For some strange reason my balls had come alive to me, maybe it was because they could be rolled down slopes and would seem to move on their own, as if they were independent autonomous beings. One of the spherical form’s qualities, is that it can be guided and sent off in a precise direction with a force applied to it. In his lecture to the C.G. Jung society, Howard W. Tyas, Jr., refers to Marie Louise Von Franz, a Swiss Jungian Psychologist (1915-1998), who discusses the sphere (or ball) in terms of its symbolism. Franz suggests that in terms of analysis, the ball or sphere in a dream can represent a person moving on in their analysis and the emergence of something new. She refers to fairy stories, where she says that the,
…hero follows a rolling apple or a rolling sphere to come to some mysterious goal. He just follows this spontaneous self-impulsiveness of his own psyche to a secret goal. (Franz in Tyas, 1999) (Accessed on 31/3/2017 at: www.jungiananalytic praxis .com/uploads/2/1/2/4/…/lecture_-_the_golden_ball.doc)
So with a new awareness and clarity around the importance of the sphere in my own life, and after a tutorial questioning my intentions, I set about painting one of my creations. I painted my first one black and then went about a Pollock like process of randomly splattering it with coloured-paint and sand mixed with PVA. The process took a couple of days, as the top needed to dry prior to applying further paint. It was then on a Friday afternoon, without any previous plan, that I decided to walk with my ball outside.
I feel the real ‘art’ in this venture, was working with the act of ‘not knowing’ and the fact that it was a completely ‘directionless’ activity. Once I had taken the ball out of the art building, I decided to follow impulses as to what direction to go in. At this point I was not aware that working in this way would take me into the middle of Ipswich town centre. At 57 years of age, if anyone had asked me to do this I would probably have declined, but by following an immediate impulse it seemed fairly easy, with little or no resistance from the mind. I considered this as an act of ‘spontaneous and unpremeditated art’, and even an act of unrehearsed ‘performance art’.
It was only after ‘my walk’, that a new tutor discussed an artist called Michelangelo Pistoletto with me and told me to check out his own ‘newspaper balls’. In 1966-1967, Pistoletto had himself walked through the streets of Turin in Italy with a very large sphere made from of compressed newspaper, involving the community and public with his walk. This walk was also re-created prior to a retrospective of his work, in Philadelphia in 2010. Pistoletto is viewed as a major contributor to the pop, minimalist and conceptual art movements (spiralq.wordpress.com, 2010).
Another area of art-theory / art-history, that I came in contact with after doing my walk and through discussing it with a tutor, was the idea of the derive (a French term for drifting). This was a concept created and practised by the Situationists and explained in Harrison and Wood (1992). They state that,
In a derive one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. (Harrison and Wood, 1992, pp.696-697)
The derive is only a very small element of the situationists complex philosophy and collection of ideas. Their movement developed after Surrealism declined around 1957 and they were considered a revolutionary way to deal with and live in the modern city (Harrison and Wood, 1992, pp.696-697). In some ways though, my unplanned and directionless meander with a large ball through the town of Ipswich, could possibly be seen in relation to the derive.
