Liminal

This took too long /  by Justin Harrison

This article ahs been on my bench for the longest time, I don’t know quiet why it took so long to make.

I’m really wanting to conclude one or two key pieces as I rapidly draw to a close of the MA. However I’m not sure this is wise as I try to acclimatise to a new way of approaching my work.

I’ve modified it as the details I first drew feel excessive and lack a certain honesty. I’m mindful of the work retaining it’s integrity. I’m mad because I know I can do the stitching better. But overall it’s ok.

I feel the colours the soft dense black of the burnt wood against the burnish copper next to the warm ochre of the leather all coalesce to make something more for me. The item a tool, a ritualised tool with a distinct purpose but obtuse as to what it is. Passaging through uncertainty requires rituals that are ambiguous at best.

I am tempted to fuss with it some more, extend the height of the burn, something about the aesthetics for me isn’t quiet right…

 

Imaginary Bundle for Passage /  by Justin Harrison

This motif has been recurring, well several motifs have been recurring and I want to pay attention. I sometimes move on too quickly from one idea to the next, when actually I need to pause and contemplate what is occurring. The past two curated blog assessments have been really useful in taking stock of what is happening, seeing common threads and how there is continuity to my work, visually and conceptually.

This drawing isn’t my favourite… today but…that might change. However I do find it informative and encouraging. It’s a development form the ‘Imaginary bundle’ drawings I made last year, taking the more abstracted form of the paddle and thinking about the emptying out and filling. Following the idea fo the Kenotic and the Khora. Exploring the negative and positive spaces in connection to the role of Derrida’s ‘Differance’. The behaviour of the Liminal and passage through.

I want to go bigger is my first response, having finished it. It needs more mass, more presence. To go larger has been a growing feeling for some time and has been affirmed in my last discussion with Jonathan. All the cute little drawings I make in my sketchbook are impotant as they inform and help me to imagine. But the scale is now feeling more and more important. Presence and the tone of voice, seem to require a a different scale.

Things we can fit into our hands are intimate and dominatable, things we can put our arms around are relatabl,e close to human form and equal. Things that are larger than us are beyond us and our control they take on a different gravitas. I guess it’s this gravitas I am looking to engage with.

So I wonder what happens when I go up in scale to A00 or two stories high? How/where would I show this? and would it be worth the effort and resources? I often fall over on these questions and don’t make work because of these restrictions, so maybe I need to work harder to overcome them….

 

Khora: The Hermeneutics of Hyphenation /  by Justin Harrison

I found a curious connection whilst researching in a paper entitled Khora: The Hermeneutics of Hyphenation by John Manoussakis. I don’t understand it all and I don’t know that I agree with it all, but towards the end I did find some parts that are interesting.

Outside the city of Istanbul there is an ancient monastery that is known to all the sources under this odd name: the Monastery of Chora (an alternative transliteration for "khora").1 Its unusual eponymy is explained by its even more extraodinary frescos and mosaics that dated back to the fourteenth century. It’s iconographic program includes depictions of both Virgin Mary and Christ that bear the same inscription alike: The Khora

In the first of the two plates we can see a mosaic of the Virgin the inscription reads' {The Khora of the uncontainable).

In the second plate, Christ is depicted with an inscription that and reads as follows: ' (He Khora ton Zonton = the khora of the Living)


In the paper he goes on to explain:

During the Incarnation, Platonic khora, serves as the intermediate, the triton genos (man and the divine; she [Mary] is the point of contact between the the two poles of all dualisms (Greek or Jewish); she is the overlapping place of the two circles, their meeting place and of course, the hymen that hyphenates them. Like the receptive character of khora, Mary receives the entire deity within her body without appropriating it into herself. Thus, she becomes a paradox, an antinomy, the chore of the akhoron, a topos that sustains what is a-topos and u-topos: the receptacle of the un-receivable, the container of the uncontainable.

