Our Yesterday Was Precious

Dear Sue Tompkins

Yesterday I saw your work on the internet and in an old copy of Frieze magazine and it sparked me. For the rest of the day I saw the world through a different lense. I went for a walk into town and and it seemed like everything was waiting to be discovered. It felt that anything was possible and that things can be light.

Thank you for the feeling

Yours

Jean x

Fallen in love with he work of Sue Tompkins.

How she works with the materiality of paper, how she uses text as image, the informality with which how she presents her work.

LOVE IT.

Glad to be looking at her work after I’ve made my piece.

Sue Tompkins at Micky Schubert, Berlin, 2012: http://www.contemporaryartdaily.com/2012/08/sue-to…

A good morning of making, thinking and talking for my piece for the SCIBase ‘Inhospitable’ show at Bridewell Studios for the Independents Liverpool Biennial.

Can I be honest? I’m not keen on themed shows. Too often I feel like a Foundation student on one of those 6 week projects they set you. It’s so hard not to be literal, or obvious, and not to bore yourself with your own predictable responses and starting points. Dictionary definitions, brainstorming… there’s something so crushingly familiar and deadened about this process that at times I lose the will to go on before I’ve even begun.
I sometimes have this feeling as a viewer at themed shows too – you can predict the kind of work you’re going to see before you see the show, and there’s often not much in the way of surprises.
So – I try to find a way of tricking myself to come at it sideways, so I can respond in a way that keeps me interested and hopefully will have the outcome of of some non-blindingly-obvious work.

By committing myself to blogging at this time and about making the work for the show, I have to articulate how I arrive at the work. That’s really good to do – by documenting, it illuminates and clarifies the real process, not what I think happens, which are often two different things.

And it is in fact a surprise. A surprise to find out that a kind of accident is my piece for the show. That this accident, which was a by product of the piece I thought I was making, is not only the thing that fits, works, feels right, conceptually and materially – for the theme of the show, but also reflects of my inner state at the moment. It’s a strange, mute, resistant, dense thing. I couldn’t make it if I tried. I don’t fully understand it but I know it’s right.

I’m kind of gob-smacked by that process, which it seems was out of my control/volition. Is it mystery, or accident, or both? I’ve been talking about it with my other half, who is also an artist, and we reckon the right approach/attitude is ‘finding’ the work, rather than ‘making’ it. Try too hard, force it, and it’s dead.

This is blindingly obvious right? I’ve had this experience before, but I forget each time, and writing it down like this helps me remember: there are always surprises, if you’re open to them.

The SCIBase and Divided We Fall show, ‘Inhospitable’ is on at Bridewell Studios, Liverpool 2-15th October. More information here http://www.independentsbiennial.org/category/2012/…