Sculpture

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…

 

Studio notes /  by Justin Harrison

This is the perils of limited materials - reclaiming stuff means that I only have limited supply of a particular medium, wood button or metal hooks etc.

Of the two wood formations I can’t decide which I prefer best and actually want to make all of them however there is not really enough. I have to make a decision….commit!

Also I have a new obsession of Indigo blue, it actually moves me. It’s like the depths of the sea of the expanse of the universe for me. It holds mystery and passage. Can a colour do that? Is it just me?

I’m cautious about painting wood - it’s a pet hate of mine, I love the grain and the natural colouring and variants. Yet staining the wood is an instinct I can’t resist. Maybe just a bit…

 

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…

 

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/

 

Show Planning /  by Justin Harrison

I’ve been wondering about this for a while. Let it sit in the back of my mind. Sometimes I find it’s better to let things percolate. I’m thinking about how and what I show, part of me is tempted to make new work…but I also know the dangers with that. It’s hard I always want to be progressing and for that to happen I want to make new work, use the lessons learnt from what I have just made. But its also time consuming, and perhaps more importantly I need to pull on what has happened over the past two years on the course.

A key lesson learnt is the value of me liberating my making, stopping myself from overthinking and working which ultimately leads to me editing all ideas and not making so much. In working quick and dirty I’ve found that my ideas are able to make more connections and resonances, the practice based research goes deeper.

So in many senses it seems appropriate to show all the experiments rather than a polished final artwork. Although this is hard too as I imagine the weight of expectations of others. But then I think making the installation similar to what the drawing is in keeping with my research paper too. A nod to Ursual von Rydingsvard curation.

Hung from hopefully a unistrut using cables suspending the work feels more sympathetic that securing to a wall, but at a push that could work to, it feels kinda big maybe 3.5m - 4m square, but that’s kinda greedy.

But more than that an exploration of the liminal, I do wonder weather objects are allowed, making something physical seems almost contradictory. But I return to the phrases ‘Ritualised objects of the liminal’ and ‘Poetic discovery of the hidden’.

I do have a new piece that might also translate better, in interpreting the Liminal and my investigations, but I need to make it and it’s location bound so I don’t really know how it would show in the gallery context…and I need to make it yet. It could suck.

I want to meditate more on the past two years and reread my paper, so older blog posts, there’s so much that I have already forgotten.

 

Practice /  by Justin Harrison

I'm surrounded by a mess of clamps, stray wood and glue. I'm wondering how I made any work before. I'm challenging myself to another spontaneous fast piece. I'm getting in my own way of making and it's annoying.

I have a creative tantrum and brake stuff.

/// Day 2

I had managed to glue and clamp some stuff yesterday before I lost it, as I continue to work on it I make different choices changing layout and direction, I question the wood where it wants to go what form it needs to take to speak, to articulate of the in-between, at times I purposely plane and smooth off the wood from it’s original texture. You can't see it easliy- but I know. Changing states. The wood came form a couple of boards I found in the street, the wood is coarse and rough with glue residue. I also blacken two slats - I’m constructing some strange object - born for the liminal. On object of negotiation.

I wonder wether to paint some or all of the wood. Normally I recoil from painting the material and hiding its nature, but I'm also considering my instinctual colour palette, black browns amber and occasionally blues. As I look over my blog and instagram account I see a strange consistency.

I'm asking, looking for the poetry of the work

I also have been dreaming about the clay drawings, about camping overnight beside the tree, ritualising the process

Heart spirit Mind soul in alignment. Generatiional imbalance.

 

Studio /  by Justin Harrison

I don’t know what I’m doing to be honest. But It kinda feels ok or even right. I’ve constructed this monsterous stencil from collected disposed of card. Almost like what one would do when cast adrift on a desert island cobbling together some sort of improvised solution.

It’s growing into some large drawing, evolving. It’s not finished, I have more to do…when I figure it out.

I’m looking for the work to have ‘presence’ for the drawing to move in some way. I’m deliberating - what does it need want. How does it speak?

I stop the drawing for now and lay out more materials on my bench - various types of wood I’ve collected. This has now become part of my process, to collect and set out materials, give them space to breath and speak to me. I strip the laminated boards I found and break them down into slats constituent elements. I’m processing materials looking for dialogue.

It’s a mush mash of materials, I don’t know what I’m doing but its ok. I’m asking questions of the material and myself. I start sanding a fence panel and that feels ok or am I repeating everything? Am I genuinely experimenting? I want to develop more the initial trials that felt successful. The clay drawing. The looped animation, and where are the films I was promising to make?

