Passage
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.
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.
Revenant -one who comes back from the dead.
Kenosis - the renunciation of the divine nature, at least in part, by Christ in the Incarnation
I’m still struck by the scene in the movie ‘Revenant’ where Glass(DiCaprio) has accidentally ridden over a cliff in escape of pursuit and certain death. His fall is broken by trees and he lands in snow relatively unharmed. His horse however is not so fortunate as we discover when Glass crawls his way to its broken body.
The weather is worsening and a snow storm 🌨 is rising as dusk falls and night soon follows. Glass with what feels like no other choice enviscerates his horse, it’s huge stomach and intestines emptied out to make a shelter.
It’s this moment that I am especially caught on. Although not voluntary, the seeming sacrifice of the horse feels almost Kenotic. No I am standing on the threshold of Blasphemy, however I am not saying Jesus is a dead horse 🐴 But the emptying out of the self, with a sacrificial element has resonances. Furthering with the sheltering in its breast. Its a physical and metaphorical emptying. Space is made. Yet there is also displacement and occupation. In the morning Glass emerges as though born again. The cavity encrusted with ice white and shining.Time and space also seem disrupted with the emergence of Glass in the morning, the landscape has changed a thaw has begun.
Again there is a form ‘passage’ but it also includes a scared motif.
Image my own
This ia an image I took some time ago, but it came to mind after my last blog entry. It’s the limp bird from the game paintings and the glove at the road side.
I previously posted it on Instagram back in October 2019. What’s curious is the entry I made. I wrote “…it’s a preoccupation with transition and being in ‘passage’ - that perhaps there’s a moment between binary markers’
This really is a preoccupation of mine. But why? Why do I focus on this area?
The bird will soon be rendered down to it’s constituent parts, as it gives itself up to the soil, feather and bone to minerals and proteins. Carbon dioxide, water, simple sugars and mineral salts.
I looked up what happens to a body that is decomposing. Breaking down to simpler elements. Then I discovered this delicious passage.
“Decomposition begins several minutes after death, with a process called autolysis, or self-digestion. Soon after the heart stops beating, cells become deprived of oxygen, and their acidity increases as the toxic by-products of chemical reactions begin to accumulate inside them. Enzymes start to digest cell membranes and then leak out as the cells break down. This usually begins in the liver, which is enriched in enzymes, and in the brain, which has high water content; eventually, though, all other tissues and organs begin to break down in this way. Damaged blood cells spill out of broken vessels and, aided by gravity, settle in the capillaries and small veins, discolouring the skin.”
Mo Costandi - 25 May 2015 Guardian Online.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/neurophilosophy/2015/may/05/life-after-death
It’s like poetry.
Still Life with Dead Game, a Monkey, a Parrot, and a Dog
Frans Snyders
I’ve been wanting to add video sketches to my work for a while, and finally found the opportunity. I took an alternative route to work and discovered this delicious spectacle.
The ground had opened up and ushered forth. The tarmac blacked and fractured. Sunken and violent. The street transformed from it’s passive state to a site of unknown menace and promise. I felt that were I to enter the water could be relocated to another space. Transformed. Passage.
