I won’t keep boring everyone with stories of transport problems, but I am starting to think that the best residencies are probably the ones where you are actually resident somewhere, ie, permanently in situ and not needing to commute to/from home. My last word on the subject: a big thank you to the person trespassing on the railway tracks this morning who delayed me by 90 minutes.
Once I finally arrived at the Centre for Drawing this morning I continued work on the wall drawing I started yesterday. I spent most of the day on this, until I ran out of mapping pins and was forced to stop. It was a tolerable annoyance to stop prematurely as it gave me the opportunity to return to a more investigative way of working, which I’ve been enjoying this week.
It’s fantastic having the space and time to test out ideas as soon as I have them. Normally I have to wait hours or days until I’m able to develop new ideas in the studio. By this time my mind has often moved onto other thoughts. It’s quite possible that I’ve forgotten potentially brilliant ideas while doing everyday mundanities like washing up. This afternoon’s new idea was to make a drawing in white cord on the white studio wall, hoping that the sunlight would move across the drawing and it would change with the movement of shadows cast by it. The amazing sunlight from my first day in the space remained elusive today, so I started a white drawing in the hopes that we have a change in the weather soon. In the meantime I used directional light from a digital projector to illuminate the drawing – it looked nothing like sunlight but was interesting anyway. I think that much of the work I do during this residency will be developed in my own studio afterwards. This is one of the good things about writing this blog – it’s a brilliant way for me to remember all those ideas I have before ‘normal’ life gets in the way and I forget them.
I sometimes feel exhausted by all the ideas I have for the work I want to make. I felt like that today. Having so much focused time to ruminate and reflect on what I’m making has caused a huge outburst of creative thinking. This is great, but I’m working to a very tight schedule (just five working days left after today) and there’s no way I can develop all of the ideas I have. I spent some time this morning looking at what I’ve made so far, which at that point was visual research, exploratory drawings and some speculative experiments with materials. To spare my sanity I’ve decided to be realistic with the time I have, to make comprehensive notes about what I’m thinking of doing but probably can’t in the time, and to not let myself worry about ‘finished’ outcomes.
Much of what I’ve done so far on the residency (today is only day three) have been rudimentary explorations of the physical environment, finding interesting features to respond to while in the space. One of my aims now is that all the work I make will be diagnostic in nature. If I had longer in the Centre for Drawing I would like to collaborate with some other academic departments and technical support staff to make fully resolved pieces of work, but today I’ve decided that the residency is offering me some rare concentrated development time and I’ll be best served by continuing to test and evaluate my ideas.
As of today I’m now concentrating on two distinct lines of enquiry (although this doesn’t mean that they won’t develop into other things). Firstly, I’ll continue to develop the monochromatic line drawings of disrupted architectural features. Today I made two more drawings in black acrylic on paper. They are visually simple but have a reductive quality that I enjoy and I think could be developed further, if only after the residency. I also started to recreate one of the large disrupted line drawings from my sketchbook on the wall of the CfD Project Space using thin black cord, stretched and held in place with black mapping pins. This is still in progress, I will hopefully finish it tomorrow. I have worked with stretched yarn before to create lines in space, but this feels like a more controlled use of the material. It felt good to work outside of my sketchbook, actually engaging with the room itself. Hopefully the bright sunlight will return to the room soon, introducing some shadows into the space between the cord and the white wall. My second area of investigation is also inspired by the light in the space (which incidentally, and rather annoyingly, I now haven’t seen for two days). Using yesterday’s investigation of folded reflective papers and card as a starting point, today I made some drawings from the folded structures, exploring line and form. I feel that there’s much left to develop with these pieces – scale, materials, colour – too much to do in the time I have left at the Centre for Drawing. At the point at which I finished work today I was feeling exhausted by all my ideas again *sigh*.
At times today it felt like the world was conspiring against me. Icy conditions and serial road works made the journey to Wimbledon drag on for what felt like forever. I was itching to get on with some work but instead was confined to an over-full bus half convinced that I could have walked to my destination quicker. It was a dull and overcast day with none of the bright light I enjoyed yesterday. This blighted my plans for what I had decided to work on this morning, which would have involved engaging directly with the light. When I arrived at the Centre for Drawing the glorious natural light that illuminated the far wall of the room yesterday was nowhere to be seen, and it remained that way all day, so Plan B came into play (not that I had a plan…)
I took a trip to the library, photocopied some of my line drawings from yesterday and had an enjoyable time scanning the drawing section, which is well stocked with inspiring books and catalogues. This gave me rather more hope for a productive day than the tedious bus journey had.
Back in the project space I spent some more time inspecting the curious cracks in the wall. They don’t run straight, but instead inscribe disjointed lines down the entire height of the wall at regular intervals. I’m quite fascinated by them. Perhaps it was these disrupted lines that caused me to start cutting up the photocopies of my drawings and reassembling them, fracturing the architectural lines and superimposing one linear form onto another. I made a series of collages from the reconfigured photocopies and then started drawing my own deconstructed spaces using yesterday’s drawings to inform my new lines. I developed these until the resulting drawings had become larger and more complex, then explored realising the lines by folding paper instead of drawing. It felt like there is something to develop further here, so I will return to this tomorrow. As is often the case, Plan B turned out to be more interesting than what I’d originally intended. It’s taken me a long time to let go of the need to ‘plan’ work but I finally feel able to explore materials and processes without worrying about what the outcome is. In recent years this has been one of the most liberating experiences in my practice, to be able to trust my ability to explore, test and evaluate without fear of failure.
