Everyday

Making stuff /  by Justin Harrison

I glue some more battons together in the stack as it felt too light weight not enough presence, fiddle with a clamping system and revert back to string wrapping.

Then I turn my attention to the base plate - Ive been sanding it and start thinking about just the transformation the material from rough to finished - am I adding value or meaning? Can I also do this with copper too - I still want to draw on it. (I also realise I should have dipped it in water to raise the grain before adding some oil - but I got too excited by the material wanting to see its grain)

Still not sure about the direction of the sculpture stuff it seems too tight and controlled and unimaginative. I don’t feel excited about it. But I need to push on and make not worry.

I move on to a funny little piece started last time I was in the studio the tin batton pieces I’m following the idea that at times it’s good just to make and not overthink but let the art evolve. I’m undecided what exactly its about other than ‘an article’. A collection of physical sketches. I keep on rearranging it and get tired and just make a decision and glue it.

Ursula Von Rydingsvard has a collection of pieces called ‘little nothings’ a collection of smaller less self-conscious pieces. this seems like a helpful technique and I’m trying to fill my bench with quicker pieces whilst I settle with my practice.

Then because it’s been on my mind and in my drawings for a while I cut out a paddle from a fence panel. It’s crude, quick and dirty. But then. I am trying to make quick pieces too and to do it to my satisfaction would realistically take weeks. There is something satisfying seeing it in the physical, it represents something but needs to go under more transformation.

When mounting the paddle quickly on the wall to view it I place the ‘article’ next to it and something small happens that I like. A relationship strikes up between the two pieces it’s small and quiet but present non the less. I leave up and arrange the there current pieces to see them together.

There are various thoughts around the purpose of the paddle that I’m beginning to explore in sketchbooks also relating to the vertical poles.

 

States of mind /  by Justin Harrison

I’m working on assorted projects in the studio. With the mantra ‘make lots’ in my head. I know I can get caught up with trying to perfect stuff and so faster ‘physical sketches’ and experiments makes sense. But I do find it hard and it has been so for the past few days. A lot of my work feels silly. I care about making good work, but then to make good work means letting go. Work that is constrained doesn’t breathe, but is stifling. So I come back around the circle again to - just get on and make.

I start by cutting more wood with no real plan, other than dividing it up to smaller and smaller pieces, with a loose plan of reconstructing it.

Implementing more time limited piece - I set the clock for 1hr. By the end of 2 hrs I have two pieces partially made - (gluing). And a third is glueing to0 - but that’s been evolving over a while.

I’m trying to capitalise on the limited deadlines as a launch point for developing the thread of ideas. Although today I don’t feel entirely convinced. But I do know it works, things reside in my preconscious and I all too often reject them and don’t document them. but if I’ve learnt anything it’s that making and blogging captures the elusive and transient thoughts that actually coalesce into more.

Also this helps document some practical stuff like better ways to secure items whilst glues sets. (String wrapping).

It’s an interesting process - moving through different emotional states with my practice. Some of which I’m learning to ignore as they are counter productive, arresting my process.

I like the more inquisitive states I’ve been finding, photographing and writing and reading as well as making.

 

The Colour of Everything Left Behind /  by Justin Harrison

Not sure how much I want to say about this…I could leave it. Just post the image and the title.

Maybe its a piece to show.

But for the sake of my blog, process and the need to document I’ll write.

Disposed of ‘used thinner’ from multiple oil painters, collected and distilled over a period of time. Left to stand, gradually the paint settles as sediment and the thinner can be poured off and reused. Divisable. The sediment normally disposed of. However I realised as I recycled the thinner that there was a uniform colour created each time. The colour of everything left behind.

I collected the sediment in a specimen jar - it seemed appropriate somehow. Something evidential. Something clinical. Dispassionate. Removed.

I wonder if I should use it, make a drawing or print, but for now it doesn’t feel right. I just want to keep the jar. Distilled.

Everything is divisible. (Almost)

Addendum: I’ve come back and posted the image 3 times as I attempted to colour correct the image to get it as faithful as possible, but I’m working with an I-phone 11 and an old Sony 3/4 SLR and a laptop, which doesn’t bode well fo colour correction. George if you read this I know how off things are, please don’t judge me!

