Sculpture

Held In Tension /  by Justin Harrison

Spent some time considering the construction of Iranian Dome Tents. The role that tension plays in holding and creating form and structure. Strapping and Poles, Rope and Pegs. Inside the tent there are straps that don’t just hold the frame in tension, but also hold meaning unique to each clan through the design woven into it.

I wonder if there is a link to the tension in binary definitions of writing and the potential for there to be ‘Undecidability’

It makes me want to create straps that hold a pole in constant tension. A form of restraint or connecting ‘a’ to ‘b’ - which might also link to Godel’s theorem of the included middle. How something can be a and b and not a or b at the same time. Some form of interdependent relationship of ‘a’ and ‘b’ and ‘not a or b’

Possibly leather straps and white stripped or black charred, green wood poles. These could increase in complexity to describe more complex relationships that use tension.

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

 

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

 

Belief and Intuition/// /  by Justin Harrison

Image: My own

I still like his notion of ‘intuition’ for dealing with the non factual or logic of our lives. As much as we deal with a hard reality; bills, trains, shopping and germs. We also need a system for dealing with the non factual spheres of our daily lives - a softer reality. That which sits beyond standard taxonomy /// Things which we cannot easily process with reason or even fit our language. That which resides beyond.

The ‘Nursery’ of our belief system. Where do our beliefs originate? I’m still trying to track a neurological model, but equally a philosophical model. That’s a lot of reading>>>

Then also there is that which is in us and that which is beyond us - outside of us. There is me, and then that which is not me and that which is me and not me at the same time.

Internal, external and mutually idependant or perhaps mutually interdependent?

In the sculpture we can engage with the space around the object as much as in. Creating a widening aura, and yet a blurring of boundaries///

///What belongs in a bundle? What must sit outside?

 

Studio /  by Justin Harrison

Working in the studio. I've been drawing these articles for some time and it was good to have my hands on physical materials, to work towards making. I feel like I'm getting stuff done when I hold a section of metal or batton of wood.

There were various plans I had and I knew I wouldn't get everything done, but I was glad have charred some wood and dipped it in plaster. That's not it - the work. Just a test of the materials to see how they behave and look together.

I had a bunch of questions in my head - trying to see where the work can go. Essentially it should work. I want to build up the layers of plaster enough to carve back into forms, polish and refine. I realise that I need to use scrim if I am to escape the form of the baton, although this could present problems later on when carving back if the scrim is exposed.

For some reason I have chosen the shittiest wood, old fencing panels. Sometimes it disintegrates as I cut it. But there is a charm to it too. It's honest and lacks pretence. If I were to use new wood somehow the dialect changes. The other thing I note is the wood came from an art director who I worked for back in the day, she's passed on now and there is an element of memento mori and honouring to using this wood. It smells too - the creosot gives off a tar like scent that isn't unpleasant, but some how a little unsettling. The associations and the scent jar almost - stood amidst it all I find the moment odd.

The plaster makes a heat of its own as I mix it in the cold studio. It's always a fight, waiting for the right moment the only lasts a minute or so. I dip the wood and then immediately figure out a way better way to do this. Next time I can production this a little better if I set it all up and have the battons suspended.

I'm not entirely sure the plaster is white, it seems to have a cast to it. Will need to research it there are better brands to use. Was good to be making.

 

Chen Zhen /  by Justin Harrison

There is something deeply satisfying about the physicality of Chen Zhen’s sculpture and choice of materials. It seems he often chooses to leave the material unaltered but manipulated out of it’s normal context. A particular and specific use of visual language. The black rubber inner tube becomes an almost natural element, like grass or reeds, yet they are unapologetically honest in their use with no attempt to cover up or hide the history of the objects or material.

In fact the presence of the history of the object is imperative, intrinsic to the reading of the work. The language of history and past experiences is. curious one because that too is read and created especially by the viewer and their lived experience. The associations and emotions attached to an old chair or a drum can be multifarious.Yet there is still a specific tone of voice to the work. Awkward and suggestive, nostalgic and melancholic.

I like the work but I wouldn’t want to make it.

“One should learn to break out of one’s own cocoon and be courageous enough to break away from one’s self and to abandon one’s own cultural context. The Chinese proverb ‘the soul has left its shelter’ in fact symbolizes the critical state in which one’s creative capacity has reached the most active zenith.” Chen Zhen
(Quoted in Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea 2003, p.83.)

Connected to this notion of moving beyond one’s immediate cultural environment is Chen’s term ‘Transexperience’, which he coined in 1998 while living between New York, Paris and Shanghai in order to describe what curator Hou Hanru has defined as ‘the dynamic and dialectical process that occurs when an individual is displaced between cultures, societies and languages’ (Hanru, ‘“Transexperience” in the art of Chen Zhen’, in Serpentine Gallery 2001, p.15.) According to Hanru, ‘Transexperience suggested to [Chen] both the fusion with these other influences and, simultaneously, the ability to transcend their impact’ (Hanru 2001, p.15). As a result of his combining creative techniques and influences from the divergent countries and cultures in which he resided in works such as Cocon du Vide, Chen has been described by art historians as a ‘transcultural artist’, as was explored in the exhibition Chen Zhen’s Transcultural Art in Paris Retrospective at Galerie Perrotin, Paris, in 2014. Tate website:
 https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/chen-cocon-du-vide-t12941

///Temporary Homes For The Liminal\\\

 

Day 2 in the Forest/// /  by Justin Harrison

Stripping the wood down to the raw white wood I find there are about 4 different layers of to get through till you get to the wood.