In the second plate, Christ is depicted with an inscription that runs in both sides and reads as follows: ' (He Khora ton Zonton = the chore of the Living). Christ is par excellence the khora that receives both humility creation in their entirety, but with no confusion, in His incarnate person. The Incarnate Christ bears the same characteristics that ruled over His hyphenated birth: neither exclusively God nor quite Human, but both God and Human; neither just the Word nor only Flesh, but the Word who became Flesh; neither high in the heavens nor down on the earth, but the channel through which the heavens emptied onto the earth and the earth ascended in the heavens.

I don’t fully understand this but then there are elements that I am very interested in, The Khora and emptying out in relation to Christ and Mary as intermediate - between man and divine. The liminal?

In his paper Manoussakis sources Derrida and John Caputo’s work on Derrida, a key source to my research. I like it when connections present themselves to me, its encouraging.


 

Tools for drawing: Escillation. /  by Justin Harrison

How do I go big? Following the tutorial discussion with Jonathan. I have been meditating on what drawing larger could look like. In addition I found the same topic coming up in the MA session this week. We were discussing challenges to our practice. And again one of the points that came though is how I want to find ways to facilitate working larger now and after the MA.

What practical steps can I take to make it happen? Point that came up was to make the opportunities if I don’s seee them available. To approach people/companies/bodies and propose the projects, using the momentum from the MA and the show. Find ways to escalate things.

I keep on returning to the clay drawings, I like how they are connected to the earth, the ground, the natural world. In addition the work has a lower impact on the environment - which I am becoming more and more concerned about.

Why big? Why does it matter? In discussion with JK part of it was just like it felt as though it was time, a natural progression and desire of the work, permitting it to evolve. Also my preoccupation of materials and the work speaking

I’ve had fun making the tool for drawing, basically a giant icing bag - although that doesn’t sound so cool. However in thinking about my practice its intrinsic to the process and expression. I’ve mentioned before about ‘ritualised tools of passage’ - The improvisation and creation in response to the environment or absence of environment in the ‘Difference’. The liminal almost demands the generation of such items. From nothing comes something doesn’t addiquately expression it but falls in the right direction. The’ fertile emptines’. In folklaw often the protagonist returns from passage with a sacred item a hard won yenta times terrifying tool of significance and assiatance. For exmple The folk story of Bluebeard.

Perhaps this could explain the repeated motif of the paddle and the abstraction of the paddle form. The difficult yet fundamental protagonist. Or a more elusive and fluid character both benign and baneful and neutral.

WORDS:

Antagonist
Protagonist
Irritant

 

Unexpected /  by Justin Harrison

Something happened tonight, an unexpected flurry. I’ve been angsting about the final show. A little lost at sea with my work. I have ideas but didn’t feel convinced. The past week or so Ive been in the studio just making and doing a few drawings around concluding bits.

I sat down tonight to make some drawings, finalising some ideas and have instead generated a whole bunch more work to make. Too much to make for the show but that’s fine it’s work I can continue with after the MA.

The practice based research throws me at times, I feel like I should be in books and papers, which I do - and have too many! But the making and drawing is a valuable form of research and development not an end process - which I keep forgetting.

I now have a number of pages of sketches that I can work up into sculptures or more involved drawings.

But how that’s my question, what occurred to summon this? How do I keep it?

There’s some interesting bit happening for with the pot. (At the back of my head is the smoking pot from Abrams encounter with Yahweh and the question was that a Liminal Moment a generative moment?)

In addition I’ve been wondering about basic needs of the Liminal Personae.

I’ve begun to think about the passage - basic needs. Food, Water, Sleep, Movement.

The circular form a kind of navigational device, measuring the character for travel. I want to put metric markings down the rod.

More paddles just because I can’t leave them alone.

A travel bed - but more.

The cooking pot and stick.

///

Shopping

https://www.rapidmetals.co.uk/product/copper-1-4-dia/

 

Process Post. /  by Justin Harrison

Nothing too deep or revelatory. More me just making sure I’m writing about my process.

