Image my own
Entering the forest requires a different way of being. One's presence needs 'toning down', for you are not alone and your presence perceived. We are not unwelcome in the forest, however there is a better way of moving and being. Sound is felt, pace absorbed, activity registered and at times resisted. It is good to sit, to let your thoughts meander as a river would pass through. Time is measured but not by any clock. Gifts are given freely but not thoughtlessly.
Image my own
Digital naustalgis - old school music and games
Safety of familiar
A structure that cannot decay is a structure that cannot provide space for the new. (Ref from video)
Also a structure that cannot decay cannot transform or have an afterlife, discover the new( (Depression of computers - Baudrillard))
Dragging behind the present
UvR’s work is decaying, but can have an afterlife.
Decay death transformation afterlife
brb
Video: Jonas Čeika - CCK Philosophy
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.
Kris Harbour- Inspiring maker - videos for my ref.
I am starting to from an uncomfortable relationship with UVR and her work. One minute I love it and the next I am uninterested. I keep returning to it though I love the forms and textures she creates and uses. It’s deeply satisfying the shapes she discovers the way they articulate the unknown. Her prolific generation of different forms feels so intentional and yet unplanned. Great forms sweeps across a plane or intricate animated forms like barnacles cluster together, mouths open feeding on an invisible source, an implication that there is more in the unseen around us. Yet when I listen to interviews and read I find little spoken of other than the process and begrudging concessions about the past.
It appears that much of UVRs work is automatic and whilst there is nothing wrong in working this way, I can’t help but feel that something is being missed here. When UVR talks about her work it comes in simple safe statements. Yet the work has way more going onthan just the surface.
But how can we ignore the significance of who the woman UvR is and what has happened and informed her life and therefor her work?
I found this whilst researching, thinking about submersion, drowning, afterlife, and transformation.
Taken from the website: https://www.fieldandstream.com/photos/gallery/hunting/deer-hunting/2010/12/triple-tragedy-three-bucks-drown-antlers-locked/
Article by BY STEVEN HILL | PUBLISHED DEC 15, 2010 10:18 PM
Image possibly taken by: Jason Good
It’s not my photography but I wish it was. Curiously, I suspect the image was just for documentation rather than a consciously creative endeavour. However it just has so much happening in it.
In a muted palette of olive, amber, brown and blacks. Three bodies have come together in a triste tri-union. The trees appear to sprout out of the cadavers spines, blackened and wirey, as though some mysterious transformation has occurred through the incident. nature has reclaimed the moment. Above and beneath a quiet worlds are entangling. Bleeding through.
Little nothings - in the studio and I’m making more quick pieces, they don’t feel deep but maybe that’s ok. What they can lead to is more interesting. I do worry that I’m not landing on any one pursuit. I still like to surround myself with materials, my desk is littered with bits of wood leather and copper piping.
I cut my finger magnificently and there is a fair bit of blood. I curse a lot, not because it hurts, but because it’s gonna slow me down.
These pieces confuse me, they come from me and there are qualities about them that I like, but I’m not often sure why. I want to draw and yet I end up making the physical sketches. I think about Matthew Barney and how his work moves between sketches and sculpture. Is this a root that my work also takes? How dp I find the equilibrium between the two.
What is my work about?
Being set apart? Margins?
What about the photography and prose?
I do notice the motif of reclaimed materials, it’s becoming a stronger preference, the motive I suspect is primarily financial, but also a rejection of capitalism and a concern for the environment, I am mindful of my presence. The more I research capitalsim the more objectionable it becomes.
In addition the history to the materials helps me to construct the work. This came up before in Jericho where the provenance mattered - even if it was just to me and definitely influenced the work.
Image my own
Immobile in passage
Significance is a virtue
Bravery the subject
Stoicism a choice
Performance of values
Image my own
In researching Ursula Von Rydingsvard for my research paper - I've come across a some ideas and material that connects with my practice - I'm curious about time, how it is perceived, approached and explored by the artist. Process is a key part of my practice and I see often that this relates to ideas of time and history. The layering of materials, techniques and processes. Building up and breaking down.
“Levi Strauss remarked on the laborious working process of layer-by-layer marking, sawing, and grinding, noting that “at each stage of the process, hundreds and thousands of marks were inscribedon the mass with pencil, saw, grinder and a variety of hand tools, adding up to a wearing down.” This ”adding up to a wearing down” Levi Strauss saw as “the back and forth of actual time, the time taken to mean it” and he added”
“Though this sculptor does not practice mimesis (her
humility precludes it), these human inscriptions
of eventfulness are echoed in the formation of tidepools, tree stumps,and river beds - minute quotidian world formative acts.
