Artists

Anselm Kiefer: /  by Justin Harrison

In thinking about large format drawings I remembered Anselm Kiefer. His work centres upon using natural media at large scale and at times drawings falls off the wall into sculpture. His use of  straw, ash, clay, lead, and shellac.

I’m jealous of how prolific some artists are, Keifer especially. Yet I feel at times my work moves too slowly along a concepts and motifs. But then this is me thinking too much - when I’ve learned that its better just to make as quickly as possible. Then think about it..

I am mindful of space and how to best occupy it with drawing and with sculpture, especially for the upcoming show. How do I best conclude what I have been doing and leave space for it to continue after?

It’s this scale thing again, I love drawing and somehow this feels like a rightful progression, to go bigger and offer some of the work more gravitas seemingly. I need to draw more - I wonder if I need to make more preparatory drawings or just have at it.

I’ looking at spaces differently - imagining drawing in it, what it might look like to fill it.

///

Currently listening to the sound track of people working with wood in the forest. It’s somehow pleasing and calming for me…weird.

 

Richard Long /  by Justin Harrison

Following a discussion in the MA group I've begun looking at Richard Long again, as his work shares sensibilities with mine. the use of clay/ mud from origin and the use of natural materials, clustering, bundling.

Historically I’ve not paid too much attention to Richard Long’s work. For various reasons I’ve felt distant from it. In all honesty I don’t have a lot of time for performance work or land based art. It felt like it kinda fell into a dated era in the 80’s and 90’s, one that I didn’t connect to. I preferred a greater level of narrative, even if only implied.

However on reflection of the work I’ve been making the past year or so I see a lot of commonality. His choice of materials being a key one, mud stone. The minimal and honest  presentation of the work as a form of documentation or record keeping. It’s important to know what is and has been and contextualise my own research and outcomes.

In addition I also notice with his constructed a stone cross that it is very close aesthetically and  follows similar rules to my drawing for imaginary bundles, the informal organic interlocking.

I do think we take separate paths when it comes to concept, he gravitated towards the natural, pattens, human presence in nature and it’s physicaldocumentation, where as I strive towards examining cultural passage through language, the unravelling of mystery, poetry.

Where as Long describes his work in this way.

‘you could say that my work is ... a balance between the patterns of nature and the formalism of human, abstract ideas like lines and circles. It is where my human characteristics meet the natural forces and patterns of the world, and that is really the kind of subject of my work’ (quoted in Richard Long: Walking in Circles, p.250)

I do like the scale of his mud drawing that is inspiring and looking at his larger drawings awakens deeper desires , and I do wonder how I too can get a chance to make on a similar scale. Again following the discussion with Jonathan my work needs to scale up.

Could I do that at the show? Fill a whole 6meters of board with a clay slip drawing? JK did say dream big…

 

Ernst Haeckel /  by Justin Harrison

Ernst Haeckel - inspiration of form and colour. Beautiful and yet loaded.
How can drawing convey more than the subject? How can tiny apertures release greatness?

Out of small comes abundance (TD Jakes)

I’m keen to use natural materials and not interfere - yet I do find key colours come that I am drawn to. Collect and muse upon.

 

Ghosts, partial presences Spectres /  by Justin Harrison

Image my own (Digitally edited). It’s a failed digital photo but I love it, I confess I found it in my photo album, and have no idea how I made it.

If the ghosts of UVR past haunt her work, ghost being actual history imagined history and environmental and inherited history both direct and indirect

Something that has theoretically died, returns as a spectre. Revenant. Not just people but also  concepts, values beliefs. Returned but transformed.

Something of the past has returned and is revenant in and through UvRs art. A spectre, a ghost.

Her father, the camps, the wood, the people. More importantly her geographical imagings - simulacra - ghost of a ghost. All manifest around her work.

If the ghosts of UVR past haunt her work, the ghost being Rydingsvards lived history, her inherited history both direct and indirect and her imagined history . Then what of it? What does this mean. What does this mean for the liminal?

The liminal is the naturally occurring 'differance', that brings us the necessary temporary relief from our rightful and wrongful structures, to allow change to enter.