My wife worries that I’ll be cold, I have a thermos of hot Japanese tea but I don't need it the work is hot it’s self.

I spent more time stripping wood of it's bark. Learning about the material and how it responds. It informs about the time scale if I want to work larger. It will take longer than I thought.

I also burnt the wood a little, it was green, wet and took time to colour. I'm not sure if I like it. Whether it will work how I imagined. I wanted a gradient that transitioned well but its patchy and organic. It's not how I drew or imagined.

I tested a stripped stick and a natural one against each other. Hammered them into the dark brown earth. There was something about it I liked and I wonder if it might work better on a much larger scale. There does seem to be a language to it - the contrasting vertical presences. Although I miss the craft of drawing and sculpting - this feels too simplistic somehow.

Perhaps when I add copper to it the voice will come through more.

Another thought crossed my mind. how. would the work change in voice if I were to cast sticks in porcelain? It would take black colour well if I wanted to dip or stain. Raw porcelain has that toothy bite to it which would take the black.

I'm also worried that this is taking a lot of time, all this effort for work that's not very good.

I took more sound recordings too, they still amuse. 

Oh year and the ribbons, as I shaved the bark off I made ribbons which reminded me of the blown out tire, the same forms occurred, similar violence had occurred to the object to create the form.

Stripped.

 

Breaking Down /  by Justin Harrison

I saw a blown out tire on the way to work. Cast to the curb. There was something poetic in its appearance. The confidence of it’s thick black tones counterpointed by the twisted ribbons and threads of it’s insides. Somehow it felt like it had now become a victim of a hit and run. But by whom? Then the leaves add another texture to the scene for me. They too have fallen, curling and twisting in their passage. All transitioning away from their known purpose. Exit.

I’m not sure what I want to do with it, just leave it as photographs or progress it into drawings, there is something about the forms and shapes it takes that is a little provocative to capture - maybe printmaking. Maybe a digital composition of all four images.

 

Holly is a sticky wood /  by Justin Harrison

Out on location in woods. Looked for and found a resource of wood to process for ‘bundle 1’.

A number de-limbed branches were on the ground so I took the opportunity.

Again to hold materials in my hands feels good and adjusts the course of my thinking.

I realise that this project is going to take longer and more energy. The holly doesn’t give up its bark easily and is a stick wood to work with when green but pleasingly dense and heavy, and to process a number of large poles will take some time in addition to resourcing them.

I stripped one shirt Barton and left a little bark which gave a texture that spoke differently to what I expected.

I was short of time and didn’t get to burn the wood or test it against copper. However I processed a pile of wood and worked up a sweat despite the cold. I want to capture the whiteness of the wood Before it greys. The contrast to be pronounced when I burn one end.

Staining paper to in preparation for drawing letting the inks ‘bleed out’, possibley another form of dismantling my work.

Research: artists, context and connecting theory.

During making I also recorded the sound of me working - I thought of my friend who I’m collaborating, with who’s first instinct is a musician, I figured it would be fun and provocative to make a recording of the sounds of me working on the sculpture for our collaboration and send it to him instead of pictures///

 

Currently Reading///Researching /  by Justin Harrison

Collections

Sculpture as constituent parts///

Language and it's relationship to compositional elements of sculpture or artmaking

Deconstruction in language and the physical.

Derrida it appears has a dislike of the term Deconstruction and the resistance to it becoming an 'ism'

‘Deconstructualism is a word used by idiots.’(McQuillan 2000, 41)

Everything is divisible rather than deconstructible.

How is this reflected if at all by atomic structure and constituent parts?

Letter to a Japanese Friend"///Jacques Derrida///10 July 1983

Derrida and Differance, ed. Wood & Bernasconi, Warwick: Parousia Press 1985, p. 1-5

An insight into the problematic nature of using 'deconstruction'

Jacques Derrida /// Nicholas Royle///Routledge 2003

Not sure the below statement is true... but I like the idea of interrogation. Scrutinisng our understanding of Law and Justice. Isn't this what Jesus did?

For him it was both ‘foreseeable and desirable that studies of deconstructive style should culminate in the problematic of law and justice.’2 Deconstruction is therefore a means of interrogating the relationship between the two.

https://criticallegalthinking.com/2016/05/27/jacques-derrida-deconstruction/

Interrogating Law and Justice - But who's law and justice?

Thread to Physics ____

Thread to Language____

Thread to Sculpture____

Thread to Spirituality____

Further reading required?: 

Derrida Difference

Deconstruction

Law and Justice






 

Relief /  by Justin Harrison

ADurer_Study.jpg

I made the relief as a demonstration for a student. Pulled up an image of a masters work. Albrecht Durer. It was a image of an old man again, can’t get enough of them although I still haven’t ascertained why. (My own aging? A too easy an explanation)

The materials felt good in my hands and the work came together quickly. It doesn’t feel finished but it felt good to leave it where it was. I could refine it to a much more finished level but that seems dull and trite somehow.

Yet there is something that happens when I make things, physical materials in my hands. I love the crafting. But it seems self indulgent and absent of thought.

Why make it?

Who cares?

What purpose does it serve beyond a teaching aid?

But still it feels satisfying and perhaps hidden deeper is a purpose, a thing that needs to be made, an idea as yet brought to realisation.

Elusive in its simplicity.

There are a number of pieces I want to make:

Immerse sculpture

Axe for the boundaries

Portraiture in drawing and relief

Abstract prints

Not sure how they all relate and are they worth pursuing?