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.
I had a really interesting lecture from Tavs Jorgenson about 2 weeks ago. He’s a research fellow at Falmouth and is involved with autonomatic research there. I was really fascinated by the digital drawings that he had done by using a data glove to capture the motion of his hand. Even though it was using technology it was almost a truer line than one you would make with a pencil or paintbrush.
I’ve got quite a few different strands of my work that I want to explore. I want to investigate how I can use colour to create movement or how I can distort an image or mark by my use of colour. Some of the groupings that I’ve put together of my marks are almost reminiscent of DNA type structures or code. When I inverted some of my drawings they had an almost etheral quality like they were floating in mid air. I’m approaching my work on paper in a very empirical manner and I’m going to take the same approach to the work I’m starting with ceramic materials.
I’m really enjoying reading the material for my theory lectures, even though some of it is not easy. It’s helping my to develop more of a theoretical framework, so I can talk about my work within this context in a more articulate and informed manner.
Paul Crowther says in ‘Art and Embodiment’ that:
“the experience of an artwork can bring a unique reflective awareness of the nature of the human condition itself. This moving revelation and celebration of the enigma of embodied consciousness is what I shall call emphatic experience. In a sense it marks the logical extreme of all human self-awareness, in that the only way beyond it is to invoke communion with a transcendental reality, i.e. religious experience.”
This sums up for me the kind of experience that I think is important for the viewer when encountering a work of art.