Although the sunlight had mostly evaded me I still had time at the end of the day to undertake some quick and rather scruffy experiments with folded mirror card and florescent paper, looking at reflected colours on the white project space wall and three dimensional forms as a means of drawing in space. Despite a deeply unpleasant start to the day on the 152 bus I left the CfD feeling excited about continuing some of today’s lines of enquiry tomorrow. A good day in the studio can indeed make the world feel a much better place.
On the way home the bus broke down so I have written this blog entry standing on the edge of a road in south west London.
Tomorrow I’m travelling by train.
I have always thought that I enjoyed the urban edginess of the inner city and the energy that comes with it. My studio is in New Cross Gate, a very different environment to Wimbledon. I had wondered whether I’d find my new working environment rather too sedate but during my first full day at the Centre for Drawing today I actually enjoyed the lack of inner-city noise and the change of scenery. There was something about hearing birds singing, having a window (I’ve never had a studio with a view of the outside world before), and feeling part of a slower and more serene pace of life that I found very positive. After settling down to start work I turned the radio off and moved my desk in front of the window. For the first time in years I felt connected to the world while working, rather than being shut off from it – a feeling I normally admit to enjoying – but perhaps other ways of working can be as productive for me too. This is perhaps something I’ll reflect on further during my time at the Centre for Drawing.
This newly felt connection to reality extended to what I was generating to. My work rarely uses real world references, but instead comes from somewhere less easy to define or quantify. The first thing I did today was to spend time editing and mounting the photographs of the project space that I took on Friday. The images focus strongly on the formal qualities of composition, blocking out extraneous visual information and describing lines, angles and textures. The camera allowed me to ‘see’ the space in a particular way, capturing the physical characteristics of the room in a way that made sense to me visually. This may be something to learn from for future work. For now I’ll make a note to myself to use photography as a way of seeing and recording after the residency.
However, there are still some things that can’t be experienced or ‘seen’ through a camera, like the empty, echoey acoustics and the way the light travels round the project space – these things take time to understand. I watched and recorded how the light entered the room and crept across the wall and floors as the day progressed. I took some rubbings of cracks in the walls to capture the haptic qualities of the disrupted wall surface and made simple, black line drawings of angles and architectural features in the room. One of the things that has emerged today is that I am fascinated by the relationship between the bright white ceiling lights, which are fixed, and the softer natural daylight, which is fluid and moves round the space. This is something I’ll continue to explore visually over the next few days of initial research and idea development. This afternoon I made some drawings of the ceiling lights in ink, masking out the hard-edged, graphic forms of the light casings. All too soon the day was over and I returned home with lots of things to consider before starting work again tomorrow.
Yesterday was great, the beginning of a new and exciting project. I arrived at Wimbledon College of Art in the afternoon and was met by Michael Pavelka, Course Director of MA Drawing, which is based in the Centre for Drawing. The course is unusual in its focus on students developing their own individual relationship with drawing processes and methodologies, embracing what drawing is in different contexts. MA Drawing brings together a range of practices and disciplines including architecture, engineering, cartography, writing, design, the sciences, art, performance and dance. Its intention to identify commonalities between drawing across a diverse range of activities is really exciting to me, it attempts to unpick what ‘drawing’ really is in terms of real experiences beyond the university.
The afternoon was spent orientating myself in my new surroundings, locating the library, canteen, photocopier and art shop, and meeting some very friendly and helpful staff. I quickly felt very comfortable there. I’ll be working in the CfD for the next two weeks. It’s a beautiful space; light, warm (a blessing in the current snowy weather), and spacious. I’ve written in previous blog posts that I intend to respond to the physical environment of the project space, so yesterday I spent some time looking, photographing and analysing the room and what I found interesting. Since my work focuses on the drawn line, I often see lines everywhere (I suspect there’s an overdeveloped part of my brain that blocks out detail in favour of lines, shapes, geometric forms etc). Consequently I spent a long time photographing the parquet floor, finding especially fascinating a place in the centre of the room where two different wooden patterns are joined – resulting in the lines inscribed on the floor changing trajectory. It felt like a physical embodiment of a series of drawings I’d made last year, Praxis (Interrupted), where repeated lines shift in direction and start to describe a dimensional exploration of the papers’ surface. I think that this might be something I continue to look at on Monday when I return to the project space for my first full day there. I also spent time taking photographs of the bright, rectangular ceiling lights, and the light from the project space as it poured out onto the snow covered windowsill outside, shaped by the lines of the window frames. Having seen the influence of the exceptionally bright artificial lights in the space I’ll also be looking at how the natural daylight moves into and around the space during the day – which might be one of my tasks for Monday too. It’s going to be a busy day!