Yet something feels right about this, somethings I make and am unsure, but this I’m ok with.

Materials lead me again and there is something provocative and pleasing about the natural canvas.

I’m making a large icing bag basically, but for clay. I’m making my own tools to work with and that to is satisfying. I’m tempted to get ealborate, but I should have learnt from previous lessons that it will slow me down, but it’s hard - I want to make pretty!

The plan is to locate naturally occurring clay and use it as a medium to draw with, although I am now having to research and figure where I might find it. This could involve a number of exploratory walks and scrambling but then I like that kinda thing.

I feel drawn to the process of engaging with the land, gently moving an element and decontextualising it into a medium and meaning - a form of translation.

This too I’ve been looking at ‘Translation’ what does it really mean to translate language and other things? What and how does it happen? It’s connected to the Liminal.

Also please note it took me a ridiculously long time to figure the pattern out, when it shouldn’t.

 

Minor Post: Boundaries /  by Justin Harrison

Boundaries and borders not just geographical but cultural, social, intellectual… how are they given, accepted, defined and disrupted?

 

Stuff /  by Justin Harrison

Been getting into this guy for a while - I’m taking note of what. I naturally look at and ma drawn to. Lots of outdoor living - forest skills. Exploration of the wilds.

It’s the land, the spaces that are unoccupied, borderless boundaryless. No buildings, no people, no structures.

I am naturally looking at outdoors videos. Crafting temporary shelters. Navigating. Falling down.

Removing ourselves from what has been given to us as dwelling.

Dwelling.

Navigation. Where there is no land or territory.

 

Drawer Paddle - Ritualised tools of passage /  by Justin Harrison

Completed recently is the paddle cut from the front of a chest of drawers. I chose to leave in key details as I wanted to maintain elements of it’s history. The key hole and holes from where the handles were once fixed and the dark varnish.

I like the way it sits when folded back on itself, again a sense of animation, movement, something animalistic. I like how the gesture is minimal but also suggestive of presence. It leads away from the notion of a paddle that works, that is ‘fit for purpose’ and is becoming.

There is a passage to be made through. Through uncertainty, through mystery, through the unknown.

It does feel incomplete - that it need s something to pull the narrative through. When I say narrative I don’t need an explicit story more something of the mystery to continue on. I need to think about whom these paddles belong to and why.

 

Jointed Paddle - Ritualised tool of Passage /  by Justin Harrison

It’s take all summer and I was supposed to be working on fast pieces. But I had this paddle planned for a time since I cut a joint in a section of thick Holly wood. This is the progression from the initial idea. It’s just so hard cutting and drilling Holly. It’s a defiant material and somehow I like it’s resistance.

It feels good to work at a larger scale and I’m keen to find a better way of displaying it and perhaps contextualising it. I do wonder about the previous discussions on animation and film. How would this lend it’s self to being filmed? Could a short looped film of it in the forest with a liminal persona?

There’s a lot I like about this, the surface with some under bark left for texture, the pegs holding it together are kinda cool, brought cut and also from nearby Holly, a little like tuning pegs, I enjoy their prominence - somehow they add something more to the piece. I like the way the blade moves the animation that comes through the articulation. Again it asks to be animated, but how and why?

I do imagine a multiple sectioned paddle spiralling round with a figure in the centre. Or could it abstract more, and focus on essences?

 

Why the forest? /  by Justin Harrison

Image my own

During my first tutorial Jonathan asked me ‘why the forest’? ‘Why am I drawn to it’? Now I think the forests significance is because it’s a strong liminal place, ever shifting and changing, constantly in decay and growth - always moving. It’s a site that is not occupied but free of dominating presence and technology. Natural and free of intent. In the space time feels slower and is of less consequence to the forest, it posses it’s own language, one I only barely understand intuitively and where my words are of little significance, finally the forest shares a rhizomatic consciousness, it thinks in community.