Ghosts are the active but partially agency that differs from the liminal inactive

Wood the Ghosts of trees liminal agents in the in between

Working with the ghosts of materials

Disturbing Ghosts:

Does the liminal disrupt language because of translation? The need for translation. Which creates a change i the angle of vision?

Disruption of language. Hamlets father . Is he called father, ghost or king? As a spectre he is all three and none, for his body is dead and gone he cannot embody the king or father and a ghost is not embodied.

 

What do I really think about Anish Kapoor? /  by Justin Harrison

I’m torn, I’m not sure I like Anish Kapoor’s work anymore, which is kinda tricky as I was looking at him for my research paper. I’m sure he doesn’t mind, but there you have it, after looking for a while I’ve become less enthusiastic about it.

I do like the language of the materials. The imperfect dialogue, I can’t translate it all, but who can? The text of steel or the dialect of paint. It murmers in deep tones, a quiet melodic muttering.

Yet I feel disatisfied, like I’ve eaten but still feel hungry. I want to access more but feel arrested at times. I know how much Homi Bhabha enjoys his work, which makes me stop, pulls me up. But when I hear him talk it seems like a lot of the creativity and intellectual rigour is Bhabha’s rather than what Kapoor has invested in the work.

Some of his recent paintings feel tedious and a little in the territory of art therapy. I find I don’t want to interpret them, I feel repelled rather than a desire to enquire. Content and context matter. Materials matter. The above work I do like however I’m finding that there is more that I don’t.

The work of translation and interpretation is often the burden of the audience, yet how much? This is another rabbit hole of Roland Barthes and others.

 

Wangechi Mutu /  by Justin Harrison

I’ve known of Wangechi Mutu’s work - but feel like I saw it for the first time today. Some artists work goes deep, and she is one. I’m a sucker for beautiful mark making that carries difficult resonances to it.

I guess I’m interested on a superficial level because of her use of bled inks, collage and layering. But then her work occupies and very interesting and challenging place. Her dialogue in the work confrontational and powerful. I hadn’t known of her sculpture before - so this is new to me. It’s encouraging to see an artist working between sculpture and drawing so successfully, I struggle to reconcile the two practices a lot of the time.

Mutut’s work broods on the paper and in content, it has a slow but purposeful movement to it, never feeling rushed. It’s fascinating how she controls time and pace with colours, textures and marks.

It has a sense of resistance and strong independance - creating her own aesthetic language. It also has a feel of the liminal, the sense of time, ghostly and refusing categorisation, the figures feel as though they are constantly evolving refusing the binary.

https://vielmetter.com/artists/wangechi-mutu

 

ZARINA HASHMI /  by Justin Harrison

ZARINA HASHMI - I notice her work has similar motifs to the ‘Bundle’ drawings, in addition her work focuses a lot on displacement. I discovered her trying to wade through a lecture I found by Homi Bhabha. He’s messing with me in a wonderful way. He hits all the notes that connect. I think I’m actually starting to really enjoy researching. Language, displacement, translation, liminal. And I didn’t realise that he was so closely connected to the arts.

I need to investigate her work more.

57:30 These material practices that I have termed the poses of facture are more than mere surfaces of inscription or materials submitted to transformation. They're as active in their signification of cultural translation as any other discursive or semiotic system.

And I have often thought that we have been so trapped in the idea of face-to-faceness or in the idea of binaries or polarities, things that I have resisted thinking about, forms a foreignness or otherness or alterity that there are other ways in which the making of work is also the translation too, the making of work is the encounter with alterity and I find that very much in her(Zarina Hashmi) case.

Bhabha Homi

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVQcdbSV6OI

 

Translation /  by Justin Harrison

I’m now obsessing which can be a good and a bad thing. The paddle is now a key object, I’m making them in my studio and in my drawings. The tool for navigation, immediate and resides in our hands, yet partners with a craft of some description.

I’ve been listening to Anish Kapoor interviews and reading text as research for y paper - and them there was a brief discussion about making a series of the same object or work can up, and I found it encouraging, to explore an idea - open it up and out. I think I worry that I am just repeating iterations endlessly and that there is no value to it. I am annoined that I feel like I need permission.

The drawings are strangely pleasing for me, I’m connecting with the way the ink bleeds out to granular and the empty negative that it creates.

