Accidental partial presence. I’ve been eyeing this scene for a while, it’s almost too obvious and I tried ignoring it, but then it became an itch I had to scratch. Something appealed to me in the unfussyness. It’s not erasure or omission. A partial presence, in it’s absence.
I also like it because it plays by my rules. no interference, no fabrication. Only what’s there…or isn’t.
“Thou art a scholar - speak to it!”
///
Ghost Sign
DIsplaced
Hauntology
“Now a river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it parted and became four riverheads. The name of the first is Pishon; it is the one which skirts the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. And the gold of that land is good.”
Genesis 2:10-12 NKJV
I think I walked this river bed in a dream. The river ran inside a mountain where the gold was abundant. I spoke with the elders for permission to access the land and its gold.
Once inside everything changed, I was transported to other lands and encounters.
///
I made another 3 drawings and then put gold into one. I’m breaking my own rules now. My definition of partial presences required the use of negative space, of absence. And now I have filled it, manifested an agent, embodied something.
I would be annoyed and pedantic, and refuse…but right now I just want to make and this exploration needs to happen - if only to reinforce the use of absence and incompleteness.
I’ve now purchased some copper leaf to render another set. Something in the materials calls. Giving myself permission to detour actually feels helpful right now, as I try to recalibrate.
The narrative I’ve attached to this work feels off brief but then works at the same time.
I’m being indecisisve
Lost In translation
Key words: Strange landscape: Translation, Substrait.
I’m back on the paddles again, diluted ink on paper. On the MA I made an animation of different ink rendered paddles morfing together. It was very satisfying visually and conceptually worked with the research I was doing.
I am keen to progress, to move forward with the art work I am doing and don’t want to regress and fall back on ‘old tricks’, yet at the same time a lot of the work made on the MA feels untapped, barey explored, meriting more attention.
I want to find a different protagonist to the paddle. (for fear of being overly repititious and monotone). I can’t quite identify it yet some but some how it’s key to the narrative of this next work. The best way for me to discover work is to do work, explore the materials and not think too tough before I start.
Bleeding different inks across different media gives different results. No shock there. But as I work I am exploring in more minutia there’s minor details, trying to tease the narrative out of myself. Gauche doesn’t give good greys. Khadi doesn’t bleed well. But at least I’m making.
The paper matters too , well the background really, the first drawings had been made in a sketchbook with off white ivory paper, which I find I prefer to the stark bleached white of regular paper. The ink too has a significant role to play, how it bleeds the greys and it creates and the textures too.
I make a couple of hasty drawings and find qualities and flaws in both. Somewhere there is a beautiful drawing that carries more of me and less of me. That speaks in delicate tones and emphatic statements.
As I work, words come to mind.
Some strange landscape
Familiar yet foreboding
in its obscurity,
and troublesome in navigation
A land of deep/broad marshes
dense with reeds, vegetation,
brooding waterways and darker secrets.
Where the sun can be lost
in a cauldron of murky clouds,
born of midnight and memory.
Narrow paths lead to nought,
yet still trod..
Moisture hangs in the cool air,
breath of the land.
Birds ascend and descend
in the partial day.
I also wonder how these could become prints, what freedoms and control I have. Also should I paint a ground on the paper? To get the off white/cream or even a deep indigo to recieve a stark white drawing…now if only I could remember where I put that super white paint.
Other renderings that occur to me are to do this in aerosol, mystic black a translucent paint that applies thinly but can be built up in layers.
I need more paper to test on. Long narrow strips - that could be stitched together in sections. There is Something key about stitching the sheets together. I don’t know why but I like the break in drawings that the gutter of the sketch book gives. A breathe. A pause in the beat. A tangent of the substrait. How the ground and air can influence the passage. How the vertical leads the horizontal. Or the sacred influences the flesh.
Also ratios are important. White to grey to black on the paper. 1/5 white 2/5 grey 1/5 black.
///
(((As a foot note I came back to this drawing the next day and found I liked it much more than the day I made it. What I had thought was the wrong paper and paint - has become a preference…for now))).
The simple act of organising, has this aesthetic and emotional quality that becomes satisfaction Storing and managing, prepping. My work often sits with chaos through the making process, so moments of order feels reassuring.
.
Saline grief
f
a
l
l
s
Between
strips of linen
The hasty steps
Of a breathless witness
White cloth draws
confusion and query
Why seek for warm bodies
in cold climbs?
Woman
why are you weeping?