There's a neutrality to it, a reset. I get tired of all the demands that come from the digital world and to be honest I actually dislike a lot of it. I do find it useful and use it, but I don't like the way it kidnaps my time and energy.

I like making work that is devoid of this, and in a conversation with George, he mused on it having a 'prehistoric' feel to it. Which led to us wondering about the final show, could it just be a set of coordinates to site specific work in forest somewhere, or if that warrants the use of GPS, just some hand written directions. In rejection of the capitalist gallery space and commodification of creativity.

 

In-between /  by Justin Harrison

In-between having purpose, being discarded, becoming waste. The wood and cigarette packet lie in the passage awaiting transformation from one state to another. Passing from one territory into another.

Passage is the beginning of movement of all things, references, being, knowledge, place, identity, territory, history, home, meaning.

More materials to process, strip back and rePlace. I’ve taken them back to my studio, to see what they say.

 

Stacking /  by Justin Harrison

This piece has come from fussing in my studio over various works, I’m not sure I love it, but I don’t hate it either. It needs re-photographing as it’s flattened out in the photograph.

More intuitive making without solid plans or intentions but rather letting the materials find their own voice, working quickly I ask questions of the form and wood, where does it want to be, in what state, why is the harder question I have left aside for now. I’ve been thinking a lot about materials and their role in the language of the work. Dialects and translation and interpretation. Intentional application of histories.

The elements are bundled again, stacked the wood finished and unfinished, left in different states. Histories are stacked and layered.

Benjamin's proposal Cultural translation is a coming to terms with the foreigness of language. Such foreignness revealing the liminality of both the indigenous and the extra territorial. Working with materials and modalities of difference whether linguistic, visual or digital demands something other than finding a consensual form of resemblance or appropriation.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=homi+bhabha+translation+and+displacement 1:01:40

 

Movement and Passage /  by Justin Harrison

Image my own

Notes whilst cycling home...I've found my processing happens at interesting moments and not always the most convenient! I've learnt to record messages to myself to scribe later.

An aperture opens up through/by the interstices, and can connect to any number of possible apertures, the rhyzomic, with no guarantee where it will end. This is the 'Unknown' the 'fluid', the 'frustration' of 'being in passage'.

To pass through requires movement, and this is fundamental, movement must always occur, because to not move is stasis, a 'little death' and that is the structure, the structure does not move, it cannot take passage through the Liminal, for it is an aberration.

The structure has an 'illusion' of movement because it has a centre (((Derrida Structure sign play)))and everything (((WHAT? All that is termed/defined by the binary of the structures definition))) is tethered to the centre, and it can only circumscribe a circle of a given diameter, territory. A false moment, an ersatz movement, a 'performative'.

Where as once displacement has occurred for an agent, then there is a' line of flight' as Deleuze describes in Minor Literatures. This displacement can come through two sources, either structural violence where somebody is ejected - removed form the structure for failing to fullfill binary demands, or violence to the structure where somebody rejects the structure and remove themselves. Rejection and Ejection - this trajectory requires 'movement' through new boundaries new borders new apertures, new interstices.

Other thoughts

The trouble with the Binary is that it is a 2 dimensional in it's approach. It lacks holistic thinking and fails to acknowledge the differance, the movement, the third dimension, or third space as Homi Bhabha describes.

AK makes work that sets up perameters that manifest the void. It messes with the binary logic, rational. Making the untenable - the untouchable

UVR makes work that stands in defiance of ejection the weigh and size, the oversized. Defiance of authority. (Often self elected authority)

 

Interstices /  by Justin Harrison

In the intersticies the edges are blurred , indefined, indistinct. There is no clear demarcation, margin, boundary. Yet the apperature is clearly perceivable.

The liminal represents the free play, the opportunity for change. The change in the angle of vision, the change in space, time, concept. It is the opening up, where deconstruction can operate freely and generate the new. Broader passages of movement.

Hauntology, spectral, third space, void these too are different angles of vision through interstices.