This particular media I’m using was ironically made by Stuart Smeple in a reaction to Kappor’s Vantablack, it has a quality in its miss use that I especially like. When diluted it has a granular property that separates out into delicious bands of gradients, leaving small tidal marks and tracks. Something deeper in me connects to specific marks, moments. Yet it leaves this gritty feel, like BhaBha’s scalar interstices, the bundle divisable. Collective moments spread across time inconsistently. The bleeding through, the threshold melts, margins fade.

 

Uncomfortable relationships /  by Justin Harrison

I am starting to from an uncomfortable relationship with UVR and her work. One minute I love it and the next I am uninterested. I keep returning to it though I love the forms and  textures she creates and uses. It’s deeply satisfying the shapes she discovers the way they articulate the unknown. Her prolific generation of different forms feels so intentional and yet unplanned. Great forms sweeps across a plane or intricate animated forms like barnacles cluster together, mouths open feeding on an invisible source, an implication that there is more in the unseen around us. Yet when I listen to interviews and read I find little spoken of other than the process and begrudging concessions about the past.

It appears that much of UVRs work is automatic and whilst there is nothing wrong in working this way, I can’t help but feel that something is being missed here. When UVR talks about her work it comes in simple safe statements. Yet the work has way more going onthan just the surface.

But how can we ignore the significance of who the woman UvR is and what has happened and informed her life and therefor her work?

 

Age and time /  by Justin Harrison

Image my own

In researching Ursula Von Rydingsvard for my research paper - I've come across a some ideas and material that connects with my practice - I'm curious about time, how it is perceived, approached and explored by the artist. Process is a key part of my practice and I see often that this relates to ideas of time and history. The layering of materials, techniques and processes. Building up and breaking down.

“Levi Strauss remarked on the laborious working process of layer-by-layer marking, sawing, and grinding, noting that “at each stage of the process, hundreds and thousands of marks were inscribedon the mass with pencil, saw, grinder and a variety of hand tools, adding up to a wearing down.” This ”adding up to a wearing down” Levi Strauss saw as “the back and forth of actual time, the time taken to mean it” and he added”

“Though this sculptor does not practice mimesis (her
humility precludes it), these human inscriptions
of eventfulness are echoed in the formation of tidepools, tree stumps,and river beds - minute quotidian world formative acts.
Thousands of marks made consciously,
leavened with kind cutsand crual, then leaded
down, blackened to absorb the light. A topology of
chambered need. An apparition of the dark.”

The Sculpture of Ursula Von Rydingsvard P 46 The Sculpture of Ursula Von Rydingsvard P 46

Also:


”Positioning her sculptures at the midpoint between metaphor and concreteness, she deliberately multiplies narrative possibilities through a va-et-vient of memory and action.” The Sculpture of Ursula Von Rydingsvard P89

And:

“Time puts all back into equalibrium, which is more in keeping with natural laws. I would like my work to be as though time acted upon it---avery long time.” UVR from her journal - (taken from The Sculpture of Ursula Von Rydingsvard) p 82

Basic to her technique- which she surely developed in answer to a deep and indefinable need - is the element of repetition, the implicit statement that there are situations in life that have no beginning and no end. The arts in human history are threaded through with the impulse to escape calendar time (surely the basis of Islamic art), and many of von Rydingsvards routines suggest her need to enter the timeless universe of mythology. In casual remarks she has revealed her deep respect for ritual - the repetition of eternal gestures, always the same, in orderer to propriate the gods who themselves are always the same.” The Sculpture of Ursula Von Rydingsvard p 60

To Ponder:

Time is variable and I don’t believe it can be considered constant, even atomic clocks cans show variance when subject to different gravities.

In addition the Ethiopian calendar and Persian calendar both differsto the Gregorian calendar commonly used by the west, what does this mean a global and then universal understanding of time? The Gregorian calendar cannot be the standard by which everything is measured.

