Jenny Walty

There's a great article by Tacita Dean in artforum (Tristan da Cunha) and this was my response:

In this story, as in her films, Tacita reminds me of time's relationship to a sense of our sacred purpose.

I yearn, as she does, to be in a place out of capitalist, industrial time. When we are free from time's demands and forego ownership of "our" time, it must be so easy to contemplate our place in the world, the vastness which our singular selves feel acutely.

Friends of mine sailed across the Pacific Ocean last year, from San Diego, CA to Nelson, NZ, and reported that almost immediately after being on the open water their perspectives changed. The now was all important, time stretched and fell away.

I believe our purpose is to live and be aware, to let our awareness expand outward from our consciousness and envelop the world, to be, as in the magical passage Tacita quotes from Saint-Exupery, "a human consciousness ... in which as in a mirror that rain could be reflected."

My hope as an artist is to help people learn how to see beauty in the world, learn to let the moment between past and future blur. The still moment between breaths is when synapses crackle and independent thoughts arise from the grey matter.

I'm thinking of The Green Ray, one of Tacita's films which limited time to see something magical, stretching a moment and compressing it to nothing. I wonder if she will realize the project on Tristan da Cunha?