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Tutorial 6: 15 October 2019. Jonathan Kearney

Alexis

 

Tuesday’s tutorial covered a number of points I would like to pursue further in future blogs. We talked about two main things: the sound element of the project proposal and the challenges that these and other aspects present in terms of the exhibition space. 

The time away from the studio has allowed me to think about my practice in a more objective way and select out or rather prioritise elements, focusing what I do to concentrate its effect while making it possible for it to be more open. 

We discussed three principle acoustic elements in the proposal: ultra low frequency, normal sounds embedded in the sculptures, and separate narrative audio.

It was a very good thing I spent a lot of time familiarising myself with the spaces and the show dynamics during the Summer. The spaces can be quite challenging and there is also the question of logistics and installation. These challenges also present opportunities to create a show that is flexible and modular capable of being shown in other spaces and contexts.

The interactive bass sounds aim at: drawing people in, mitigating any disruption in collective spaces, affecting the space at a physical / corporeal level.

The narrative sounds work on a different level altogether. We discussed how the bass and narrative sounds would interact. This will need a lot of experimentation and testing so that the bass is audible while listening to the narrative on headphones. I think that because the bass will fluctuate in volume as opposed to the headphone’s constant narrative, a dislocation will result in further layering of meaning.

A third sound layer will be provided by the sounds embedded in the sculptures. Talking with Jonathan clarified the direction I should take with these sounds. The pieces would probably work best with abstract sounds correlating with the sculptural forms. To have spoken or representational sounds appear to me at odds with the static, ‘silent’ nature of sculptural form. This is another technical matter to experiment.  

We briefly discussed the Arduino and headphones, whether the latter should be wireless to allow visitors to walk around setting a spatial conversation between the sounds, sculptures and any other visual element that might be included.

The idea of different scales of listening creating circumscribed or diffuse space in the installation is an interesting idea but again will need careful working out:

  • the diffuse bass interactively fluctuating in volume and vibrating the space
  • the abstract embedded sounds circumscribing a tight horizon of perception, drawing in the listener
  • the headphone narrative being a more rational layer creating that tension between the rational and the emotional I often talk about.

I mentioned that the installation is a form of shrine. But on reflection what I am doing is not so much building a shrine as enshrining notions. I think this is a much looser and and open term that gives me much greater freedom than what I had thought earlier – mythopoeia. I can still use the term mythopoeia but in narrower contexts to describe part of what I am doing. 

I believe that this idea of enshrinement come at a critical moment in the current process before I start to immerse myself in the final project  

We also discussed the opening night as a moment in which the work might not be fully appreciated because of the nature of such gatherings. I see the opening as more of a social event , P.R, that may or may not yield appropriate interest. Really, if someone wants to see work, they will not come on the opening night, something I know from experience. 

I explained how part of my methodology is to make the sculptures empathetic to a certain extent. Not with a covert anthropomorphic form, but something more alien. So far the unfired porcelain gives me a sense of this but after the firing process it will be interesting to see how this affects my ideas, display and handling of the works. 

I am still incorporating the idea of an alimentary canal, digesting and assimilating ideas from a world of ancestry and connectedness; an alien landscape that is part of us. 

With respect to the large suspended sculpture, and the word Icon, Jonathan spoke about religious icons being ‘written’ after after many hours of meditating before painting. This process creates a space that allows an icon to be a window to another world. 

I told Jonathan that at the beginning of the course I was open to explore new and familiar materials and methods. He asked If this had been a challenge, that is to say, trying to push processes that had been previously defined and clear. 

I have found the process immensely enjoyable, getting underneath the process and it has developed my ability to better articulate what I am doing and why to myself. The PP is now less dispersed; I have used my energy to look at different things gradually delineating a clearer picture that can be taken into the future making a methodology without wondering what if I did this or that. My endeavour has been to work within a chaotic coherence out of which can emerge a more focused trajectory that draws in ideas in its wake. 

We finally discussed the Amputation post and the amputation video at the end of it. This is something I would like to continue and formalise into a more polished performance.

Jonathan said that the ideas make sense with what I have been doing and that there is a clear trajectory and evidence of testing and pushing this along. Although there is still a lot to do, technical issues to resolve with testing, but he can visualise the coherence of what I am doing. 

 

 

What to do next

Explore the ideas of shrine and icon and the relationship between them.

Look at the idea of a tent, reveal and enclose as in shrine and icon.

Middle Eastern stone shrines to the invisible god

Consider / plan / curate the making of further amputation videos.

Design audio experiments to assess questions of balance, comprehensibility and significance between the varying sources.

Think about displaying text on screen as well as through headphones offering alternative ways of delivering.