By recycling and repurposing material like wood it’s age becomes multiple, the initial growth of the wood will have been progressively accumulated (demonstrated by the rings), then there will be the first intervention where it is constructed into an item - a chest of draws or scaffold plank, then the 2nd visitation rePlacing, rePurposing and refashioning where it can be made into another item, and then decomposition. Which age applies then tot he item and by what/who’s calendar? This relates again to Derrida and Spectres and time being ‘out of joint’

 

There is nothing new /  by Justin Harrison

In researching for my art and paper - I am on an interesting/infuriating and yet somehow not surprising route. By ‘interesting’ I actually feel like none, a non route, nowhere. The more I read the less sure I am what it is I am doing. (Standard MA Fine Art emotion)

Frustratingly, but then perhaps mercifully I see work that I am making, or about to make, or want to make. With Theaster Gates I see the shingled roofs I begun to explore. The RePlacement of materials, I like to choose. Especially reclaimed wood.

With Von Rydingsvard, I see the paddles I have been drawing and want to carve out of wood.(She make shovels to be specific, but they are so close I can’t ignore them).

Repetition feels like a little death. I need there to be a significant departure from what has gone before to justify my making. Especially If I am going to ask others to view the work.

I also struggle as an artist, with the continual re-presentation of objects and images to be interpreted again only slightly differently, with the burden of interpretation on the audience to discover the newly imbued meaning. Especially with my own work. Originality is a troublesome notion. Very little is new, yet creativity for me requires a healthy does of originality, rather than a nuance one.

 

Gregory Crewdson /  by Justin Harrison

What I am interested in is that moment of transcendence, where one is transported into another place, into a perfect, still world.
Gregory Crewdson - https://gagosian.com/artists/gregory-crewdson/

I find it a little strange to be engaged in sculpture and abstract work, and yet of all the artists right now that I feel any affinity to would be Gregory Crudeson. I’m working through a list of a whole bunch of different artist in my research. However usually I only connect to one or two works of per artist and not so much the body of their work.

However with Crewdson I don’t get weary of his work. I find that there is a movie in one photograph, I find enough room in his work to wonder around. And then I discovered the above quote which feels akin to my preoccupations of the Passage and Place of transformation.

I feels like I am witnessing a slow decay in his images, the gradual reduction of a granular world to an exit of some form, either physical or existential. His work carries a romantic sadness that reminds me of ‘Flemish Game’ paintings but goes deeper.

I’m not sure exactly how he connects to the Derrida theory I’ve been reading but intuitively I feel like it’s there.

Also I’ve noticed of late how much I use photography in my blog that it is a natural part of my visual language. I think I should permit it some more space alongside the drawing and making. There is a piece I’d like to shoot that’s been lodged in my brooding, but I worry it’s just a cheap copy. However I’ll at least draw it out to explore it, maybe print it an I can decide on it’s virtue after that.

 

Bag Dump /  by Justin Harrison

I’m not entirely sure where this is going… but there is a thread that runs out from this. I’ve collected these images all formally arranged elements from a bag. There’s something about collection, organisation, display and function. All the items are things I’d like to own, but beyond this it feels like a narrative is buried beneath all of this.

I’ve had this though about travellers, individuals ‘passing through’, there location being ‘in passage’ and place being where they pause for a time, and or where they are going.

There is an element of folk law to it too, I feel like there are deep stories that I need to unearth, maybe in the making, as I make and collect elements for a travellers pack.

Who is this traveller?
What is their purpose?
Where are they heading?
Where did they come from?

Currently Reading:::
The Rites of Passage /// Arnold van Gennep

Currently Listening To:::
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46VHdzSdB7k

 

Dear /  by Justin Harrison

Following yesterdays post I looked up Game painting, specifically deer. The major players Jan Van Weenix and Frans Snyders. I guess it would come to this sooner or later…dead animals. So here is my confession.

Hi my name is Justin Harrison and I have a thing about dead animals. My friends if the see road kill - think of me or send pictures. This theme always seem too manifest sooner or later in my work.

I guess maybe the MA is the place to follow this moribund thread.

I’m thinking about a body of work and this actually plays very well into it, I’ll need to research some more, but revolves around ‘bag dumps’ that you see often on Instagram, Youtube - If you follow Bushcrafters or survivalists. I like the idea of making the contents of a bag dump but for a 17th Century Game Keeper of for an imagined traveller/ initiate.

Kit for the rite of passage///
Knife, Compass, cordage, bag, invented tools.

