Pamela Crowe

My work is concerned with the bareness and complexity of the acts of standing with someone and of speaking to them; of what we might not say; how close we get. I wonder how possible it is to make intimacy and loss visible (not ‘acted’ intimacy, not acting) but through live images or visuals. These might be a conversation with someone I’ve known a long time. I orchestrate it, they go with it, they trust me, it’s watched. Something happens and afterwards the viewer might think “all the wonderful things are over”. I’m choosing to make my writing defer to voice, I’m returning the words from the page to the voice and I’m searching for a way of speaking that is so direct, so pure that the listener will be changed by it (see Frank O’Hara, the Personism manifesto). I’m looking at the work of Barthes and the immediacy he loves in the writers he loves – and his own attempts to speak directly. He talks about being able to Speak so that (a) the Listener/Reader learns to know oneself better (b) that afterwards, the Listener’s soul, absent, is returned.