And Why do our desires miss the mystery unfolding before us?
Deeper
than
the
earths
foundational
trenches
In the emptiness
In the quiet
Are answers
To questions unformed
More profound
Than the sum total
of life time
of dreams and desires
In the dark
In the dark
In the dark
Familiar cadences
bring comfort
and revelation
To tired hidden hearts
In the breath
Fear is cast out
benediction ushered in
And forgiveness
Becomes boundless
I found tis drawing on my way home. I wish I had made it. I didn’t know that cast away fluids had pathos. Evaporating ghosts of a river people. Ones who have since made passage from this world.
I seem to repeat myself, but if I don’t make the weird or seemingly repetitive work then I’ll not process properly to arrive at something I do like. I don’t dislike this work but I don’t feel convinced either. The colours are off my ususal palette but then it’s good to disrupt your own practice. It is still me abusing the camera on my phone, it’s become a useful tool for documenting and sketching, although I am loathed to admit it. I have also edited the images in photoshop so I do have a hand in their existence.
it’s when I make this work that start asking myself the question - what do I really want to make? The answer big drawings. so how do I make that happen? I guess find the drawings and process.
More misuse of cameras, wilful distortion of colour and focus. I’m tired of social media expectations, I’ll make: what I want, how I want, when I want. I refuse to serve the blind idiot machine god of the digital. I exist in spite of my digital footprint, not because.
Values have always been hard to keep clean, to not be swayed by the environment around me. Making art and holding my motives in check isn’t easy, I want an audience - but at what cost?
Something about these colours again, I keep returning to ambers and blacks as a palette - why? What pulls at me from the inside to render in this way, what do they mean to me? Maybe somehow they represent the colours of mystery, the unexplained, the colours of change.
It would be good to print this twice. One incarnation as a digital Giclee with the blacks as velvety as possible, and another as an interpretation of the image, a hand rendered etching or screen print, concentrating on the layering of the colour and the texture of the inks. I could go down a whole rabbit hole of ‘hand made inks’ (and go large in format)…
But as a good friend warned - that might be jumping tracks…
I have introduced small rules to my practice, to disrupt and influence my creative process. I think we often do it in the everyday without realising. Which also raises the question what laws do we unnecessarily live under?
Born from work on my MA and fInal show. These drawings have become one of my temporary obsessions. The basic rule comprises of making three marks , they must go in differing directions to their neighbours. with no predrawing of outlines is allowed. . The lines of the negative space inevitably go wonky and I get annoyed and then become resigned.
Small marks - partial presences combine to make a greater presence that describes presence/ absence (a partial precence) by the negative space denoted.
I’m not entirely sure what the outcome will be, but that’s kinda the point. To loose control but still remain influential. I’m looking for something but I don’t know what. This is the search for what I’m searching for.
I know you hear me
I know you
can hear me
Your replies
are
like whale song
They travel right
through
m e
But
I str
ugg
le
To find
words
in
the
s o u n d s
I feel you
///
Sometimes words are too small
To fill the meaning
I have
Some days
I want
to be
with you
O u t s i d e
of words
I’m big
really big
I fill whole
libraries
with
just
one
thought
You can’t look at
me
But you can
I have the phrase 3 rivers echoing round at the moment - I’m not sure why yet …but then that’s been the case recently. I follow some firefly off into the woods, intrigued but blind to the path I’m taking. SOmetime language leads and sometimes it obscures. It’s hard to know which is which at times.
I want to make more clay slip drawings. And I hope that this is developement from it. I liked the first one I made how it spoke back to me and how it felt in the making. It also taught me a lesson or two… but then work that matters will do that - push you and demand of you more than you want to give.
I’m asking what form do I want to draw and why? This will require more practice based research. I can repeat the paddle form I had begun with and it may be that it’s what I continue with. But I also want to push it further and deeper - to expand from it.
What has come about is the idea of using clay from threee rivers, three different tones. I could even blend the clays to gradiate.
The first thought that comes to mind is about coalescence an individuality and yet community- wait that sounds kinda familiar…
Three sources of fluid movement and passage. One enters the river at any point an can potentially leave at any time. No clear entrance or exit. Flow
I know I can find red clay, grey clay occuring naturally and I hope a cream. It does make me wonder how many different colour clays naturally occurring clays exist. And then what wall/location I can make the work upon. The locaion will profoundly affect the work as I like it to be inresponse to it’s environment.