Thousands of marks made consciously,
leavened with kind cutsand crual, then leaded
down, blackened to absorb the light. A topology of
chambered need. An apparition of the dark.”The Sculpture of Ursula Von Rydingsvard P 46 The Sculpture of Ursula Von Rydingsvard P 46
Also:
”Positioning her sculptures at the midpoint between metaphor and concreteness, she deliberately multiplies narrative possibilities through a va-et-vient of memory and action.” The Sculpture of Ursula Von Rydingsvard P89
And:
“Time puts all back into equalibrium, which is more in keeping with natural laws. I would like my work to be as though time acted upon it---avery long time.” UVR from her journal - (taken from The Sculpture of Ursula Von Rydingsvard) p 82
Basic to her technique- which she surely developed in answer to a deep and indefinable need - is the element of repetition, the implicit statement that there are situations in life that have no beginning and no end. The arts in human history are threaded through with the impulse to escape calendar time (surely the basis of Islamic art), and many of von Rydingsvards routines suggest her need to enter the timeless universe of mythology. In casual remarks she has revealed her deep respect for ritual - the repetition of eternal gestures, always the same, in orderer to propriate the gods who themselves are always the same.” The Sculpture of Ursula Von Rydingsvard p 60
To Ponder:
Time is variable and I don’t believe it can be considered constant, even atomic clocks cans show variance when subject to different gravities.
In addition the Ethiopian calendar and Persian calendar both differsto the Gregorian calendar commonly used by the west, what does this mean a global and then universal understanding of time? The Gregorian calendar cannot be the standard by which everything is measured.
By recycling and repurposing material like wood it’s age becomes multiple, the initial growth of the wood will have been progressively accumulated (demonstrated by the rings), then there will be the first intervention where it is constructed into an item - a chest of draws or scaffold plank, then the 2nd visitation rePlacing, rePurposing and refashioning where it can be made into another item, and then decomposition. Which age applies then tot he item and by what/who’s calendar? This relates again to Derrida and Spectres and time being ‘out of joint’
In researching for my art and paper - I am on an interesting/infuriating and yet somehow not surprising route. By ‘interesting’ I actually feel like none, a non route, nowhere. The more I read the less sure I am what it is I am doing. (Standard MA Fine Art emotion)
Frustratingly, but then perhaps mercifully I see work that I am making, or about to make, or want to make. With Theaster Gates I see the shingled roofs I begun to explore. The RePlacement of materials, I like to choose. Especially reclaimed wood.
With Von Rydingsvard, I see the paddles I have been drawing and want to carve out of wood.(She make shovels to be specific, but they are so close I can’t ignore them).
Repetition feels like a little death. I need there to be a significant departure from what has gone before to justify my making. Especially If I am going to ask others to view the work.
I also struggle as an artist, with the continual re-presentation of objects and images to be interpreted again only slightly differently, with the burden of interpretation on the audience to discover the newly imbued meaning. Especially with my own work. Originality is a troublesome notion. Very little is new, yet creativity for me requires a healthy does of originality, rather than a nuance one.
Street Bag
Inside out
Bowels on public display
Disgorged acts
Vapid Gestures
Regurgitation of yesterday
Putrid nostalgia
Nothing new
Brief performative repetition
Benevolance of dirt
So this guy is my new favourite discovery. Maybe I’ll move on quickly but. art of points are resonating, and seem to fall into a useful place. I’m not sure this will go towards my research paper but it’s certainly interesting.
"History is made by bodies, armies, mass movements, hordes. Historie's great men and women always stood on mobs of bodies that changed history. unlike heroes journeies history is about masses of peple doing stuff, lots of work lots of war, lots of building systems and sometimes dismantelling systems. ANd ususally all of this is done without knowledge of what they are doing, unconscious of history, just like the zombie.
The problem is ideology refracts and distracts and temps us away from a mutalistic or communal historical consciousness and it temps us away from the consciousness of being a mass". 14:20 Plastic Pills
"The real power of the many as many. As an organism driven by a singular purpose. And even if the only leverage left avaialable to you is to take up space - that's still leverage. You've got more agency as a zombie than as a cowboy regardless of what the films say". 17:30 Plastic Pills
This is gonna look like I’ve lost my mind….But then I guess when art is being it’s least performative - perhaps it’s being most honest and has greater potential for insight. Or to at least move towards something genuine.
There is simple pleasure for me in removing some of the bark, ‘stripping’ to raw wood. I’d like to do it almost surgically. However I also enjoy the rhythm of the cut marks across the surface. A rhythm that feels located in the familiar. I’d like to have multiples but worry about time and is it worth it for the work. Is this my work? I keep looking for clues from myself.
