ARTISTS TALKING

# 11 [17 July 2010]

It seems that my practice is continually evolving and changing. I was quite enjoying that feeling of knowing what I was doing for a little while. It's a cyclical process and once again I feel that I'm back to square one so to speak. It's not unlike snakes and ladders, where you feel you are progressing and then land on the snake and go back a few places. I need to add something new that is fixed to my work. Perhaps an image or a trace of an image that is barely glimpsed amongst the interplay and alchemy of materials?

# 10 [3 July 2010]

I've had some really good news, I'm going to be taking part in an exhibition back home in Ireland in October. I feel both apprehensive and excited at the same time. It's a really good opportunity for me. I work quite a lot as I'm doing my Masters part time and I'm self funded, so this is going to make me extremely busy.

# 9 [28 May 2010]

I've been examining ways of filling the spaces or reservoirs in the grid of the form. I've been using slips and glazes to expore this, letting some of the glaze spill over the boundaries of the spaces. This is leading to interesting results and is changing the sense of boundary that the reservoirs have.

A question that has arisen for me has been the purpose of the former, is it subordinate to the mark making or does it play a more important role with the context of the mark? So, I'm going to explore this question and see how I can manipulate the form whether through the making process, the material or the firing process itself.

# 8 [7 May 2010]

"I think it is a record of the workings of thought that we see embedded in the drawn, in the sense that it is both the actions of which Valery speaks as 'willed attention' " (Avis Newman)

Avis Newman's ideas on drawing remind me of Merleau Ponty's use of the example of two halves of an orange, to represent the conscious and the unconscious. The inbetween point where you are neither in one state nor the other can be achieved by various means. One of the ways that this can be achieved is through drawing as it is a very immediate activity and all that is needed is pencil and paper.

Language can be limiting in terms of expressing abstract concepts such as these. The creation of a visual language through drawing and mark making has the potential to express such concepts in a transparent manner.

# 7 [18 March 2010]

Where do you stand in relation to your practice; are you a modernist or a postmodernist? This is a question that I have been taking on board as part of the theoretical side of my course. I'm postmodern in the sense that I feel postmodernism has broken down a lot of boundaries that have only in recent history existed between craft and fine art and in relation to the materials that artists use. It's encouraged us to examine meta-narratives such as the art historical canon and to think about who is speaking and what their agenda. 

I feel that there is a lot of opportunity for artists for whom ceramics forms an important part of their practice to write about their practice. There is a general lack of good critical writing within the field, obviously this has improved a lot within recent years. Artists like Clare Twomey and Edmund De Wall write very well about ceramics practice. Indeed, this has been very beneficial to their careers because they have been able to apeak about their work with a great deal of authority because of their engagement with the written word. Many ceramicists seem to think that they don't need to write about their practice, that it speaks for itself. However these are the very people who then complain about a lack of critical writing in the subject or feel marginalised because their views aren't represented.

http://www.craftscouncil.org.uk/crafts-magazine/bl...

# 6 [2 March 2010]

Trying to figure out where your work fits in, where it should be shown and who your contemporaries are can be minefield of confusion! I've decided to continue with what I'm doing for now and worry about all of this at a later stage when my work is more developed. Maybe there won't be a neat category that my work will fit into, and does this matter?

 I've been exploring drawing through my work on paper, on clay, and also through reading critical writing about drawing. There has been some really beautiful writing about drawing in the introduction to the book 'Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing':

"Drawing offers us the most extraordinary range of possibilities: it is a map of time recording the actions of the maker. It is as Michael Newman writes a record of 'lived temporality', and in the sense that a drawing is by essence always incomplete. A line always suggests a continuation and infinitum and thus connects us with infinity and eternity. A drawing enjoys a direct link with thought and with an idea itself. It's very nature is unstable, balanced equally between pure abstraction and representation."  (Emma Dexter, p. 10)

This extract expresses a lot of ideas that I have concerning both drawing and sculpture albeit in a more considered way. Drawing is a very pure form of expression and perhaps this is why when I've chosen to work with ceramics I've used a black and white palette in order to exploit this pure quality.

# 5 [24 February 2010]

My work is beginning to evolve from a flat 2-dimensional surface to a more 3-dimensional object that is becoming independent of the flat object. There is a sense of emergence out of the surface.

The plaster mould that I made for the purpose of forming flat rectangle shapes has now become an object independent of it's original task, which was to serve as a tool or a former. Through the process of working through my ideas, I'm now revisiting my previous work and I'm relocating it by putting it back into its point of origin.

My approach to materials has become more sensuous, I'm more respectful of the potential and properties that are inherent within the mediums that I employ. Previously, I may not have been so respectful as I was very much concerned with how I was going to express my idea or concept. I'm still interested in communicating ideas and concepts to the audience, but through the art objects material qualities.

This is a very Hegelian idea, Hegel believes that art inhabits a space that is somewhere in between our sensual/bodily experience and our intellectual understanding. i.e. the 'sensual presentation of the Idea'

('Drawing: Towards an Intelligence of Seeing,' by Howard Riley, from 'Writing on Drawing')

# 4 [10 February 2010]

I feel as if my work is all about discovery at the moment, I'm learning a lot about the different materials that I'm using; their limitations and possibilities. I have only a certain degree of control over the materials. I am to a certain extent initiating the interplay between materials but then standing back and allowing chance happenings to occur. Dropping the ink onto the water saturated surface and then watching as it disperses and follows the form and direction of the water.

Drawing or markmaking can express what language cannot. As Heiner Bastian says in relation to Cy Twombley's drawings:

"No artist has in his work, as radically as Cy Twombley, substituted language for an expression that suspends and interrupts the discourse, the rhetoric of occidental culture. Twombley insists on the transparency of the most transient of all forms, the state of conception and comprehension, when the form itselfis the untranslatable event." 

# 3 [10 December 2009]

I've been experimenting with ceramic surfaces using different stains and slips and I've been trying to set up a similar interface to the ink and paper drawings. I've had varying results so far. I've liked the qualities that I've achieved with the pieces where I've applied a thick brush stoke of slip and then applied a mocha stain over this. The stain bleeds into all of the feathery lines left by the mark of the brush on the slip.

I'm currently reading about phenomenology as I'm going to write my first essay on this particular position. I think the idea that metaphor can contribute to perception and the creation of meaning is a really interesting one. I've been examining Clare Twomey's pieces as I'm going to examine them through phenomenology. The interaction between the artworks and the audience and her response to the gallery space is fascinating.

# 2 [26 November 2009]

I have realised that I need to set myself an agenda for my days in uni if I am going to achieve anything. I need to organise myself better. Perhaps giving myself a script to follow, or timing myself would help?

It had been my intention and it still is my intention to set up an interface between drawing and ceramic materials and surfaces. I didn't realise how important the drawings were going to become to me. They're entities in their own right now, they have a certain independence, which has surprised me. Perhaps a continuing translation and retranslation of different materials will make me more informed of my visual language and how I choose to express it.

I need to carry on being explorative with materials and not rush into final outcomes before I even begin to investigate the potential of the materials that I'm working with. After my group tutorial I realised that my work in clay needed to express more of the qualities that I had achieved through my drawings and work on paper. I need to be more conscious of why I am choosing different materials.