Distance
I have been doing something different this month; working in the hospitality sector to bring in some extra money and also to shake up the focus of my observation and experience. It came at a good time. Just before I started I was a victim of common assault as I was on my way to my studio. This altered things – the place that I looked forward to going to be creative and experimental changed to one of fear and unease. I hope with time that this will resolve itself but it has been a shaky old few weeks and of course all swaying on the uncertainty and stress of these Covid times.
The making of art currently seems a long way away, but it does not concern me. I know that as soon as I am ensconced again within my studio, the ideas will start flowing, fuelled by the last month’s going-ons. There are things I know I want to play with. These are mainly to do with process and materials; experimenting with different papers, collage and print transfer. An art friend and I are also going to be putting together a proposal for an exhibition so at some point we will be sitting down, gathering our thoughts and trying to put down in writing our research interests and ideas.
It is important to me that I carry on with my creative art writing. It is hard to know how to continue with this, so I will occasionally use this blog as a space to experiment and share. It won’t always be about my visual art practice.
Once thing I do feel (which I suspect is the same for many people) is a certain level of exhaustion where I don’t want to think about anything, question anything, reveal anything. I just want to be and to hover over the facts and statistics and continual murmurings of stress and outcomes.
Cool water.
Reflective, impenetrable.
It reluctantly catches the limpid light.
But I can still feel the cold seeping, creeping.
The rats.
They gather together by the banks.
Trembling amongst the paper cups and crisp packets.
Sheltered from the damp of the wild grasses
and the rising river woe.
The lights from the screaming retail outlets bounce off the water’s edge.
They join forces with saris, hoodies and acidic trainers
And pink fluffy unicorns with long matted manes.
Colourful slashes breaking the grey.
Yet there is a perceptible dragging and a weighing down
More than just shopping bags, lumpy and distorted
More than the carved out and disappointed grimaces
Heavy with the knowledge that it is what it seems.
The manager is playing hooky and his gang has left the building.
The ground rolls.
Whether I am looking, perusing, or simply standing, feeling the solidity under me, it nevertheless possesses, embarks and gives a slow almost indiscernible rumble.
I am always humbled by the fact that it goes further and further below me, older than I can possibly imagine, a core, inner and outer, the latter made up of liquid iron and nickel – malleable, constantly changing, responsible for the earth’s magnetic field, the inner, mainly iron, dense and pressurised such that it behaves as a solid.
And the heat! This core, a burning mass, as hot as the sun. It defies explanation and feels to me like the outside is on the inside and the inside is on the outside. I love the idea of an earthly and cosmic connection entwinned intrinsically with our very being.
I have been working on a small series of mixed media works made of paper collage and painting where the painted ground plays an important part in determining the final piece. The collage fragments are pieces of photographs, loose cut outs of mainly nature and the urban environment.
After adhering them to the painted surface I step back to get an idea of what this composition so far suggests to me. Then working with paint, I follow what I see as patterns or movements. I try to leave a little time between each step, as this loosens up my perceptions. The earth spins and the ground that I stand on shifts and shudders as the way that I see things continually mutates.
There is an investigation.
Something is to be found but I don’t know what. Collected moments have been captured in a particular area, in particular streets, focusing on graphic design, signage, lettering and evidence of historical fame.
Somehow the breaking up of experience creates more of an appeal than an elusive whole. Pieces of scenes allows for the opening up of questions and a myriad of open-ended possibilities. Where could that be? What does it mean? Why is this particular aspect revealed? What am I to understand from this? The rust of time scratches our curiosity. I seek the answers but each clarification often seems to create more uncertainties. At times there is comfort in the hidden, and other times there is a macabre fascination in the hunt for the truth.
Puzzles, quizzes, murder mysteries or the pronouncement of what appear to be straight forward questions. The disclosing is never simple.
These words as I write encompass possibilities. Yes, if I wanted I could choose to defy the linear nature of the structure and conventions of the written paragraph. I could explode the visual layout and present in an alternative format but I think this would be too easy. Instead I’d rather utilise what we think we know, specifically to play with it; re-framing those coded understandings that allow us to exchange language to communicate a premise. Slants of light and shade can mask the reading in front of us.
The borders that make up a sentence; the capital letter, the comma, the full-stop, give us a beginning, a pause and an ending. But it is not as simple as that. What else comes into play in our compositions? What particular words are enclosed and what do they suggest to us? We can so easily assume certain words and phrases can mean the same thing to everyone, particularly when it is spoken or written in the same language. Yet the constant impossibility of language translation to articulate everything as it is meant to be understood surely is evidence enough that language is malleable and fluid. Everything is in a state of constant flux and that certainty of what I see and understand is as stable and unmoving as a shadow on the ground.
Magician, psychologist, anthropologist, film director – when we communicate each of us throws into the ring an array of possible readings and transformations. The paint upon the canvas, the movement of the gesture and mark making, the tone of the composition, the fetishes we reveal and display. Words and sentences are not solitary entities. They are alive and potent, carved and sculptured, an orchestra of history, culture, interconnections and displacements cast out into the air and falling differently every time. Even a copy or reproduction is not the same as the one before. It sits in a different place of time and reading.
I pass by some windows and what I see reflects so much more than the physical environment outside. The images and shapes shimmer, dance and entrance me. What I see today will differ tomorrow as the surrounding world changes and my imagination is stirred.