And conclusions what can I conclude? Or do I just make…

 

Refill /  by Justin Harrison

I’m back in the woods harvesting material. I’ve had an idea that’s pressing on me, although I suspect the raw materials won’t be here. I do find something of interest and set to it - cutting disks off a larger fallen tree, It’s hard work - as I cut I looking for an efficiency and wonder what this means also. Why be efficient? Why is production so important. Does efficiency matter in the Liminal?

I like that it’s all cut bulky hand but the novelty is beginning to em wear off.

More importantly I think is that I am in the forest. It’s a place of refilling - even if I don’t get much made. The head space I find is likely more productive…but then do I need to be productive? Or is that a capatilaist conditioned relfex?

 

Ritualised Tools of Passage /  by Justin Harrison

I'm sanding some reclaimed wood for a piece and I hesitate, the colours of the grain - the history of the wood are emerging subtle yet sweet; knots, creosote, grain and dirt, its like a book with an obscure narrative that I'm trying to follow - I'm slightly torn how much to sand, I love the glassy feel of super smooth lacquered wood but it feels like a crime to remove anymore of the paternation, like I’m erasing memories. I'm trying to engage with time in a disrupted way. Keeping the history yet making new.

I accidentally put Danish oil on first - I had planned to use varnish however I know that these mistakes often work for the better so I don't worry too much. Fine saw marks appear, as forgotten half healed scars as the oil soaks into the dry fibres of the wood. Then I put too many layers on and it changes the colouration I had been obsessing over, the oil takes the wood to more warm honey colours and some of the paternation disappears.

/// I lament for a moment///

However these sculptures are meant to be fast explorative pieces, all of which is research and informative. The more I make - the more I learn about the materials and my work.

As the oil is drying I cut a second piece of wood, it's thin and brittle and doesn't have the subtlety of shape that I want, so I take to carving at it in attempt to have a little more control. This works but ads time to the process. I'm able to manipulate and manifest the forms that I feel in my head.

At some point it also occurs to me that I can char the wood that I will get a nice contrast against the Holly pegs I've been making and plan to add. This changes the voice of the piece, more gravitas than the honeyed wood. I like it and putting the two together creates more dialogue that I enjoy. (I do wonder about how I animate this work more a feature of the other recent sculptures)

On reflection of the two sculptures placed together as a piece - I almost feel as tough I've happened upon something that I shouldn't have. Like opening a tomb.

The apertures agents, the pegs agents in conflict. Some sort of holy/unholy moment. The passage at crux. The threat of the outside coming in.

I'm not sure I quiet understand what I've made, I need time to absorb what is going on. A slow burn.

 

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?

 

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

 

Studio 22 Oct /  by Justin Harrison

It was quiet a feverish time in the studio today, I’m trying to make everything that is in my head, it seems the simplest response. I’m stressed because I want to be making MA worthy work again. I’m carrying the voices of imagined peers and imagined criticisms. ‘Everyone disapproves of my use of time and resources’. The power of our imaginations - I’m using my powers for evil not good. SO my response is to try and just make everything that I currently have in my head, just dump it all out because at least I am being productive and hopefully I can free up my thinking into more productive paths.

I managed to finish the last joint on the draw paddle, it still pains me that they are not well executed. I hate that the cuts are tatty - it really bothers me …like alot…it needles away inside my head. But I just don’t have the time to be fussy right now, I need to make everything that I am seeing, feeling. I am also hoping that out of this pushh will come work that really interests me. I am getting a little bored of just making paddles they aren’t talking enough for my liking.

I make a number of hasty pieces putting ,materials together to ask what they might say. I fabricate another peg, this is a self indulgent exercise as I get some kind of pleasure from making them, I like putting the leather and the wood togeher. It does leave the question to what purpose, what are their purpose? What do they hold? But then that’s maybe useful, pegs are my markers, simple and impermanent the temporarily can hold onto something or mark it’s place.

I’ve also had two lumps of tarmac sitting around the studio, that I’ve not known what to do, but today they got bound up in some leather I had left on my bench to provoke something to be made. Again led by the materials I tried to find something that they were happy with. It’s become some sort of sling or hammer, again I bashed it out, no measuring or marking. Photographing it on the old wood felt right, the placement and reference to an older history. I like the idea if ignoring chronological time. Anachrony. Derrida’s hauntology comes into play. I like that the sculpture has history in it’s materials. It’s lived two lives already;

Life 1. The Raw Material, the evolution/ life span of the wood, leather and tar, is one life time that has passed.

Life 2. The Given Purpose, The draws, the pavement, the garment. The material exists in an assigned purpose.

Now it exists in a third and yet still retains the previous histories, lives, they are still present and palpable.

