A collaborative project of spoken and written word and sound for Plas Bodfa (2021) by Amanda Hodgkinson and Liana Psarologaki.
The sounds and poems of SPRINGCLEANING explore cleaning as a gesture of love, of identity and of the habitual care we give the spaces we call home. The ways in which the remnants of the somebody who loves us, linger on and create poignant memories of the ways we care and are cared for, often in invisible ways. Nobody after all, sees the act of vacuuming as an art form. Yet the creative gesture of gathering in the dust bunnies, beggar’s velvet, slut’s wool (there are so many phrases and words around dust) are never-ending. And cleaning is barely spoken of in art. Our dust lives in all our homes, even as we sweep it away. Dust is woven on a human tide of movement and thrown up in rooms and corners and behind furniture, like domestic flotsam and jetsam. Cleaning is surely a creative act – it changes our landscapes and living spaces, even as the dust returns again and again.
SPRINGCLEANING is a site-responsive installation of poetry and audio art and takes on the notion of time passing in the rhythm of domestic life. It presents the praxis of cleaning as an integral part of what we call ‘a home’. The timing of the exhibition itself is important. SPRINGCLEANING ‘prepares’ Plas Bodfa for Spring, Easter, and a new age. The installation is a series of sound pieces projected in space via discreet speakers and the narration of original poems. The poems respond to the domestic ghosts of Plas Bodfa. Sound clips fill the spaces with rhythms characteristic of domestic life.
SPRINGCLEANING aims to highlight the essence of temporal narratives found in in the habitual and often ‘unseen’ domestic action of cleaning, in domestic objects and architectural elements as the soul of the home, its ‘mana. ’
