Cecily Nicholson Interview: Clip 1
Details
Cecily Nicholson Interview: Clip 1
Metadata (MODS) |
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| Titles | Cecily Nicholson Interview: Clip 1: |
| Name | Cecily Nicholson |
| Name | Dr. Joanne Leow |
| Type of Resource | sound recording |
| Identifier | Interview |
| Identifier | Cecily Nicholson Clip 1 |
| Abstract | Cecily Nicholson talks about her role in art--in particular her concern with space. The conversation then shifts to a discussion on poetics. Nicholson discusses the complex relationship between individuality and collectivity and how she confronts it within her own work. |
| Extent | 7:56 Minutes |
| Form | sound recording |
| Note | Cecily Nicholson: So, my name is Cecily Nicholson. Currently, at my place of employment where I am the interpretive programmer for the Surrey Art Gallery in the city of Surrey. I have worked for years in Arts administration, but I think I’m a part of this conversation today because I’m also a poet and a writer. And involved in arts organising and community-based works. I think it is generally an aspect of my methodology; the way I think through an approach to writing, is that I am concerned about place. And I am constantly trying to explicate my own complicity or relationship to that material existence, as well as the history of it. And possibly a future. So yeah, so it’s sort of an intuitive or an instinctual thing for me to think like that already. From the Poplars, I started off that project in a couple different ways. One is that I’m on foot. I’m a very avid walker. I feel like both in my life as a matter of wellness and grounding I just have to be out on land even in an urban context. In addition, it’s also just how I learn a place. So, the ways in which you can learn by driving and being in transit and people telling you stories or reading and all of these things, but I really don’t feel like I ever quite learn a place until I’m actually boots on the ground, as it were, not in a military sense but in a, sort of just experiential sense. And so I do a lot of walking. The island my partner and I noticed years ago, living in New West Minster, has the strange—it’s not strange inherently in and of itself—but it struck us as strange because it was this quiet, unindustrialised, seemingly unindustrialised, seemingly untouched or uninhabited, unused space in a highly industrialised major city. Major as part of the lower mainland kind of complex but major in the history of British Columbia as well, or the formation of British Columbia, the occupation of British Columbia and so on through to the gold rush. So, it has this, the mouth of the Fraser, as it were, we’re just shy of the ocean there, in this very particular nexus and there’s this space, this 23.5 acres of basically trees. So, curiosity, I suppose. But also, just like a call. Not in a religious sense per se, but maybe in a creative sense, maybe in a you know ancient historical sense; the ways in which we’re compelled to pay attention to things about our natural world. That beautiful mountain, that significant tree, that body of water, or whatever it is. So, I felt called to pay attention more and more, and then began sort of working through the human record of it. Trying to listen for the human story of it, which lead me to archives, lead me to thinking through the industry of the area. Obviously trying to think through to a pre-colonial and non-colonial pre-European settlement or moment of occupation. Trying to understand if indigenous relationship or history relative to the space as well, but not necessarily starting there because it wasn’t apparent, and it was actually quite difficult to access or think through how to make those connections. So yeah, it started, it started because of that. And so a combination of interest and call and curiosity but also a sense of wanting to engage in a project at a time—and I’ve talked about this before—but listening to people. Lots of people, but Sarah Hunt stands out in the local context, because I was listening to a talk of hers—her reminding or encouraging us to think through the history of the land beneath our feet and the land beneath the city and what it might mean for a practice of poetics to try to work through those multi-scale meanings and contexts and what is my responsibility, potentially, to that moment. 4:28 JL: Can we talk a little bit more about the poetics, then? There’s something that poetry gives us or enables a form of thinking or a form of seeing that the text is trying to access. Can you talk a bit about the difficulty or the challenges or perhaps the pleasure even of translating that relief-complex-fragmented-fragmentary history both of the land and the human archive as well, the difficulty of getting that? Can you talk a bit more about what that process is like? 5:00 CN: I enjoy it for the most part. I think of it as study and I think of it as a slow accumulation, less in a capitalist sense, but more in a robust—growing or robust understanding or knowledge. I do enjoy it—ultimately, I enjoy it. What’s challenging about it—there’s several things that are challenging about it, and I’ll get to the question of poetics, I guess, but the challenge for me is I do not enjoy the “I” figure. I really am quite challenged by it. You know, coming out of teenage years or as a child writing poetry instinct—you know always putting the “I” figure, “I think this,” “I do that,” “I see this,” and that authority, you know, not really being very critical about that at all. I had some very good lessons from teachers and other writers to start to think through just the problems of the individual. The problems of the individual individuating kind of aspects of our cultural experiences, our capital, our economy experience, economic experience, and the ways in which that’s reinforced in academia, and the art world, and literary world. The figure. So, I do find it challenging to come to poetics without being overly engrossed with my own perspective. But at the same time, being thoughtful about the necessity of not erasing my presence, both as a matter of responsibility, so of course I’m here, of course I’m having an impact, just like all of us collectively are. I have some degree of power it’s important to to to understand that and to not give it away unnecessarily, and if I do how and why. What good reasons are there to do that? And then also what is my relationship to a sense of people? “My people.” Even if it’s “my people” in an ancestral sense or maybe it’s “my people” in terms of class sense or a labour sense or the multiple confluences and intersections that have resulted in my presence where I am these days, so what is my relationship to that and do I want to erase that either? That challenge of coming through and thinking through the “I” while I’m engaged in study was a back and forth throughout the whole text and it wasn’t fully resolved at all but to some degree found some harmony (I hope) in the outcome of that book project. And so, indeed, the work moves in sections through different ways of observing, some of which centre my individual concerns and others which obscure or make complicit as part of systemic observations that presence. |
| Access Condition | Contact Dr. Joanne Leow |
| Subject Hierarchical Geographic | North America--Canada------Vancouver |
| Subject Local Name | ------Poetics--Individual--Collective--Art--Space--Materials--History--Land--Fragmented---- |