E Bush: Findings in Time (performance)

Emma Bush – Findings in Time: Material Memoirs (performance)

Beginning in a process of making material memoirs with my mother’s, Kathleen Bush (83) and Gail Marie Gauden (78), I will share extracts from emerging short stories springing from this source.  This storytelling focuses on memory, materiality, discovering ways to listen and create intimate encounter. These memoirs circle around a rhythm of return and repair, unearthing memories shared across bodies, times, and places. Whilst challenging conventions of time they reflect the ongoingness of life and the perpetual re-arrangement of things. These memoirs use materiality and sensory observation as an anchor for re-call, and trace shared acts of sensing performed together with my mother’s across the kitchen table, the garden, the imagination, and the page. 

This is a project with roots entrenched in, the fear of loss and old age, the immanence of death and our relationships with place. It is an expansive process mapping a person’s life in which we encounter ‘a rush of stories’ (Tsing:2015). How can stories offer a sense of contact with another time, place or moment and re-conceive of memory and thus ageing through a more-than-human and non-linear lens? Foregrounding an active relationship with place, ecological roots or ‘environmental inheritance’ these writings attempt to touch the intimate synergy and exchange between bodies and ‘environment’: “in which the human is always intermeshed with the more than human world.’’ (Alaimo: 2010)

The title ‘Findings in Time’ indicates a guiding idea which emphasises that a performance or story can be discovered by making it*. In other words, storytelling, writing, and creative acts are processes which invite receptivity and call up images, rhythms and constellations of words that find their own agency, presence, form, order, re-ordering and multiplicities of meaning.

Image Credit: Memory sketch from the notebook of Gail Marie Gauden. 

*I have borrowed the phrase ‘we discovered a performance by making it’ from Goat Island Performance Group.