The Mid Point Review is a moment for revision and evaluation of what I have done so far and give some sort of indication as to where I am going. I do not intend for the MPR to be a literal description of how I work but rather a summation of my philosophical approach and how it has developed during this period. I see it more as a document of inspiration, an indication of where I am heading. Five minutes would not be enough to unpack the lineage of the activities, their provenance, let alone the detailed methods, materials and so on, these reside in the blog itself and elsewhere.
A transcript of the video is included below and can also be found here
Transcript
I started this course asking myself, how I might bring together the disparate areas of my practice.
Previously I had dealt with this concern by accepting the variety and differences between outcomes while focusing on core ideas which I expressed and connected but not necessarily in overt ways.
Since October, I have engaged in a period of research and reflection; evolving and synthesising, deepening roots through a series of sequential stages as well as more intuitive, simultaneous orchestrations of video, photography, drawing, sound, sculpture, illustration and text.
The different means of expression and transformation I employ, affect facets of my practice in different ways addressing interests that lie in the domains of natural and human activity, science and the humanities, domains which are normally separated but which are nonetheless deeply connected.
The blog itself plays a critical role in the elaboration and synthesis of ideas and solutions as well as serving as a document for retrospection.
Each path I take articulates a different way of seeing. I embrace this multiplicity as I do the complexity of human society which in turn I see as a reflection of the natural world.
David Wengrow furnishes an insight into how composite cultural ideas and forms arise from the plurality of evolved societies. As a society becomes increasingly complex, with a multiplicity of world views, religions, writing, trade and so on, the idea of composites such as imaginary creatures and complex works of art proliferates.
An analogy can be made between this cultural phenomenon and nature’s way of “experimenting” with body plans and life strategies in new and changing environments, as it did during the Cambrian explosion about 5 00 million years ago.
Navigating this ecology of ideas where relationships are often assimilated, sublated and hidden behind a chaotic order, I look for correlations between natural and cultural processes and how new rules of engagement emerge and overlay preceding ones.
This emergence happens when thresholds of complexity are crossed. Thresholds such as the origin of life, the emergence of consciousness and now the digital symbiosis that appears to be encroaching on us.
I am particularly interested in the poetic possibilities of cross-fertilising modalities such as the relationship between sound and sculpture and how meaning and nuance in language can be variously disrupted and manipulated.
These are not only responses to and a way of reconciling with what Ted Hughes called “the horror of creation” but also rejoicing in the wonder of life and existence underwritten by the question, why is there anything at all?
I see an evolutionary universe in which being becomes becoming, impermanence discloses change, and the desire for permanence and stability becomes a quest for understanding the nature of continuity and time.
For now, I envisage the final show as a compendium in which interrelated themes from different domains are expressed as on the connected faces of a solid, looking outwards, yet out of one another’s sight. A whole in which the existence of continuity of relationships is inferred from a unity of form.
These outcomes are not set but may include: sound and sculpture installations, a series of videos and a graphic books, maybe even performance.
The idea of inversion of methodology is one example of how I am currently approaching work. Where previously I embedded sound in sculpture from whence it subsequently emanated, now I am looking at ways of collecting externally sourced sounds within a body where they can resonate and sublate into a transformed essence.
The low residency period has been a transformative time for recontextualised reflection away from daily life. It has brought challenges that have facilitated clarification of questions posed by the many directions which anyone work might take.
It has sharpened my awareness of the need to wield clarity and control with as light a touch as is within my grasp, and that context and experience should ebb and flow through the permeability of the self; filtered and selected to allow the beating core of what I do to sound its own rhythm, be the principle impetus. In all this, my relationship with the external world can be taken as a given, I am immersed in it, self evidently unseparated from it.
I look forward to the next fifteen months, always transforming, always evolving, continually finding the vulnerable protean soft body inside an ordered and constrained carapace.