A conversation with Lisa Le Feuvre, exhibition curator, and Renée Green

Endless Dreams and Water Between is the latest commission from New Visions, the Museum's contemporary art programme, which will be showing at the Museum from 22 January to 21 April 2009. In this interview the artist, Renée Green, and the curator of the exhibition, Lisa Le Feuvre, talk about the commission and discuss the inspirations behind Renée's work.

LLF : "To speak of islands is to speak of the sea. It’s an ambiguous non-location that is only representable through its limits and interruptions. Maritime charts used for navigation depict the sea using shorelines, soundings, direction of currents and, sometimes, the architecture and topologies that loom into view as sailors near shore. Without these reference points the sea is impossible to comprehend. I suppose I think of these vast stretches of water as being understood in relation to definable points – locations that, unlike the ambiguity of the sea, are paid attention to as soon as they become, through habit, somewhere to depart from or somewhere to arrive at. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the sea operates as a screen for the imagination – a projection that is oftentimes focused on the islands that punctuate its overwhelming mass."

RG : "As it’s possible to imagine the sea as a place for projection of perhaps endless dreams, I was interested in examining in this project Endless Dreams and Water Between particular sensations and perceptions that are intertwined with various histories and stories of locations and people that are surrounded by water, or feel as if they are. I’ve tried to think through the range of imaginary ways in which islands have been and are perceived, as well as the very material aspects of these locations that break vast stretches of water, to alter what was in times past called ‘earth island’. Encountering seas and oceans daily shifts one’s perspective – from the light and climate to the sounds, smells and passage that can be observed of ships and birds coming and going. Although islands aren’t usually associated with cities, but with fantastic ideas about leisure, independence and escape from ‘civilization’, each of the islands or peninsular locations I’ve focused on comprise a complex mixture of daily encounter that I’m tracing back and forth across time, from geologic history to the present. In my case being near the water is strangely reassuring, maybe because it’s always changing and that isn’t a surprise."

LLF : "In this project various characters narrate, navigate and speculate their way across different bodies of water, each driven by curiosity. There is Lyn, a Manhattan based writer, designer and indexer interested in systems of communication; Mar, a writer, herbalist and botanist based in Majorca; Raya, a writer and marine biologist based in San Francisco Bay; and Aria, a narrator and thinker residing in Majorca, Marin County and Manhattan. There is also George Sand – the French writer, whose book Winter in Majorca is one of your many references in Endless Dreams and Water Between. Here she describes, often inaccurately, the island of Majorca and her journey to it. Her experiences were influenced by the miserable time she had on the island – the reality did not come near to her imagined version. When published it was introduced and annotated through footnotes by Robert Graves who clearly disagrees with her. Your actual and imagined characters seem to negotiate between the general and the particular, as well as across the constancy of change and the interdependence of fiction and fact. These are concerns that seem to reverberate through your artistic practice."

RG : "Yes. While in the process of developing this work it has been interesting to attempt to further hear and uncover aspects of submerged pasts and presents – including unsettled disagreements – via an examination of places, a panoply of materials and through speculative imagining. The main characters in Endless Dreams and Water Between are island-residents who probe where they are. There are also additional characters, as the cast can be thought to include many unnamed actors who span centuries. The title does refer to ‘endless dreams’ which implies dreams shared by an assortment of people over time that may continue into the future. But what are these dreams? Some of the more subterranean named characters include the modernist poet Laura Riding, who lived with Robert Graves in Majorca, and also the composer and pianist Frédéric Chopin who accompanied George Sand on her journey there. Two couples of artists at different times on that particular island. The tourist industry that has grown around the sites that were inhabited by these people is daunting and curious. What exactly is projected onto islands over time, for example, from the perspective of the Occident? What has been imagined and thought from other locations in the world about islands and by the inhabitants themselves? Who were the first inhabitants? What happened to them? What have islands produced, and how have people living on them created beyond what those travelling to them imagine in ways that have significantly altered history, language, and perception? How do they continue to be thought of and experienced? These questions lead to many intertwined stories and dreams."

LLF : "And importantly, you leave these questions open to ever expanding responses as facts and fiction continue to inform and contest what we might think we know and understand. Such are the questions that underpin the very concerns of the National Maritime Museum as objects and ideas are placed under scrutiny as these traces reveal how the sea, stars and time are used by human beings to attempt, and often fail, to understand their place in the world."