If I had you

Darren Almond is an artist with astounding talent. Though he may have lost the Turner Prize to Simon Starling, I still think his work is very moving.

I went to Tate Britain yesterday to take a look at the Turner Prize nominees and winner. The works of Darren Almond was the most sensitive and moving for me. It dealt with personal and collective memory and was heartfelt. Really just beautiful. I walked into his room. Black. Hardly any light, except those coming from the 4 four-screen video installation. This piece is called 'If I had you 2003' and focuses on the personal memories of his widowed grandmother.

"Almond filmed her as she revisited Blackpool, where she had spent her honeymoon, for the first time since her husband’s death twenty years earlier. She watches a lone couple dancing in the famous Tower Ballroom. The soundtrack combines a gentle piano melody with sliding footsteps, discernible in each corner of the gallery. Their circular movement echoes the turning sails and creaking mechanism of an illuminated windmill from Blackpool’s promenade; Almond’s poignant metaphor for the reality of passing time and the inevitability of death."

(tate.org.uk)

"Darren A:
“If I Had You began when I was visiting my grandma a few years ago. She was in hospital she’d just had a mild stroke. And when I visited her she mistook me for my grandfather and this was the starting point of the piece. I decided to take her back to a ballroom in Blackpool tower where she used to dance with my grandfather. When she’d had the stroke she kind of leant into my ear and said that she missed him and that she’d like to pass away and return to dancing with her husband. And her body’s failing her but her mind wants to be away with him. So this piece is about a portrait of a widow caught between the present and the past in some sort of field of memory.

There are four projections all shot in Blackpool at the time of the Illuminations: we’ve got one large screen which is the illuminated windmill, which is signifying work and the passage of time; you’ve got a smaller, candy-lit fountain of water - the elixir of life, obviously! You’ve got the footsteps of an unknown couple. And on the fourth screen you’ve got my grandmother, watching it all and recounting her past through the subtle changes of expression across her face.”

(tate.org.uk)

When you sit in the room, you cannot help but feel emotional. First the windmill and it's slow creaking sounds. The never-ending and monotonuous grinding of its mechanics. Then the fountain. Poignant. Then the lone couple.. you can only see their footsteps, but you can tell, they are beautiful dancers. And most important, his grandmother. With the music and the thickness in the air, you can't help but think about life, death, memories, and what was once.

I could almost hear the echoes of her past. She dancing with her husband in Blackpool once more. I could almost hear her memories. The laughter, the music, the footsteps, the costumes, the lights, the zest in the air...

From her expressions... I felt her longing. And in that room, I cried. Not only because of the beauty of the piece, but also because of gesture of love that has been captured forever in this work.