 

Just stuff I like /  by Justin Harrison

Not been the most productive this past week, I think my Brian had had enough after the assessment and interim show. So as an attempt to get things moving again - I’m just collating a bunch of stuff I like especially around the idea of books.

There is always a desire to draw and to explore drawing, I’m looking for a common thread to explore or maybe just make stuff and see what happens, I suspect the latter is better because the former sounds like an old procrastination tactic. I like the idea of pages and pages of delicious drawing building a narrative, coloured collographs, mono prints, raw drawings and etchings…

I discovered an artist too (picured above) who seems to be working with similar motifs. I also see similarities to his invertigations.

“In Tibetan text ‘Bardo’ refers to the transitional state between one life and the next, a state in which those that have passed, in a karmic sense, may ne guided by the living towards a more positive ‘rebirth’.
When a tree dies its wood can taken a new form and be re-imagined within a different realm.
Clays was once rock, formed beneath oceans, raised up by the mountains to crumble and be washed to the seance more.
Metal, Glass, Leather, cotton, plastic, stone - all that exists is moving, becoming again, in a constant, cyclical change.
Birth is not the beginning and death is no end”
Nic Webb: Instargram 2MAR2023

Also see: https://www.nicwebb.com/works/hod-english-oak

 

I am everything you left to decay /  by Justin Harrison

I am everything
You left to decay
As walls fail
And fluids leach
Billions multiply

Out of my body
Yields possibility
I am given up
To the earth
In smaller parts
Than before

(((Discarded squash left on window sill, decaying and desicating.)))

 

In the studio /  by Justin Harrison

Im stood in the studio drinking a dirty can of Dr Pepper and trying to figure what I AM GONNA DO. I have about 4-5 different things pulling for my attention and I’m really not sure what the priorities are. Maybe the thing that looks the coolest and will impress people....

I had every intention of pressing on with ‘Jericho’ a sculptural piece - but one thing has led to another and now I'm thinking about coracles.

Oh and there's also tattooed paddles and winnowing fan, and blah...+++

I do need to focus but also want to let all the ideas fall out of my head. It was ok before I started the MA life was simpler- I blame Jonathan K it’s his fault.

Also there's the Study statement and curated blog hovering menacingly behind my head.

Then I think about Passage and Place and consecrated spaces. Can a body or area of water be consecrated? +++

Oh and etching copper pipes - Id forgotten that needed investigating - along with ink drawings and encaustic wax. The list grows

Jericho ok Im focussing now. Why Jericho - a stronghold? I stop questioning and just make to see what happens>>>

There a lot of stuff on my desk - it’s supposed to inspire - today it's just irritating.

 

Passage between the binary and self-decomposition /  by Justin Harrison

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

 

Encombre 3 /  by Justin Harrison

 

It’s the orange glove, otherwise I might have skipped the scene, as just repeating previous work. But there’s this disembodied skin again - cast against the fragments stone and grit, lying prone, limp and deflated. It had purpose, briefly, visceral and present, now it’s passing through. The black plastic is encroaching, soon to suffocate everything that has been rendered.

Passage and place. Briefly.

Now limp like a dead game bird from a flemish painting.

 

Disrupted averages /  by Justin Harrison

Image: My own

Disrupted averages (Concept - Jonathan Kearney)

In the studio I have an hour or so.

Not long///

I have left items out on the desk from my last visit. I do it to provoke myself. It’s irritating and funny at the same time. Pieces of textured leather  - favourite tools. It all makes me want to make things immediately - the materials speak, not a language I entirely understand but it is language none the less.

I hang some large watercolour paper I have plans for - been day dreaming about making huge black ink drawings. Bold and sensitive, ink dispersing to granular clouds of vapour.

My phone is a pain in the arse and kepis turning off ###

Disrupt your averages/// 

I tried to make something in a hurry tonight. 

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I decide I have to make something in the next hour, using what I have collected or hoarded around me. This means working fast, the opposite of what I normally do, usually I take long, considering, measuring, crafting experimenting. This has to go out the window.