There is something I love about the game paintings, the colours and lighting, a strange tableaux. As I look through the galleries of images I could collect more…

I feel like there are some interesting and deeper connections, but having had very little sleep for the past few days I’m gonna trust that I’ll figure it out…

Image References:
https://fineartamerica.com/featured/a-huntsman-cutting-up-a-dead-deer-with-two-deerhounds-jan-weenix.html
A Huntsman cutting up a Dead Deer, with Two Deerhounds
Jan Van Weenix

https://www.passionforpaintings.com/en/art-gallery/sir-edwin-henry-landseer-painter/of-a-dead-stag-oil-painting-reproduction
Of A Dead Stag
Painted originally by: Landseer Sir Edwin Henry
Recommended: 25 x 18 "

http://community.artauthority.net/work.asp?wid=64064&pos=2
Title: Still Life with Dead Deer, Heron and Hunting Implements
Artist: Weenix, Jan
Year: c. 1690 Medium: Oil on canvas Dimensions: 47 15/16 x 62 3/8 in. (121.8 x 158.4 cm)

https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O131738/still-life-with-a-dead-oil-painting-snyders-frans/
Still Life with a Dead Stag
Snyders, Frans 
Oil Painting 1640s Antwerp

https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/still-life-with-dead-game-138951
Still Life with Dead Game
Frans Snyders (1579–1657)
Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow

https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/SK-A-591
A Dog and a Cat near a partially disembowelled Deer, Jan Baptist Weenix, 1645 - 1660 oil on canvas, h 180cm × w 162cm × d 12cm × w 46kg

 

Dead Horses /  by Justin Harrison

I am everything you don’t want. I am everything you leave behind.
(I realise that the sofa comes under this title too)

Ok so been having a little fun researching dead horses. I’m still stuck on the discarded sofa I found in Brighton. The strong connection to dead horses. Especially with it’s four legs stiffly jutting out like rigamortis. Covered in layers of fabric like skin and fat.

My favourite of all the artists had to be Berlindfe De Brukyer, her relationship to the materials she uses is potent and I’m left unnerved and beguiled at the same time. Visceral and cruel her work is quiet matter fo fact and yet more subtle codes are embedded in her layers.

Some of my deep fears and darker encounters seem to reside somewhere in her work to, unsettled Want to leave yet continue to look, like a bad dream that I can’t leave.

https://www.galleriacontinua.com/artists/berlinde-de-bruyckere-21

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Points I’m mulling over in connection to my research questions:

What does it mean to be transformed? How does this occur?

To Discover Temporal and spacial locations in which a form of transformation happens. 

What are the consequences?

Why are the outcomes?

Can we influence the process?

When does it occur naturally?

When has it happened in history?

How do other artists engage with transformation?

Are liminal places key in all this?

IMAGES USED>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

A DEAD HORSE - (JEAN-LOUIS-THÉODORE GÉRICAULT)

Untitled (desiccated horse carcass sitting up) - Sidney Nolan (Australian, 1917-1992)

Hungry ones in Petrograd dividing a dead horse in the street (1917) - Ivan Vladimirov

Berlinde De Bruyckere
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPJwkXf5RK4
https://www.galleriacontinua.com/artists/berlinde-de-bruyckere-21
No Life Lost II, 2015
https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/berlinde-de-bruyckere-at-hauser-wirth-new-york-6097/

 

Liminal/Threasholds, Threashing Floor and a sneaky Star Wars reference /  by Justin Harrison

I found a curious connection between the films: Star Wars - Empire Strikes Back/Revenant/Man in the wilderness/Rivers of Fundament (Matthew Barney). The visceral and jarring motif of entering and exiting an enviscerated horse/ cow/ tonton for survival and as a metaphor for death, rebirth and transformation. I’m not sure if there is a classical reference that precedes these films - or any myths or stories. .(I’m not sure how ‘Fine Art’ Starwars is but I’m gonna crowbar it in cos… well it’s Star Wars).

However the motif has caught my attention as it also demonstrates the metaphor of a Liminal place a space where a transformation occurs or a threshold crossed - albeit a psychological one perhaps.

