Ros Crouch - Getting started

Getting started has been difficult despite the various brainstorming sessions which threw up many ideas.

My initial ideas didn’t really fire me up:

The distorted reality between sleeping and waking
Twilight
Grand old Duke of York – neither up nor down
Winnie the Pooh poem ‘Halfway Down’
Between a rock and a hard place – damned if you do, damned if you don’t
Straddling – foot in both camps/ sitting on the fence
Boundaries, fences, borders, fringes, edges, Cusp- mathematical or symbolic
½ -the line in the middle of the fraction
Song- Half a Sixpence is better than half a farthing…
Half an income – 50% tax
Half chance/evens/between cetain & impossible

So it all went on the back burner!

I subsequently wondered about looking at the word NOW (between past & future) & how it might be played about with graphically.

I was quite excited about mind maps as the place between initial ideas and outcomes in design process. This got as far as thinking about recording stages in a mini album but decided the result would look more like a sketchbook and be difficult to display in a coherent way.

So it all went on the back burner again UNTIL I heard Caroline Bergvall read her ‘48 Dante Variations’.

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
Che la diritta via era smarrita

Hearing these few lines from Dante’s Inferno repeated as 48 different English translations sank in to me and I realised I had a subject at last.

I liked John A Carlyle’s 1844 translation:

IN the middle of the journey of our life, I found myself in a
dark wood; for the straight way was lost.

But how to approach it? On the back burner again.