I welded this simple frame for another project, Logos, intended for working with its maquettes. Yesterday I took hold of it to photograph the latest zoan-like model. I wanted to isolate the work from surfaces in order to minimise cleaning up in photoshop. This worked on the level of convenience but there was also an unintended outcome.
Repurposing something I had made, led to a meaningful solution for display as I mentioned in Between two Worlds. This way of working at times results in the surfacing of underlying ways of thinking and working which in turn can lead to new thoughts and ideas whilst maintaining a focused continuity of source.
Although this is a relatively small piece of metalwork, it is easily scaled up for an installation where there are no means of suspension from an architectural structure. In such a case, it could be, would need to be shaped into the idea/philosophy of the work itself.
What is this, I ask myself? As I made it I felt an unease as it extended its reach physically and formally. The other models in porcelain are clearly zoan but this is different, a hybrid perhaps between animal and artefact, biology and ritual.
And the way I photographed it, suspended by fine cords, gives me an idea for presenting that moves away from the wall, pedestal, plinth, stand, case, cabinet, table top, floor. Fragility, underlined by the immersion in a field of tension, defined by the slender threads, a psychological state between the din of kinetic energy and the repressed quiet of potential energy.
The above series of images is a reminder regarding a recent idea to create 3D animations. I have thought about photogrammetry too which, however, seems to yield imprecise renderings far too often for me to give it the time. In any case , it is all about photographing what I have already made in the flesh, so to speak. I prefer to invent and for this I turn to Blender which is convincingly versatile with high specifications, offering tight control… and it is free.
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.
Yesterday I started a small scale study in porcelain – no larger than twenty centimetres in its largest dimension – for H’s playthings in porcelain. What I show here is the first stage, the plasma. It is small so I can quickly assess its outcome before investing more time in how to proceed on a larger scale. The question for now, is whether to move in the direction of a baroque, visceral rendition or a more schematic, symbolic one. I am thinking that the former might be too ‘noisy’ for it to be receptive to a sound element in the work.
I feel that the two approaches are different aspects of what I am looking to express. This makes me think that there is space for both to coexist, a conversation contextualised in the transition from a mass population engaged in an ecology and the symbolic representation of each class type. The former an animated, raw, poietic emergence from inside me, the living expression of thought. The latter a cerebral aesthetic product, distanced, engaging on another level. Can the two ways be reconciled and merged or are they mutually exclusive?
Not all bodies of work need to be homogeneous. I have talked of heterogeneity before, it represents the outer layer of deeper commonalities. Multitudes exist within one idea, am I to be restrained by the aesthetics of conformity? This may be my own prejudice: the need to replicate serially to create distinct bodies of work.
It may be possible to combine the two in synchronous dialogue, resolving a dialectic within a single work. A transition from raw to refined, from animated foam to schematic idolatry. After all, I am looking for a myth and myths are about origins, creation.
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.
Six months ago I started with a loose pool of ideas flowing from existential themes. My main aim since then has been to find a cogent argument that reflects my various interests and that could place in different arenas. This quest has been exciting if onerous; I have gone down many wandering pathways. However, I also have had to discipline my thoughts within a varied practice since many of my ideas emerge synchronously with my practice and two years is not that long to develop a coherent trajectory. I know that the Research Statement will need to be started soon and that it needs to be well conceived at the outset in order to avoid time consuming blind allies during the Summer months, a period good for making.
In view of the upcoming RS, I have looked at the problem both taxonomically and mereologically, reductively and holistically. The tension between these two ways of organising thoughts has helped me identify those ideas and practices that would fit a tight set of self imposed requirements:
original
cogent
flexible and focused
contemporary
leading to a project proposal and higher research
poetic
A thesis emerged ten days ago in conversation with Janet, not by logical deduction but in moment of gestalt in which I saw a bigger picture. With few words I was able to state the obvious precipitated out of the wanderings and writings I have done over the past six months. But how could I be sure this would hold together? I wrote a preliminary abstract or outline of the thesis in a surprisingly short amount of time, much shorter than the time it has taken me to get this far on this post. Since then I have been able to add content and ideas without disturbing cogency. I was concerned about having to read scores of papers and dozens of books in search of an idea. Instead, I know where to go and what to read for corroborative material and help to shape the argument.
I shall write about the RS in future post but for now I wish to continue with what I am doing. Instead I have opened a folder for placing material separate to the blog. Today (yesterday) I went to Doncaster to buy materials, time flies.
Briefly the RS tries to bring together in artistic thought:
The Cambrian Explosion
Early Bronze Age civilisations in the Fertile Crescent
I have seldom used glazes when working with ceramic material; I usually concentrate on form and light and find that colour can place strong unwanted overtones on a work. In the Zoan series however, I want to emphasise the symbolic and psychological over the naturalistic and biological with the intention of placing these works firmly in the human sphere. I see the use of highly coloured, glass-like glazes as a way of suggesting a sense of artificiality.
The above image is one of a number of monochrome photographs I am colouring as preliminary sketches. The result is not the same as the specular surface of glazes but it does give me an idea. I could alternatively paint the sculptures but having tried this in the past, I have found that painting ceramics obscures the surface qualities of the material and defeats the object of using it. It might be something for larger scale work but not for more intimate pieces.
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.
I often talk about origins: the imagination lights the journey into the past and the future stretches out ahead visible by the same light. Each one of us searches for a story of origin. The sense of continuity that we build for ourselves is perhaps a way of constructing a little piece of immortality, connecting us to the eternity that preceded our birth and what is to come. I say this in the plural voice, there is safety in numbers or so they say but it could equally be said in the first person.
Although these stories are raised to the status of myths and have the power to change the very nature of time, they all too often remain buried under accumulating layers of daily life… but such stories continue to bubble deep beneath the crust that surrounds the self.
Let all flowers bloom – as long as the garden is tended 1
Reading Emily Huurdeman’s paper on essaying art has made me think that what I am doing here, with my work and blog journal, is to create a form of essay (something I mentioned in my previous post). The very nature of the journal, an aggregate of personal responses to my artistic context, its heterogeneity and what Theordor Adorno called unmethodological methodology, makes it very much artistic research. The apparent disparateness of modes connects with the early Japanese quasi essayistic form Zuihitsu. Literally meaning ‘follow the brush’, my thoughts and actions have been in response to what has emerged at each stage in a never ending process.
The noun essay derived from its verbal antecedent assay meaning to test. The essay form defies definition as does artistic practice, it is neither scientific eschewing wholly critically derived content nor completely artistic responding to subjective experience. The essay is a form that pushes boundaries, breaking free from established rules, shaping content in a personal way, free from methodical constraints but not uncritical, not without method. This is the very essence of essaying.
The online blog journal can be seen as new Zuihitsu, a digital workspace where ideas are exposed, weighed and published in a variety of forms: sound, photographs, videos, text, digital interactions in all their forms. But this artistic research although fascinating is not an end in itself but as I mentioned earlier a continuous process. It is a means of better understanding, challenging, renewing and extending what I do. It is a way of harvesting new input and refreshing old ideas, of innovating paradigm shifts, developing and consolidating practices.
Since I started this MA, I have ‘followed the brush’, exercising a freedom from the constraints of a single path and given method. The essayistic form has helped render the elusive graspable and turn the opaque into layered transparencies. Fully aware that I have already touched upon such matters I recognise that many discoveries are only made after many passings over the same territory each time with a different eye.
From the book, Artistic Research – Theories, Methods and Practices. Hannula, Suoranta and Vaden. 2005. Paraphrased to correct a slight, forgivable stilted English[↩]