In addition in these contexts there is a dual form of sacrifice:
1.The host animal/ mothering agent.
2. The form of a ‘little death’ of the subject ( a passing through) and then a transformation upon exiting.

In Barneys film there is an uncomfortable feel as the Demi God character enters what appears to be a very dead and decaying carcass, which asks the question what kind of transformation would occur in this context?. Much of Barney’s work is unsettling and visual grotesque so it almost suggest something sinister and perhaps rather than a transformation it would be a corruption and deformation////

A place we fear to look ||||||||||||||

The envisceration is profound - a forced space for the incumbent. Perhaps this is what is jarring is the ‘manufacturing’ of a liminal space. I wonder if true transformation can only come through a naturally occurring spiritual liminal space. Fabricated ceremonies lead to a performance of transformation where perhaps the change is only superficial. Which we could say of Revenant, which actually has two moments the first being when Hugh Glass is partially buried being believed to be near death, and then the act of survival where he uses his horses carcass to shelter from a snow storm.

Death and Rebirth///

Tranformation//?

Deformation///

Threshold///

Threashing floor///

This has also had me thinking of the biblical reference fo the threshing floor - a metaphor for separation of the good form the bad - it also has a liminal essence to it for those who are prepared to confront their own short comings and be transformed by a purification process.

More to be extrapolated but I keep loosing my train of thought////

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZy99QDPhpw

 

In solution /  by Justin Harrison

Particle dispersion in solution.

Everything is divisible.

Every idea

Every thought

Every belief.
/////////////////////////////////////////////

Questioning how I question my questions

////////////////////////////////////////////

More drawing from film stills. Although it doesn’t feel as successful and I’m not convinced of where this can go. I’d much prefer to work from my own film work and original source.
However it still has me thinking and examining.
I didn’t care for the drawing, but I did like the dispersion of the particles across the paper as I bled the paint. To draw with this technique is excruciating as control is minimal and the temptation to draw properly to overcome the random element is strong. But to do that would pull too far from the quality of the textures created randomly. Somewhere in-between is a drawing I like.

 

Matthew Barney /  by Justin Harrison

A series of ink drawings from Matthew Barnwey’s ‘River of Fundament’. I’m using the drawings to think about Matthew Barney’s work and my own. I like the deeper inspection that comes with drawing, not just visually but also cerebrally. There’s a freedom of thought that seems unique for me when I draw. A deep pleasure in finding marks that describe, especially when they look nothing like the article yet still evoke it

{{{Currently I’m reading ‘Consciousness Explained’ Looking the the nature of our consciousness how we think and perceive. It’s interesting as it explores the visual nature of our thinking which is a contradiction as our brain does not hold physical pictures but converts these things to electrical impulses - well that’s a crude reductionist version. So how is it that we can make images and drawings and they hold not just symbolic presence but deeper emotive and intuitive values too?}}}

I want to make more drawings - go larger and deeper add a little colour too. I always return to drawing in my practice >>> I’m happiest when it hovers somewhere between Abstract and gestural evocative of something familiar yet slightly beyond our recognition.///

I find him Matthew Barney hard one to decide upon. DO I like his work or not? Do I think it succeeds?Or is it all just sensuality opulence?The truth is I am seduced by the materiality of his work. As a sculpture he engages with the visceral physicality of metal, wood, vaseline >>> all kinds of materials. And he does work very closely with his conceptual enquiries taking a the threads of a principal or narrative and weaving his own. However I do have to ask the same question I ask of my own work - how is his audience and what can they take form his work.

Self indulgence is unavoidable in our work, we have to work with what moves us - yet I feel it should be with one eye on our audience, for what is there with out a viewer?

But still I can’t get enough of huge cast metal objects - demi gods of the space they occupy. The presence beyond the work an aura. Then there are the sets he makes sunken corridors of ruin, or vaults of human senses. People and objects set in a charged miasma///similar to Gregory Crudeson, Barney’s work is flooded with symbols, materials, ideas, questions and possibilities.

Hmmm I guess I do like his work then.

Currently Reading///

Consciousness Explained - Daniel C Dennett, Penguin
Why We Believe What We Believe- Andrew Newberg, Free Press
Long Walk to Freedom - Nelson Madella,Little Brown and Company