Everything and nothing, liminal and void, inside and outside, interior and exterior. These appear binary terms - where is in between these? Differance?

We fear change. Being in passage. The moments of uncertainty. Movement.

Change - Passage - Is movement.

Again - Differance free play.

Stasis is a little death. Stagnancy.

Do I make ritualised tools of passage?

 

Spectral Interstices /  by Justin Harrison

Crossing boundaries and boarders

Forms never to be repeated

Appear and disappear

Present and yet not present

Geographically ambiguous

Free

“Shrouded in a forest of signs that render the conditions of speech and action barely intelligible or translatable. We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings we glided past like phantoms wondering and secretly appalled as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a mad house”. Conrad Joseph - Hearts of darkness.

An opportune moment, light in constant flux, crossing boundaries and margins, formal demarkations denoting space are ignored. The small spaces giving an ‘angle of vision’ - generating the new. A fleeting demonstration of the liminal, impossible to possess or repeat.

I like that this was another video opportunity, a sketch in time. It may benefit from editing, taking out some of the less successful moments. There is a pace to certain excerts that I prefer. To slow and it becomes static, too fast and the spirit is lost. As for the rogue leaf - well that can stay.

 

The liminal and void are the same, not the same /  by Justin Harrison

The liminal and the void are the same, not the same. They share qualities essences sensibilities and lacking. Yet the void by its nature must be empty. The liminal is thick and soupy,. In both locations references become null, maps Undraw themselves and time frays.

In both codes and coordinates unravel, like nets cast upon the world to create order. To locate the self.

But to exit the void leaves what?

To exit the liminal leaves the old behind and ushers forth the new, change, transformation.

There are a number of references which need to be kept apart and should not be used interchangeably. The liminal, the void, the in-between. The non place. The Third Space. The middle.

Specifically the liminal has a vectorality of the passage.

The liminal is full.

The void empty

Maybe in Kapoors work the void correctly identifies what is generated by imperialism, a consuming absence. Where as UvR’s work identifies the marginal liminal experience - not so removed. Not empty but ambiguous.

With my artwork things are the same not the same. I use an objects history to locate a vector, but replace it in time establishing another vector. In the materiality I am using its history. It’s Hauntology. With the fence panels I have in my work I am engaging in the history of a friend who’s now passed.  It’s  purpose haunts. A fence a boundary a margin. The materials history , purpose and materiality become part of the minor literature.

Same, not the same /  by Justin Harrison

In the introduction to Foucault’s book ‘The order of Things’ the author references an old encyclopedia with various classifications, in which is a category of ‘Things that from far away look like flies’.

Whilst it is tempting to make comparisons, we must remember our positionality, not just spatially but temporally, conceptually, socially and critically.

Homi Bhabha describes that there are differing scalar effects of different angles of view through the intersticies. And perhaps I wonder - that one can be so far off that perception is skewed and really comparisons cannot be made.

Perhaps imagine a toy cow 🐄, go to a field of cows hold it up and they might even look the same, in colour, form and scale. However one is not a cow, you won’t get milk out of it. They are the same but not the same.

 

Cleft Paddle - Same, not the same. /  by Justin Harrison

Same, not the same.

More paddles, there is some kind of satisfaction in making these. Touching on presence and absence, time and space. I am also tempted to return to the ‘imaginary bundles’ stacking elements in and around. Items being grouped, bundled and divisible.

I do wonder about the drawing technique - is it too simplistic? Childish. I find it is a useful short hand to explore the negative, which I am also making up larger in card. I still want to make large drawings more involved and descriptive.

Also what am I saying about the paddle? Anish Kapoor talks with Homi Bhabha about making series - the value to it. But I don’t want to be repetitive and not develop my visual language alongside my research.

I keep on finding more connections to space and time and I’m not sure I can justifiable pull them altogether. I’ll try to document as much as possible but it feels like the accumulation of information and evidence is becoming overwhelming. Just trying to find a system to categorised and catalogue everything would be a work of art worthy of an MA in itself.