Scratching the Surface

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’)

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.”