The Closer I Get To You

Kerith Manderson-Galvin


Year the project commenced:2016
Year it became impossible:Gradually from 2016-2020 

www.unofficialkerithfanclub.com 
“Sometimes I find myself lost inside it, or I realise it has leaked into another project. I steal from it all the time. I forget what it was to begin with. It gets rewritten and then undone again. It changes all the time.” Kerith Manderson-Galvin. As evidenced across this archive the year 2020 put paid to an uncountable number of projects at every stage of development and presentation. For many artists however it was also an opportunity to finally admit the impossibility of a project which had been withering for a time and to redistribute the idea within it or reignite it as a new but different entity. Kerith Manderson-Galvin’s work, The Closer I Get To You, is a performance of private feelings and a memorial to queer identity. It is about performed and subconscious identity, self-annihilation, and an alternative to coming out. It was written with limitless ambition and a blind-eye to restrictions of space, time or finance. This was both its joy and curse.
It would need a big budget, a big space, a tank of water that is filled and swam in on stage, a performer suspended in the air, endless sheets of flesh coloured latex, the edge of a cliff, and more. It would need absolutely everything to be bigger than its limited resources and support. The slow space of 2020 and an opportunity to present an excerpt in Performance Spaces’ Liveworks Live Dreams allowed “a way to see that original vision as an unfinished moment that never made it in the way expected of it but did make it in other ways, and then took a detour.” And encouraged them to redevelop the text with a view to an intimate (and stageable) work for small audience. “… it all feels very queer, and worthwhile, and full of hope.”
An excerpt of stage directions was read in a performance, with music by Jules Pascoe, for The Impossible curated by Anna Tregloan as part of Performance Spaces' festival Liveworks - Live Dreams. 
Images are from this performance.
As part of The Impossible Project we have been inviting artists conceive of, attempt and document an Impossible Task or to undertake a conversation with Anna Tregloan where she attempts (the similarly impossible task) of capturing aspects of their creative endeavours in sketch form. 
We invited Kerith Manderson-Galvin to undertake an Impossible Task.  They attempted to escape from cable-ties.
-RETURN TO ARCHIVE-                                           -RETURN TO TASKS-

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