So I begin, I keep it simple. I take two pieces of wood  cut the other day. I had plans for them, but I can always cut more. (I have a generous supply of old fence panel wood stashed in the corner). Playing with the two pieces in different arrangements I decide I want to join them somehow, I consider plaster but know this will take too long, instead I cut a small piece of leather with the intention to make a cuff to join them.

I’m already breaking my own rules by not sharpening my head knife first - it should cut in one or two passes - it takes too many and leaves slight double edge. I cringe internally and move on.

Then get annoyed an go back and clean it up, but quickly. Next I soak the leather to wet form it. I run it under a tap - ideally I’d leave it in a clean bowl of warm water and watch the bubbles ecstatically escape the back of the leather but again this all takes time. The skin takes long to relax under the cold water. Like me it's cold.

As I fold the leather around the wood and clamp it - I realise that it’s too small compositionally, intuitively I want a larger cuff - to have more presence. I should have seen this before I started.

Then I have a some realisations as the hour comes to a close///

  1. I’m no way gonna finish in time.

  2. I failed and that’s fine.

  3. I will need to cut more leather and reform it and wait for it to dry.

    Thats annoying ### It’s annoying as its wasteful, and is gonna cost me time and finance. Then it occurs to me that this is an issue for me. Like a big issue. I don’t like to waste anything, because I can’t afford to. I realise that historically I have always worked very carefully and methodically and meticulously. I thought it was because I liked well made work. (I do - but that’s not the point) It’s mostly because I’m afraid to make mistakes. I’ve learnt to work this way to not spend money or make errors.

I think about the maxim - the rich stay rich while the poor get poorer. (This week it was announced that the worlds 10 richest men have doubled their wealth over the past two years whilst more people have fallen into poverty).

I wonder if rich culture increases and advances, because it can innovate far quicker, it doesn’t need to conserve its resources. It can afford to waste a few prototypes, raw materials, money and make mistakes. Where as poorer cultures work must work carefully and methodically with the precious few commodities or compromise instead, still creative and innovative, but advancing at a slower speed.

I also realise:

  1. All the work I've done is really useful and informative and it's ok to experiment and waste a little bit of leather. No time has been wasted but well spent exploring. It's informative.

So. interesting. I disrupted my average tonight and I saw something in myself, my practice and perhaps my culture.

IMAGES+++

My own

 

Encombre #2 /  by Justin Harrison

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.

 

Sadness comes from quiet place. /  by Justin Harrison

Just cos I like the imagery. Found haunting footage of a submerged deer dancing, dead but moving through the water held in the jaws of an alligator, something saddening and beautiful simultaneously.
Instagram Video Posted by Real Nature on the 20/01/22

It touches on the dead horse again and death as transformation, a point of liminal exchange. Here the alligator becomes a ‘master of ceremonies’ or maybe the ferryman.

Then a tube poster that just pleased a deeper part of me. The aesthetics.

 

Pulling Threads together /  by Justin Harrison

Different elements of drawings and thoughts. This is the least considered post which may be a good thing///

Horizontal and Vertical. 

Aggregate and liminal. 1 + 1 =3

Made and unmade

Undoing

Sunday was a day of attempting to consolidate some of the drawings I’ve been making.Somethimes I need to just quickly visualise some of my thoughts, even if it’s to dismiss them. I’ve been given some new ‘super black’ paint which I kinda like, it sits on the page so matt, but also fragments well into particals.

‘Immerse’ (forest project with Jon) hangs in the air frustrating me with its lack of flow. I want more but am unsure what it is/// I need to write more - more lyrical stuff. Somethings the words carry more of the idea.

I like my work best when there's a strong element of craft to it. Something Jon mentioned too>>> Drawn or made.

Drawings - direction maybe doesn't matter dead horses? Can I visit a slaughter house? Or animal crematory?

To do: Ink wash drawing of Revenant - Glass climbing inside horse 🐴 

Current artists of interest: Barney, De Brukyer, Boyce, Theaster Gates. Really need to widen my exploration. Must find more artists.

Are there films I should be researching into more? Taking stills and making drawings, looking for the threads of transforming places/moments?
Return to Joker? Saving private Ryan? Revenant? Other?

