H

Psychological Voltage

Alexis

 

Pen and ink study

 

Following from my previous post, ideas start to form as to how the two aspects of what I am working with, the raw and the refined can coexist. The transition from the radially symmetrical, ordered Chaos Contained  to the more poietic gut forms has been a journey from the external to the internal, searching for the internal world contained within the carapace. I have oscillated between one and the other and it seems that the symbolic reifications have been and still are gestators for what I am working on now. I see the possibility of the chaotic inner world nascent from, evolving and bursting out of the idealised concept of the type form. This may be too literal an interpretation of what I am thinking but in the working with the material is where the transformation can take place.

Plato thought that our world was a mere shadow of an ideal one, our backs turned to the light and all we see is a third hand puppet show – which makes me think of the shadow videos I have previously put together. Aristotle got his hands covered in the slime of dissections and the analysis of the literal world that we see and touch each day. He looked at it straight in the eye and tried to explain it.

These drawings are the first attempts at placing markers for the ideas that are forming in my head. From them I can develop and evolve these ideas, make them less… obvious; more about the struggle between knowledge and knowing, existence and experience, than biology.

 

Pen and ink study

 

In the first visualisation, the internal bursts forth from the carapace; in the second, the metamorphosis of form from raw compost to ideal form. (It reminds me in a way of the empathic climb in Philip K. Dick’s Mercianism.) Two ways of reconciling through transformation. This is where the strength of the myth lies, in the potential to transform mud and dust to a higher state. It is an idea that holds psychological voltage.

 

Studies for H

Alexis

 

A chronological series of six pen and ink sketches for the H project

 

These are studies done not for the way the sculpture might look but to exercise in what spirit I will approach its making. I see part of this making as painting. Pen and ink is ideal for this, its fluidity and indelibility require seeing ahead a fraction of a moment before committing to the paper surface. And older than paper, its manufacture, a step away from charcoal belies its sophistication. Artists in the past have used this as a tool for analysis, for its closeness to painting: ink is liquid, applied with a brush of sorts, the unforgiving rigid point the focus of decision. The act of drawing with pen and ink is akin to delineating the boundary between the passages in a painting thereby creating a virtual line only that this line is the embodiment of something that does not actually exist. To do this needs an analysis and understanding of the line’s function in relation to what is being drawn must be done without inhibition or hesitation if the form is to come alive. In the case of sculpture, which deals with weight, pen and ink can express the lightest of touches as well as the heaviest of masses. Its calligraphy is a language inflected and nuanced by where and how the ink is placed and the freedom acquired can equally be translated into other mediums. 

Only in the penultimate sketch did I use pencil as a preliminary. Doing so disrupted the rhythm but more importantly, resulted in a drawing lacking in invention probably on account of the forms coming more from the head and less from a more visceral centre. Below is the initial sketch in biro I made a few days earlier featured in my previous post.

 

 

Zoans: Studies in Porcelain for H

Alexis

 

 

These are some instruments such that H might play with. For those that have been reading my posts, it should be possible to work out who or what H is. Pythagoras divided, Ovid reassembled although Theophrastus is the first author of this unification. 

I am looking to render such things in different ways.

 

Zoan: H Emerges from Ambivalence

Alexis

 

I find myself between the (scientific) need to define a field and the (artistic) urge to keep the field open.

Zoan is one of a number of works I have made in the past days, playthings for H. Whether H becomes embodied or remains unseen I have yet to discover. 

 

 

A few days ago I had a conversation with Janet regarding my current direction. As I wrote in a previous post, through an analysis in which taxonomy and mereology play no small part I am starting to shape this great ‘essay’. Assimilating what I am uncovering, intuitive action is being informed by an imaginative rationale the origin of which I am able to trace. Janet sees what I am doing as preparing a tomb which waits to be opened, peered into for the first time. I feel as though I am shaping the myth I spoke of at the start in October: a speculative reconstruction that however implausible it might be, holds within in its core a universal quest. 

Regarding Will’s comments during the MPR I mentioned in Elusive Directions, there would be a logistic problem in trying to fill a room for the final show; moving a great quantity of work from the studio, transport, storage, display. There is a solution though thanks to technology: a curation using photographs, moving images, graphics, 3D rendering, sounds to give a sense of the essay artistic research with the final works as some sort of synthesis.