I’ve also been wonder in about entering and exiting the liminal. What does it look like? How can we track it? What prompts it? Entering change. Exiting change. Do we ever leave change?
On another note I was reminded of Four rivers in Genesis
Pishon
Gihon
Hiddekel
Euphaties
“And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became four heads.”
Genesis 2:10 ASV
This is first of collaborations with musician and artist Wilderthorn. I was invited to create a sculpture inspired by Wilderthorns’s music to act as a beacon-lighting moment for their new track.
Sometimes I can overcomplicate things and forget good ideas that I’ve had. In collaborating - Wilderthorn reminded me of the animation/articulation I had begun to explore in my sculpture. This project has enabled me to really play with that. There are a number of ideas and emotions flowing into this for me and they grew as I made each segemented staff.
For from you are all things and to you are all things. The natural flow of the unseeen. Invitation and invocation. Honouring and accommodating. Making space.
Music and videography: Wilderthorn.
Wilderthorn is deeply talented and just a really great person. you can explore more of his work and discover tour dates too….
www.wilderthorn.com
Wilderthorn’s track Place is available now on all streaming platforms. Spotify : https://open.spotify.com/album/1IZc8R...
iTunes : https://music.apple.com/gb/album/plac...
Bandcamp : https://wilderthorn.bandcamp.com/trac...
Image my own
How can a slow incident make beautiful?
Gradual incremental accumulation over academic years. I still struggle to call this my work, but it is, creative observation.
I see the universe unfolding, like something taken by the Hubble telescope… were it to look inward. The rebirth of a nebulous cloud.
Only I know where this is and where it came from and where it went.
///
Make another drawing bag, for trees. Location? Prayer? Tool?
Fast and loose. If your reading this before the MA show then your in on a wee secret. I’m not sure what I’m doing is going to work. In theory in my head it sounds and looks great. However the idea is still in development and testing. I don’t normally work like this but the MA has got me approaching things differently.
I have mentioned before that I want to work larger so this is me testing mark making with river clay. It could all go oh so wrong and I need to return to the studio to see how it dries…it’s likely that it wants to shrink crack and fall off the wall.
I’ve collected some clay from the banks of a stream, which feels appropriate to my focus of being in passage and navigation. I’ve found a location where traditionally there were clay works. I like the feel of the authenticity of the material the land and it’s history - they are all important to the spirit of the work - even if no one else knows - I do.
I have some bags made up from canvas and more crafted for performance - I’m not entirely sure how practical they will be. In addition for the test I just used disposable plastic icing bags which felt a little ‘off’.
The test worked well and softening the clay to a looser ‘slip’ consistency gave a satisfying result, which I was able to apply to the wall. I will need to render the slip and remove some of the small sticks and stones as they clog the nozzle and make for less clean marks.
I really liked the clean lines which feels important, something about the rawness of the material giving a fine result feels right. I need to consider scale and the marks felt a little too large and I want the minor to coalesce in community to make the larger. Scale is a key word for me at the moment as a number of people have raised it about my work at a time when I too have been seriously considering. It seems like an important progression and part of the voice of the work.
I also need to collet more clay as I used all the sample up.
As a footnote I love the sound from the video - something I am trying to be more active in - the film and sound side of my practice.
I still haven’t tidied the studio. Working on concluding various pieces I’ve started. Theres a mess of clamps and indigo stain on my bench. An evolution of this new from that’s been appearing in my drawings and play.
As ever I have fallen for a material, well a colour this time - this deep midnight of a colour that speaks to me in words made of water
///.
Another impromptu piece the peg and wood veneers - which has been assigned the loose working title of ‘passport’. I really need to try and find more titles for the work I plan to show. Also define what other pieces I want to show in the exhibition. How do I pull my audience into this ‘Lore’ the place of passage? Without being condescending or too directive? I find it interesting and odd that again language as such a strong role to play in visual art work, but then it’s my visual artwork and perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising.
I wish I had more time to pull together all the snips of thoughts and theory that have been occurring as I work, I know that the Blog curation helps but I feel Like I still have littered all over my sketchbooks and notes and digital notes a host of thoughts that would benefit from being processed.
Then there are two round forms made up of rectangles that references the bundle drawings I have been making they are an echo or development of that and also if I can sort the clay drawing - ‘Summoning’ on the wall then a reference to that too. All comprised of smaller parts - rectangle blocks. (Everything is divisible).
They feel like some form of navigational device, a compass or sextant. Those terms don’t quiet feel right, but something akin to that.