 

Amputation

Alexis

 

 

An amputation is not something one would want. Sculptures have suffered amputations throughout the ages, some repaired, others restored and yet others left as they were found, This Herakles, Venus de Milo, the Belvedere Torso and so on. Limbs at times distract from the sense of form, many artists have known this, others have incorporated the limbs so that it merges into the body.

I have had a problem in that I want to make large ceramic works but the kiln is only so large. I have a top loader 59 cm diameter and 69 cm high which needs to be wired in. This is not small but neither is it large enough. What to do?

I had thought of jointing the pieces much as I did with the works in Chaos Contained. But this is not in keeping with the informal, organic sense of the works I am currently engaged with. Chaos contained was about symmetrical growth from within, an outward radiation. Now the works are internally generated, handled in a completely different way.

 

 

So I looked at how I could make the pieces in parts to be put together later after firing. I came across the work of Giovanni Vetere who works with glazed ceramics. The pieces are much larger than would fit in a regular kiln. In addition they would be unstable and too fragile for firing in one piece. On closer inspection of his work I noticed that they are made in pieces using the glaze patterns to camouflage the joints.

 

 

I could try to hide the joints when installing but would there be a better way? To show the cut, a severance, a clean cut that must signify something. And it opens the way for future large works where the cut plays a part. It may even lead to being able to show a work in its pieces arranged meaningfully or at least aesthetically.

 

 

What this does for my ongoing work is to provide a formal solution to having a kiln smaller than the fluid forms I want to make: the parts can be fitted together after firing. It also solves the problem of how to insert and remove sound equipment.  Conceptually, this technique offers the opportunity for representing vulnerability, fragility and reformation; perhaps also creating compositions, of parts that relate to one another and reconstituting them in different configurations.

 

Interim Show: On Titles

Alexis

 

Even Before Birth is the Future Forgotten

 

Returning home from the Janet’s show installation I had to think about the interim show’s work title. I have never been keen on the process of naming a work despite knowing how important it is; I have seen it as an intrusion of words that closes down meaning. However, having thought at length about the 17th June tutorial with Jonathan I feel quite different about the matter. It is no longer an external slapping on of words but an added layer of meaning, an entry into the work without necessarily fencing its meaning, rather offering a thought that, if the words are chosen carefully, is both suggestive and open. What is more important is that it is the possibility to introduce a rational side to the work, by virtue of the inherent characteristics of words, that helps create a dynamic equilibrium between the rational and emotional. 

Here I reference the paradoxical time shifts that I deal with in my practice, being in the present whilst dealing with time frames interchangeably. I feel this title opens up a whole lot of ideas for me regarding the nature of time and life.

 

 

Mythopoeia IV: Ancestor

Alexis

 

 

This is the video forming part of the installation for the Summer interim show at Camberwell. The animation was done by scanning the porcelain piece in different positions on the scanner screen and using the dissolve transition between video clips. I got this idea from the scanner as camera workshop Janet attended during the Low Residency in February.

The text feeds into the idea of time, ancestry and commons.

 

Mythopoeia IV

Alexis

 

I have been very busy of late and my current work is in a state of incompletion, so I am glad to have just completed a video to accompany a small sculptural work for the interim Summer show at Camberwell. Its simplicity has given me the space to think about a deep level aspect of what I am doing. The narrative in the words of the scrolling text are deliberately anachronistic. I worked on the few words in various versions: directed in the you and I form, playing with tenses, making the content more or less personal. Finally I ended in the place where my instincts had led me to start; with the intention to distance myself from the subject whilst bringing it into direct contact with me in the present as I reflect on its future set in the past. Bringing together the deep past, present and future is very much what my research statement is about albeit taking a narrow field of view. It is interesting how this synchronicity occurs from time to time.

 

Digital Mapping Workshop: Marius Simkus

Alexis

 

The mapping workshop over two days was at time difficult to follow but it did give an introduction to the technique. The most salient point is that true digital mapping is not always necessary if one is wanting to project video or images onto a surface. The real essence of this technique is its ability to conform outlines to complex or awkwardly contoured surfaces so that the project appears to be naturally formed in that format.

Using meshes, the image can be transformed and altered to fit three dimensional surfaces. However, a simpler system used masks, which is the digital version of pieces of cardboard placed infront of the lens. I have a record of the lecture, materials and equipment, and some time after the residency, I visited Marius with Janet looking at possibilities for projection mapping her painting videos.

The first day was spent looking at the technical side of digital mapping and collecting photographic and sound material for our group’s collaborative project based on the neighbourhood of Peckham.

During our ‘coffee’ conference in a shop come restaurant each one of us visited the toilets which was a wonderland of notes and messages appended in any way possible. The effect was quite magical; it makes me think of some I could do for the project proposal.

 

 

Messages on the toilet walls where we had lunch. A strange form of Aladdin’s cave.