I’m close to finishing the Holly Jointed Paddle, I just need to peg the blade sections. I drill the wood and have already bunted on bit and broken another. The holly is tough, I respect it for that, it again gives character to my materials for me and it’s important that I listen to them. Also in looking through my sketch book I notice a detail I had forgotten to add. I must upload my drawings as they carry important details and noters that I often forget and I don’t often look back through and read everything.


 

It seemed like a good idea at the time /  by Justin Harrison

Mud

Smells bad

I look weird

Forest smells good, wet

Trees look fecund, perfect light

I rush

Forget to photo in sequence. My keenness blindness

Mud applies odd full of sticks and stones

Realise the smell is also duck shit

Drawing is hard, feels silly

Like a bad idea, not how I had imagined

Run down my arms

Not as good idea as I thought

Drawing is not working how I planned

Maybe that’s ok

I left in a hurry and didn’t ask the tree how it felt about it

///////

The above is my notes - I was gonna write a detailed journal entry but I think I prefer just the notes.

Further thoughts.

I think about using terracotta clay it would apply easier and I’d have more control with the drawing but I also know that the materials would need to be integrous, If I were to buy the clay it might feel synthetic.

I need to look around and find a river with red clay, maybe go onsite and collect it and work with it. A set of drawings across 5 or so trees?

Sources for naturally occurring clay

https://victorianweb.org/science/geology/smith3.html

https://nativehands.co.uk/2016/11/wild-pottery-clay-digging/#:~:text=You%20can%20also%20look%20for,area%2C%20that's%20a%20good%20sign.

I did like the blackness of the pond mud against the lightness of the tree. It has a quality to it that feels satisfying. The materials matter. It was textured too with leaf matter and sticks, this to gave it a unique quality and tone of voice.

I do need to go back and visit. See how the drawing changes as it returns to the forest 🌳

A ritual tool

Addendum///

I returned a month or so later, I really wasn’t expecting to find much and was suprised to find most of it intact. I find that I like it but not enough, it feels like it needs more, but I can’t quiet figure what. I do like that I’m drawing in mud. Mud made up from decaying elements of the immediate surrounding, leaves , twigs, dust and yes duck feaces. Some how it rising up from the ground feels interesting. I do still worry about it feeling ‘Andy Goldsworthy’ but again if I could push the work a bit harder it might stand on it’s own better.

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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

 

Materials Matter /  by Justin Harrison

Finally back in the studio.

I’ve taken the clamps off the paddle roughly made form fencing panels - I still like, although it feels slightly out of character for me. There is a curious freedom to it that I would have resisted before as poorly made, lacking craft, and although I do miss my beautifully made items - there just isn’t time to fuss. I have a number of things I want to see completed, ideas manifested.

But somehow the Fence Panel Paddle feels like its not doing enough work. I think it needs a mixture of textures - I wish I had fine sanded and polished one layer to stand in contrast and resistance. Do I make another paddle and put in the fine layer on that one? Do I like the work enough. Especially when there is more to be made. The value to making the faster care free work is that I am more generative. Make more…

I move on for now and cutting the wood for a jointed paddle. It’s hard to do it well and cut straight by hand but I am learning. The cuts straighter - it’s hard working in green wood, everything blunts faster, and it’s super tough to drill. The green wood has a high level of resistance I get as far as I can for now as I left a key tools at home.

I move on to strip some other branches for a bundle and realise that they are not Holly. Most of the time I have been picking up fallen Holly branches and I’m used to the colour and feel of the wood. As I take the bark off a branch it reveals fine stripes and yields it’s bark differently not quiet as satisfyingly. I don’t like it, it feels all wrong.

It makes me think of my research artists Anish Kapoor and Ursula von Rydingsvard. The materials are vital, a core part of the language of the work, even with Anish Kapoor who often worked with negative space and voids, the materials that are the genesis of the void are a vital part of the tension. The rock, wax, glass and fabric. It’s unavoidable, not just the material but the way an artist chooses to work them. The materials matter. Even the spaces in-between the materials, the ‘differance’, because it is influenced by the neighbouring elements.

I feel like in my work there is more for me to do, to find to visit upon the materials, but then I’m not sure I have the language I want yet.

I realise that I am in a transitional place, quiet normal for an art MA, but never the less it’s unsettling, I see that my conceptual underpinning is far more rigourous - especially from all the research I’ve been doing. I’m not there yet, my work still isn’t cogent, but I feel the difference the movement. And it’s quiet ironic yet not surprising that I should enter into this having been writing about it.