I’ve been listening to various of talks on Derrida, Mark Fisher, Marx, Julia Kristeava. Presence and performance and Image. . I don’t know that I can surmise it all just yet. But something akin to - Presence in crisis, the lack of location and reference - a digital malaise or palsy.
The artist's activity is one of compulsive repetition, not under the law of a market as a narcissist among narcissists, but to envelop in the work the generative force of the world. Qua other. Plastic pills https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H13Unfk6UHs
It kinda gets obsessive, I try my hardest to make the marks consistent and always the same. It doesn’t work. But then I like that game.
The paddle feels somehow ‘held’ or suspended, and that if the marks were to disperse… so would the paddle.
Presence and place. Spectres manifested by the community.
For me the paddle has becoming a symbol of navigation and empowerment, a tool of implementing change. There is a deep desire to craft my own paddles in found wood, wrap them in leather and photograph them in place. But I have a lot of things pressing for my attention and it begins to block me.
I’m struggling to focus my attention, between thinking about my research paper, drawing, making. There’s a back log of work bits of sculpture I feel I need to finish to move on. Then there’s all the stick’s I’ve been obsessing over. I feel there should be a thread I can pull which will draw it all together. I also wonder about all the photography and writing that’s appeared in my Blog. (Although not for a while).
Somewhere there is a narrative in what I’m doing but it seems to elude me for now.
I don’t think I like what I am making. I’m not sure I can even call it art.
I’m not really sure what’s going on with my art work. Having finished a busy season where I work - I’ve allowed myself some down time. Being in the forest and making whatever I feel like. It’s odd to see what is manifesting when I’m not being observed and there e is no real agenda, or imagined audience.
I see that I am motivated by materials, just having something in my hand is provocative. I keep on stripping sticks, it’s a satisfying ritual reducing on half to a naked white state. Hazel strips easier than holly, and gives a whiter wood. I like the contrast between the dark bark and white wood - some form of binary. Not that I believe in binaries. I find them almost dangerous, treacherous.
I became enamoured with the green of the Holly tendrils, previously I have been only using wood that has fallen. (I am everything you left behind). However I wanted to see how it felt to break my own rules. The vivd green had a diffenret feel to it and felt as though it invited a different response. I guess its the language of materials for me. I worked in a very unconscious manner and let the form evolve with little intervention.
I’m not sure it really succeeds as a piece, however it still falls in to the category of ‘little nothings’ timed pieces.
Boundaries
Given space to occupy
Set dwelling
Dry grass, deviod of life
Out of time
Breaking down
In passage
Image my own
Been thinking about ‘The forest’ as a ‘place of non place’, of unbelonging.
Of being lost.
Also does the Forest as a site resist colonialisation? Especially in it’s resistance of structure and the centre. An anti-land (Cixous)
The strong vertical presence marks a from of time - yet time also looses it’s bearing here. Bodies grow tall and then yield themselves to the ground.
Hamlet encounters the Ghost - the Spectral in the forest. His father pulled out of time in his orchard. ‘Time is out of joint’ Hamlet.
Ursula Von Rydingsvard’s work rooted in the body of the forest, her life a liminal existence.
What else does the forest offer as a site, no site. Does it reflect the essence of Derrida’s enquiries, of the nature of Differance, the spectre, and so on.
Is it a site of transformation? The passage through summing change. After all the forest is a site of constant change, growth and decay.
On a practical level - I keep returning here to dwell, think and work. I feel like there is an obvious connection that I am blind to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJr0NwXWb6Q
Hamlet -”Time is out of joint”
Really useful video investigating Derrida’s concept of the Spectral. I’ve come back to this a couple of times. The idea of time manifesting in a non liar way creates space for reconsidering passage. And therefor the passage and place of transformation.
In looking to land on a specific line of enquiry for the research paper, I find this interesting. It sits well with the liminal and belonging. Expressions of the outsider and questioning who is on the inside, and how are these locations decided? Agreed upon and policed?
Image my own
Strapped and bound
Trapped to the finite vertical
Made an example
I realise I’m making this hard for myself, looking for deep works of art to blog about. There is a mistaken need to perfotm. But I know this is counter productive. I like the freedom of wandering sketchbooks that spill and bleed over, ideas that seep through the pores.
The more I’m researching the more I feel removed form given structures. I like the question ‘what if?’ So now I’m trying to make little pieces frequently. Post without feeling like I have to write lines and lines of deep thinking.
