It’s 1994 now, and I’m on a residency in Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, in a corner of Sweet Briar College, near Lynchburg (named after the ‘Hanging Judge’) and 4 miles away from Walton’s Mountain on the Blue Ridge Highway. Sounds great eh? Except everyone thought I was a weirdo for wanting to visit the Walton sawmill. The Waltons had been shown much later on TV in UK than in the US, and no longer part of the cultural hinterland. Disappointed. They did take me to Jerry Falwell’s mountain though, which seemed much more in their headspace.
VCCA was full of musicians, composers, visual artists and writers. Each is given a studio to work in with a bed to lie down on if you feel tired. I borrowed a camcorder. It was the first time I had used one. The advice I was given was ‘Gee you have to move much slower than you think’. I suppose that set the tone. Lunch appears mysteriously and silently in a bucket outside the door so not to distract. Mesmeric. I bought windchimes. Everyone was quite bemused that I had been in Sweet Briar for two months having never been anywhere else in USA, and getting a skewed perspective for sure. Met lovely people… including writer Joanie Puma (Hopi chanting in the empty swimming pool) painter Julia Jacquette (who finally took me to NYC at night in the back of a pickup to see her recording ‘Root Canal’ as bassist in a metal band) and Max Goldfarb who later invited me to contribute to his Incident Report project.
We made an artist's BÜK! Perhaps more of that later. We were inspired by a book artist that visited. In a walk we had together, passing a cemetery, she told me she had had a heart pacemaker fitted. Her specialist told her that pacemakers were normally taken out of the body after death, but that in America this didn’t happen for some legal reason. It put her on edge to imagine all those devices still beating away under the ground. For how long?
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