“making a destabilising passage through them”
Collins Jeff, Introducing Derrida P90

 

Make lots of things /  by Justin Harrison

I can not justify this piece, except that I love crafting and making, direct from my hands, this includes drawing especially too. Oh and for some reason I particularly like the colour of the plastercine today. Portraits feel so ‘art self- indulgent, arrogant and over confident of thier place in art history and practice. It makes it hard for me to make - except that I get some sort of satisfaction at summoning forth the work. Finding moments of detail described in a simple gesture or mark that Describes much more.

I struggle as it doesn’t feel very ‘Fine Art’ or very ‘CSM’. But then what has value. What does it mean for me to abandon approval. What could I make?

I’m still rolling over my friends words, how there is a quality and uniqueness to the things I make. The presence of the artist in the work. Even in a photograph or ready made, when work is really successful I feel as though the presence of the artist can still be discerned, felt.  

Still looking for the more in my work, something…a hand full of pigment cast like dust on the floor. A sentence that unravels the moment. An image that summons an aching. The more. Work that transcends the ordinary of everyday.

 

I am everything you left behind. I am everything you don't want #4 /  by Justin Harrison

Another discovery, at 2am this time. Not quiet what I’m looking for… I like when the subject has undergone some form of transformation. However it has this cinematic feel with the lighting, in addition the arrangement of 3 items has some from of aggregation. So I guess it counts.

The subject has this sense of semi-passive/dysfunctional patience to it. ‘Waiting for Godot’. It sits mutely in it’s incompleteness (Half a sofa), somehow stalwart in the belief that it has purpose. This whole image has a late middle aged feel to it. Or is that just me?

I find the first image works best, the lighting and confrontation perspective.

Less of the dead horse in these - which I find disappointing.

 

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

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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/

 

Encombre 2 /  by Justin Harrison

I saw a connection to the enviscerated horses in the movies and the sofa cast aside - partially dismantled. There is something I find unsettling in the brash colour a synthetic fleshly pink mixed with the violent disgorging of springs and struts. Layers of fabric folded back like fat and skin. Struts as bones splintered. Left sprawled, undignified in the street.

Yet how is an old sofa a dead horse?

Sacrificed in its death for another.

Another roadside victim, like a roadkill fox cast to the curb.

 

Ice Climbing /  by Justin Harrison

On a completely unrelated note. I am now slightly obsessed with ice climbing. Inspired by a dream I had a while ago.

Image Ref: YouTube Bradford Burns

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xi8wBxnlnY

 

I am everything you left behind again. /  by Justin Harrison

Another dirty sink. Another opportunity. Although in my excitement I made a rookie mistake. I used white paper when the sink is really a mid grey. I lost out on all the delicious white. next time…
I think this game is developing some rules too.
1. I can’t interfere in the process. As in no adding or sub-tracking to what is in the sink, only what is there.
2. I can’t coerce anyone to make such an opportunity.
3. It has to remain a secret for as long as possible.

It’s strange to be a part of the art making process yet exist outside of it at the same time. Not sure what to equate it to - except perhaps Levi Strauss ‘Triste Topics’ where he finds he exerts undue influence over a South American tribe when they witness writing for the first time and it creates division.

 

I am everything you left behind. I am everything you don't want /  by Justin Harrison

An ‘opportunistic print’. So not necessary my work?
’Somebody’ left a sink in a hot mess.
I just found it and pulled a print form it.
I’m gutted that I didn’t think to photograph the sink first, it would have made this.

But there you go, somedays I’m awake and the others…well.

This isn’t the first time I’ve played this game, there have been a few other occasions where I have been able to ‘capitalise’ on chance. But this episode has inspired the words or perhaps title:

‘I am everything you leave behind’

‘I am everything you don’t want’

This happens sometimes - something sticks in language, I discover a pull in the words. I feel a weight behind a phrase - yet I don’t understand what it is. It’s like it’s a mystery for me to solve. Maybe in the making. Something exists beyond my frame and I have to pull it in. Land it.

This image is a landing of some kind - of the phrase.