drawing

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

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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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'Make more' - pages from my sketchbook /  by Justin Harrison

I made more. I don’t quiet understand the direct nature of the vertical forms, but intuitively I do. They have agency but not body. They exist yet remain unavailable. As I draw I’m looking for a specific composition and feel, but I don’t know till I see it. The blackness around them feels important and adds to a generative feel for me.

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‘From nothing comes something’

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The collaging is self-indulgent, there is just something delicious about the waxed paper, and the way it takes a crease. I wonder if I am trying to sculpt when I collage and layer, previously I have made collographs and the same thought occurs then.

Is there a place of drawing and making occupy the same piece/space?
What does it look like?
How can I capitalise on it? Or am I trying to combine two things that are genuinely separate entities?

I also notice that number 7 is my favourite right now and that I have departed from the clear vertical columns. Will they translate up larger? Somehow I want more craft and beauty, more draughtsmanship. It feels ok to play with abstract in my sketchbook but I want the dialogue to remain accessible in some form. Or does it?

Am I doing too much on behalf of the audience? Should I trust them to interpret? To paraphase Roland Barthes -’ the audience becomes the author’

 

Passing Through - Collograph Print /  by Justin Harrison

‘Passing Through’ Collograph print on paper. (Image my own)

I needed to find a school/studio safe process to seal the collograph plate. This was a test of the new sealing process.

I kinda like it.

He’s got something going for him and he’s going places, even if he is dead.

Another fast piece, made in under an hour. Although not one sitting - more like 10mins, 30 mins, 20mins. I wasn’t timing but you get the idea.

Again there is a pleasure for. me with drawing and by extension printmaking, specifically collograph. I get to draw three times. Once when I first draw the image, second when I cut the plate and third when I wipe the plate.

There is something deeply satisfying about drawing for me, it’s visceral, and somehow beyond my words. I long to make a drawing so honest and from so deep within that it it falls off the page.

Again I’m connecting to my materials trying to find a tone of voice to them, also not thinking too much.

Rhythmns.

I also wondered about encaustic wax, I stumbled across it today reading a web page about it. There’s a quality to it that I suspect could be really delicious. I’ve set drawings in wax before by just dipping but this is a more intentional process, proving layers and tones. In addition it gives me another material - another dialect. I’m concerencd that I’m adding yet another process to learn and adding more time whichh I really don’t have right now…

Tick tock….

 

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.

 

Pulling threads - everything is divisible /  by Justin Harrison

Not deconstructing just dismantling.

Derrida says everything is divisible, so I divided the canvas into threads warp and weft. It could continue reducing to finer fibres, then to chemical compounds///atomic structure///neutrons and protons///up quarks and down quarks and gluons///

I liked the stages of undoing. An abandon to the process and loss of form and purpose, yet still remaining with some memory of self. I could paint 4 canvases and dismantle 1. As a set. All equal in the sum of their ‘constituent parts’. The Horizontal and Vertical. Undoing.

(I also felt ridiculous doing it, like I was performing being an artist, really an imposter. Trying so hard to be conceptual - I’m not convinced - It feels smug and empty at the same time.)

Taking photos as the canvas eroded and reverted to threads. A partial dismantling  - the first division.

I’m not sure I understand deconstruction or Derrida anymore.  I read him and think I grasp it then when I got back I have no idea how I thought what I did. 

Read Anthony Gormley today - I love his drawing and felt encouraged by how he’s free to draw and let the connection to his more involved sculpture work itself out. The are ties between the two practices but not always immediate or linear. 

Reading/// Derrida’s ‘Letter to a Japanese friend’. /—— again

Researching/// Matthew Barney. I love the vast expanse of his narratives, along with the interconnected themes that relate and reference. His work had such a strong relationship to materials, although I know a lot of his work is made for him, which I would find hard - not to get my hands dirty but have someone else make my work..

Things I want to make:

Stick bundle
Bundle drawings
Immerse installation
Etched copper tubes 
Stick feathers -wood and plaster
Bundle and wall set
Small natural linen drawings 
Axe for an angel - etch on axe cheek.
Immerse diagram drawings
Portraits
Large wing drawing representational to abstract.
Plaster sculpture abstract for. With inserts.
Large gestural drawings 

 

Imagined Bundle /  by Justin Harrison

There was a pleasure in the process of making the drawing, a simplicity to the rules, regularity and consistency that pleased some deeper part of my brain. I’ve returned to the drawing and still like it which is a good sign and want to make more - I feel like has something more to say. The drawings stand as preparation for more sculpture, a way of understanding and creating.

It also falls into the enquiries I’m currently connecting with ‘constituent parts’ and ‘everything is divisible’. Real and imagined. A physical wrangling with the ideas I’m wrestling with.

I’d like to go larger more obsessive in the repetition.