work has ended up being bound up with elements of these two memories, writing and dancing.
I remember having a small, blue, ring-bound notebook with squared paper in which I wrote an anthology of my favorite words. Sometimes these came from poems, sometimes from songs, the dictionary or some magazine. They were written in my pristine handwriting. I always had very good handwriting, as I was asked to copy books when grounded (I should have had a career in forgery). When working on my blue notebook, I remember tearing the page and starting again if my handwriting was not as good as I thought it ought to be. Now I know that my notebook was a kind of a limited edition artist book.
I remember, also, seeing Dolores Vargas on the TV dancing Achilipú. I was dumbstruck. I learned the song and reconstructed the dance in front of a mirror. Secretly, I still do it. You should, too. It is such a shame I could never write that dance into the blue notebook. That would have made it complete. Perhaps that is the reason why I still dance it. It is a mystery.
-Laura is a Glasgow-based artist and writer who is currently working on an interdisciplinary project exploring knowledge and the body of the hysteric.