I do worry that my work is old fashioned - constructed in wood and stain and metal. Everyone else seems to be using AI or film, where does that leave this work? What is the significance of what I am doing making? But then I am learning to make because its in me, that I can worry about galleries and collectors I I want. But that derails the work, the research and forms quiet a different practice. Doing this MA has taught me that. The work that flows from me is genuinely my own and creative. Free. And perhaps has more value.
Uh oh now I’m in trouble, I’d forgotten my interest in Quantum physics - that it also entertains the binary disruption by permitting both to be possible at the same time. And yet why do I separate my art and physics - psychologically I compartmentalise them, yet they are one and the same.
I discovered a short video on programming a Quantum Qubit and how it models the existence of non binary states. I don’t know how much I can get into this as its counter to my preferred ways of thinking - I’m not mathematical or science inclined so it’s a push.
Libby Heaney is an award winning, London based artist with an unusual background. She holds a PhD and worked as a researcher in quantum physics - a discipline Einstein called “spooky” and Penrose said “makes absolutely no sense”.
Now resident at Somerset House Studios in London, Heaney creates sticky entanglements between moving image, performance, installation, sculpture and print, usually combining these with advanced technologies such as machine learning, game engines & quantum computing - a new type of computer that processes information based on the weird laws of quantum physics.
Now this get’s interesting for me because it begins to draw the key areas I’m interested around Derrida - difference, Khora and kinetics out of academic theory into science and the physical world. She discusses removing the emphasis from the individual as modelled in modern western philosophy into a deep interconnectivity. To the point that with entanglement of atoms, photons they become impossibly connected and loose their individuality, so deeply connected - that if you try to remove an individual out it destroys the system.
She says that reality isn’t about individuality but relationality.
Again I feel the sense of the kinetic and the Khora. Somehow there is a remodelling of priorities down to a quantum level. What we count as the logic blocks of our existence are deconstructed and represented.
Made in planning for the show. The format is wrong - I won’t have the space to fit this exact drawing, but I hope to make something close. There has become a deep satisfaction in the repetitive marks and fro what the summon. A variant of the paddle but more evolved, I could almost draw these all day, completely indulgent but who know what it would inspire.
I just don’t have the time in the day to make everything I would like, there’s the rub, to be selective in what I pursue, what feels most potent and alive?
This form that is suggested by the multiple marks is almost incidental but yet equal, the coming together of elementals, community expression. the larger form is empty yet present because of the others. The paddle form is modified - as I mentioned earlier evolving, to move not upon water but upon other. ‘To move upon other’ - I like that.
In the liminal, in passage, what has been ‘known’ is now fragemented, solute. I return to ideas of decomposition, autolysis, not as an end but as a translation of materials, of passing.
Having indulged in making clay drawings for the sake of it I realised that I should animate them as I have with some of the ink drawings, the ‘passage’ created feels close to what I have been pursuing. There is a strange tension of pursuing what I feel is so elusive. Yet I need to continue.
Again I am making work in a very loose fashion, just getting it made - so it can exist, if feels right to have a growing number of works that I can focus down on in the future. I imagine this work being animated much more beautifully, the current format of Giffs is perhaps the most accessible but also the crudest. And I do wonder what software would be best I doubt I need powerful software but one that can blend between drawings well. In addition I suspect that I can move the animations further on conceptually to make the work more engaging, I don’t feel like I have to add a lot more narrative - more let the work evolve as I have with the sculpture.
There is scope to experiment more with the drawing, what. and how I render. I do enjoy the gentled looping of it, the constant transitioning and translating, perhaps a peace in the constant changing, that for it to resolve would actual feel uncomfortable.
More a fluid tool of passage, which intuitively makes sense.
MA Fine Art Digital: FIlm
5 minute film on my practice and research.
I've been learning how to work when time isn’t abundant, where and when are my most fertile times.
How to document them. Drawing works, it gives me pleasure and genuinely gives a few for what it might look like.
It’s not about the work, but how I work.
I wrestle, I contemplate, Inscrutinise, I intuit. Sometimes I just make.
Distracting myself or being sat on the tube and just writing. Ways to distract and lighten the process, seem to help my brain.
Also considering names, following a chat with Jonathan around the show, that in the naming can help lead viewers into the work.
Whether Poles
Deep Compass
Passage Sextant
Whenwhere
These don’t quiet feel right and I need to figure a name for each piece I think….although I like the idea of wrestling with evocative names
