So going on my discussion with the students at Wey Valley School the object I have produced does not communicate anything of the concept but is still a valid object as it would not have been produced had I not embarked on the process in the first place.
After discussing this with my supervisor it was agreed that I will focus more on making for this phase. She suggests I take a break from this current body of work and experiment a little. Is this a nice way of saying what I’m doing is a bit boring?
I feel that I should complete this course of action and make the self producing object I intended on making. The process was only halted by an error in light colours and should work in practice as well as in theory. I need to make this object a reality, but do I take the time to experiment now or get on with the process as decided?
For Greenbelt I have proposed to create a piece in the same way so I am bound to the process somewhat so that I can prove to myself it can be done. Can I also experiment alongside this process? I expect so. I’m reminded of the work of N Dash who rubs and destroys paper and photographs the remnants of the process. I think maybe I need to allow the materials to speak also and try not to restrict them, keep it as simple as I can. Maybe I will not from sheets with a mould and deckle but print onto the chewed paper as it exists. In this way the process is laid plain to the viewer.
The other main point of discussion was emotion in my work. I’d been to see Tracey Emin’s show at Hayward and was overwhelmed with emotion. My supervisors suggested Emin was shamanistic, and if so then what was I? William Pope L also mentions shamanism in his work. Without thinking I confessed to being afraid of allowing emotion into my work. Why am I afraid? Why should my work be emotional? Is it not already full of the tragedy of loss and the need to attain some sense of acceptance and understanding? Perhaps I have hidden the loss and emptiness in process upon process so that the emotion in object created in the end is so diluted by actions that it emanates nothing but the fact that is exists.
Why am I making a self reflexive work? Why am I making paper? Being controlled by a mind that from time to time falls out of love with the idea of existing, repetitive action is the only way I can make my way back into the functioning world. Making paper rather than buying paper takes time and in this time it takes me to make, I am able to regain some sense of purpose. In creating a medium I am creating a purpose so that in the end the paper as a medium is irrelevant compared to the act of rejoining functioning society through the act of making.
Documenting this action therefore is documenting a process dislocation to attachment and belonging. It seems fitting that the documentation of the process be captured onto the material that has brought me from one state to another. Anything else produced on the paper except maybe a written description of the process would be disconnected from the paper as an object and devalue it in terms of what it has enabled me to achieve.