 

I took a great many pictures but ended up with using the recording of a road worker who asked, ‘where are you guys from?’ Peckham is a neighbourhood that has a rich immigrant tradition and I thought it rather poetic that someone who most likely was from immigrant heritage asked us, without knowing who we were, our provenance. I thought this would be an apt element in a work which responded to the heritage and architecture, both physical and social of the area. 

 

 

The second day was spent making the video mapping presentations, one for each group. I spent a great deal of my time selecting, editing and composing various sound sources into one 36 second track. I would have like to have been more hands on with the video and get some experience of the process.

At the end, each group presented its work and one or more persons talked about the work and answered questions. 

 

Our group made a collage of video and ‘found objects’ with a degree of format distortion. The blue hair clurlers in the centre referenced the pipes of the road works and the sound track contained the noise of pneumatic drills against concrete, phrenetic radio audio and the road worker mentioned above. Paola spent a lot of time preparing some cut out stickers of graffiti adhered to the walls.  

 

Aristotle’s group was very aesthetic, with its colours and various images projected onto opaque, translucent and reflective surfaces of a found beauty salon cabinet. The effect was very lively and elegant. However, the projections were not really projection mapping by straight forward projections, masked and keyed to fit the various perspectives of the surfaces closely. The incidental spills of light added a touch.

 

 

Ash’s took the market motif and layered the videos to create sequential imagery on the wall and a separate image on the crate which contained plastic fruit. I like plastic fruit.

 

 

The final group with Janet was a simple and very elegant projection onto a plastic bowl painted white. This was the only example of  true projection mapping showing images of Iris on Peckham’s streets. The image was reduced and fitted the bowl perfectly. 

Impromptu 2.0: Video for

Alexis

 

 

For the mini popup show at Camberwell on Wednesday 20 March 2019: a 30 second video following from the idea of ‘Do Shadows Dance When There Is No Light?‘, or as I would call it now, ‘Do Shadows Dance in the Dark?’ Having received an email from Jonathan notifying of this imminent show, each one being given 30 seconds of time, I set out that very evening to complete this short. To make something that only lasts half a minute within a short short time frame was a very good constraint on my normal practice, something akin to a workshop timetable.

 

Mid Point Review

Alexis

 

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 a 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 a 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 book… maybe even a 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 a clarification of questions posed by the many directions which any one 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.

Low Residency – Day 1: Collaborative Project

Alexis

 

 

An introductory collaboration where we formed small working groups to work on a one day project. The starting theme emerged out of a poetic exposition of the art of seeing by Jonathan where an ideal society was likened to the growth of a tree: what if  society were to grow like a tree.

A tree displays its leaves so that each one can receive as much light as possible and the living mass above ground is balanced with an equal amount of biomass unseen, below ground. The leaf metaphor proposes an vision for human society where every individual is naturally furnished with equal nourishment and opportunities. I felt that the underlying theme aimed at seeing the groups as analogues for a wider society and the project each one embarked on was its development, growth and flourishing. 

We were given materials, artificial detritus, paper, plastic, leaves and threads amongst other things which could be inserted and composed in thirty-five millimeter slide frames and finally slide projectors.

 

 

We sat down and devised an initial plan to give us a framework to enable us to work together productively, creatively and enjoyably. At first we worked as individuals exchanging ideas but each one following their own initiatives, each slide being viewed with the projector and placed to one side. The variety of images was interesting and the whole process gave me ideas about how to create abstract images as a divertisment from my normal practice.

 

 

Having collected a large number of slides, a group self organised to create a slide show of the images on Apple imovie. They were captured by photographing the projections, scanning and photographing the slide in natural light with the outside environment as a backdrop. The confluence of approaches was collated on the computer selecting and composing a sequence that would be used for a final presentation.

 

 

While this was being done, I and Kelda created a shadow puppet show improvising characters and scenes with the materials available. The show was captured as a video by phone. The arrangement was awkward to film and the result had a perspective slant which had to be incorporated in the overall movie. A soundtrack was also created from the video sound and we also improvised sounds in a cupboard room to overlay on the movie video. 

 

 

The exercise was not so much about the finished project, not even the making process but rather the process of working together and how very different personalities could come together to form something that holds more than its content. Seldom if ever do I have to cooperate as an artist with someone else and this was a refreshing experience that allowed me to slough off the burden of personal responsibility. Under time pressure, often a stimulus to productive innovation, I was able do things that I can work on in the future. Perhaps not for the MA, but shadow puppets would make a wonderful hobby allied to my main. 

Obviously the final movie was incomplete, disjointed and at points incoherent but that does not matter. The overall did have a sense of narrative and humour evidenced by the laughter it elicited during its screening. The four groups produced very different final results perhaps showing that societies cannot all be the same and neither could they.