I’m troubled by my work which today feel overly simplistic and lacks essence, presence. But I continue accepting that ‘passage’ is rarely a comfortable space and this is my work. The jointed paddle itself a tool of passage, awkward and it’s purpose ‘offset’, present but impractical. The differing of meaning in my work - ‘Differance’

Growth and Decay - I like the abstraction of the process. the gradual loss of recognisable form and purpose, the granular yielding back to constituent elements.

NOTES:

Listening to Homi Bhabha whilst working in the studio - this lecture is crucial to my research - if only I could extrapolate and assimilate it all.

Start at about 25 mins in:

///How we see and where we look.

///The displacement in the angle of vision.

(((UvR and AK displaced through occupation and othering)))

They have a new angle of vision in their displacement.

This is manifested in their work - only it will be translated again.

28 Scale/scalar

30 Benjamin quote: Displacement angle of vision a positive element emerges anew…..Dialectical contrasts

Breaking constructed intention.

Interstices smallest change makes a small difference - scalar notions of translation and history - small movements  - it is from them that Life is born anew.

Translation is a temporal displacement of scale.

 

Negative paddle recycled /  by Justin Harrison

A quick experiment/Physical sketch - gluing recycled packaging together, I plan to add black paint to emphasise the negative space. Also need more card. It came together relatively quickly and I hope to get it concluded pretty soon. I especially like the departure from straight lines caused by the indents in the packaging. It gives it a new dialect that I hadn’t anticipated.

Again I notice I am repurposing rePlacing materials, a new identity and yet a previous history. Moving across time and intent and purpose. Making small spaces, aspects, interstices.


 

Studio Notes - Jointed Paddle /  by Justin Harrison

Previously I had cut a joint into a length of Holly. It had a resonance that I especially liked. So now I am embarking on making a full length paddle form. I don’t need it to perform or look exactly like a paddle but take essential qualities from one.

I find all the wood I use fallen and never cut it from a live tree. It’s left behind too. The branch is particularly straight but I suspect it could be interesting if it had a noticeable bend in it. But for now I just want to get this made and se what it says to me.

I need to cut two fairly good joints and I also wonder if its possible to make a ‘universal joint.’

The blade of the paddle is forming but I’m not entirely convinced I like it just yet, however I think it’s best to just let it evolve for now.

Another thought is if I could find a dead standing tree and put a joint into one of it’s larger branches…

 

Jointed Paddle /  by Justin Harrison

This was supposed to be another quick sketch. But took two visits to the studio later…. A thought had popped into my mind a while ago to try this. I had drawn it at some point in my sketch book and at that stage it was just a thought, but as I started to make it - I got more into it. It felt good to make, the process was satisfying and the aesthetics of the bark abruptly ending against the white wood in roughly hewn construction, had an essence to them that felt right.

As it progressed I really wanted to get it made.. finished. I realised that if I could make it work then it could become more. The paddles I’ve been drawing (a tool for navigating) could speak more by adding articulated joints then let the work create it’s own dialogue and become more active.

Adding the joint also animates the work, something I’ve been feeing was missing for me and especially in regards to sculpture. I envy animation and film - the work occupies space and tie and I desire some of this ‘life’ for my work.

As a foot note UVR has made one specific piece of work that is animated ‘Mama your legs’ A curious mechanical creation that thumps out it’s broken cadence with great lumps of wood into stoic vessels.

On completion of this small sketch I’ve continued to feel excited. It has a feel and a presence to it that speaks - I like it when my work speaks back.

I have limited time for this course but I would like to try and make some large jointed paddles in variants. Drawing wil be a good way to test out various ideas before I committ to making. And also as a meditation on the work, what is it about the materials and making that is working , articulating for me.

I do wonder what level of finish to bring to the work, currently I’m learning to not be so preoccupied with excellence/ high finish. I can refine that later, right now it’s more important to see the work manifested and to make as much as possible- to experiment.

There is also something about the crude fashioning that I like, it’s part of its language. An honesty.

I do want to collect some second had wood to make a jointed paddle, which has to do with the provenance of the material, that it has a history and has already gone through one process and purposing. An old door or chest of draws crafted into navigation tools. Already having had one life it feels haunted, saturated with history and presence of agent or agents.

I also stared an offset paddle from an old draw front, I cut it purposely to leave the key hole and other details, and echo or ghost of its history.

The joints also ties to a preoccupation I’ve started upon in my research paper about Derrida’s Hauntology. Where he focussed on Shakespeares Hamlet. Hamlet declares time is ‘out of joint’ and he laments the incompleteness of his situation.

Transformation rarely is the straightforward process we hope it will be. For me large disjointed paddles crude and cumbersome, overly complicated won’t really work. Very little help for the situation for physical navigation. Yet they have presence, and somehow purpose.