Photography

The Colour of change 2 /  by Justin Harrison

I seem to repeat myself, but if I don’t make the weird or seemingly repetitive work then I’ll not process properly to arrive at something I do like. I don’t dislike this work but I don’t feel convinced either. The colours are off my ususal palette but then it’s good to disrupt your own practice. It is still me abusing the camera on my phone, it’s become a useful tool for documenting and sketching, although I am loathed to admit it. I have also edited the images in photoshop so I do have a hand in their existence.

it’s when I make this work that start asking myself the question - what do I really want to make? The answer big drawings. so how do I make that happen? I guess find the drawings and process.

 

The colour of change /  by Justin Harrison

More misuse of cameras, wilful distortion of colour and focus. I’m tired of social media expectations, I’ll make: what I want, how I want, when I want. I refuse to serve the blind idiot machine god of the digital. I exist in spite of my digital footprint, not because.

Values have always been hard to keep clean, to not be swayed by the environment around me. Making art and holding my motives in check isn’t easy, I want an audience - but at what cost?

Something about these colours again, I keep returning to ambers and blacks as a palette - why? What pulls at me from the inside to render in this way, what do they mean to me? Maybe somehow they represent the colours of mystery, the unexplained, the colours of change.

It would be good to print this twice. One incarnation as a digital Giclee with the blacks as velvety as possible, and another as an interpretation of the image, a hand rendered etching or screen print, concentrating on the layering of the colour and the texture of the inks. I could go down a whole rabbit hole of ‘hand made inks’ (and go large in format)…

But as a good friend warned - that might be jumping tracks…

 

Fluid tools of passage /  by Justin Harrison

Having indulged in making clay drawings for the sake of it I realised that I should animate them as I have with some of the ink drawings, the ‘passage’ created feels close to what I have been pursuing. There is a strange tension of pursuing what I feel is so elusive. Yet I need to continue.

Again I am making work in a very loose fashion, just getting it made - so it can exist, if feels right to have a growing number of works that I can focus down on in the future. I imagine this work being animated much more beautifully, the current format of Giffs is perhaps the most accessible but also the crudest. And I do wonder what software would be best I doubt I need powerful software but one that can blend between drawings well. In addition I suspect that I can move the animations further on conceptually to make the work more engaging, I don’t feel like I have to add a lot more narrative - more let the work evolve as I have with the sculpture.

There is scope to experiment more with the drawing, what. and how I render. I do enjoy the gentled looping of it, the constant transitioning and translating, perhaps a peace in the constant changing, that for it to resolve would actual feel uncomfortable.

More a fluid tool of passage, which intuitively makes sense.

 

Minor Post: Boundaries and boarders to translation. /  by Justin Harrison

Boundaries and boarders to translation.

Restraint.

https://bcmcr.org/culturaltranslation/2018/05/13/key-readings-homi-bhabha-on-how-newness-enters-the-world/

 

Minor Post: Boundaries /  by Justin Harrison

Boundaries and borders not just geographical but cultural, social, intellectual… how are they given, accepted, defined and disrupted?

 

A benevolence of dirt /  by Justin Harrison

An experiment in placing words alongside the image. Perhaps more of a graphic design approach to my work but I don’t mind it…for now.

Capitalism doesn't work. A benevolence of dirt. We perform but we don't act. 

Also a subtle fast food vendor reference for bonus points…

Also encouraging is that this work has now been accepted for an exhibtion- ‘The Festival of Dissent’. I’ve printed it up to A1 which was pushing the image as it was originally shot on a iPhone. There’s always something and you just have to push and make it work. I’m a little unsure how I feel about it as it’s gone very graphical, but then it also works as magazine spread but a disruption of that media and culture where we obsess about food and being seen eating. Out culture is obscene in how it wastes food stuffs, we have a growing crisis with a huge increase in the use of food banks. We can’t live in denial. Oh and there’s achy reference to fast food to but one subtly.

 

Colour tests /  by Justin Harrison

So a whole session in the studio has been spent hand sanding a large diameter copper pipe. I’m allowing myself this indulgence of protracted fussing as I had also just made some faster pieces. It’s a balance right? Well maybe therapy, I had planned to use an angle grinder but it just felt wrong - disrespectful to the metals nature, the spirit of what I want to make. So I make my way up the grit papers. I was planning to go for a mirror polish but it feels tawdry somehow. I plan to knock it back by a grade or two.

It’s a test piece for my collaboration. I felt intimidated by the size and time it required so this a simplified stripped down version. Drawing should have been made at this point. but they are still in the atmosphere - I’ll pull them down later.

The copper is to test it’s reflective capabilities in low light. If it works then Jon and I can push on and develope the piece.

I do feel excited that this can develope and expand, I just need to stay relaxed and flow.

As I edit the photos for this post I also realise - that a comment made by Jonathan has sunk into my mind, and has been resurfacing from time to time. He had mentioned about my use of colour - I need to discuss this through a little more as I’m not entirely sure what he meant but it was encouraging none the less, and I become more aware as I examine the images - some colour and compositional tests.

I also wonder about etching drawing onto the copper, embroiling it and setting things, ideas and feelings into the fabric of the piece.

Also the music I’m listening to is filtering in. connecting and encouraging me. I need to keep a log as I easily forget what blesses my heart and making.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xrmTND6Jo4

 

I don't know /  by Justin Harrison

I don’t know what I made, or why I made it. But I like it.

I wanted to test the print screens at work, so I knocked up a quick stencil. Impromptu - I went with an impulse and a sense, I briefly saw this in my head. Cutting the stencil freely it took no more than 10 mins to make. (Using newsprint paper as the stencil)

Again in a rush due to other commitments - I pulled a quick print preloading the screen and pulling 2 passes.

The above is the first print. I was kinda pleased and surprised. Again I worked quick and unselfconsciously as it was just a test. But I can tell Iike the result… I photographed it and have been returning looking at it from time to time.

Again - It this thing that I need, to give myself permission to make work easily- not every worry piece of art hs to be laboured.

It’s inspired me - I want to use the stencil and make 2 colour prints of the black, grey, amber and the yellow that follows me. Also I had thought to make a print of the stairs, reduced to stark blocks of tone. A translation. I make a test in Illustrator - trace over the photo but dislike the literal iteration, it needs to evolve and be an interpretation. I’ll approach it again with simpler more intuitive making.

I also worry as this os quiet a departure form what I have been doing, but somehow I need to make it, get it out of my head.

 

Why the forest? /  by Justin Harrison

Image my own

During my first tutorial Jonathan asked me ‘why the forest’? ‘Why am I drawn to it’? Now I think the forests significance is because it’s a strong liminal place, ever shifting and changing, constantly in decay and growth - always moving. It’s a site that is not occupied but free of dominating presence and technology. Natural and free of intent. In the space time feels slower and is of less consequence to the forest, it posses it’s own language, one I only barely understand intuitively and where my words are of little significance, finally the forest shares a rhizomatic consciousness, it thinks in community.

There's a neutrality to it, a reset. I get tired of all the demands that come from the digital world and to be honest I actually dislike a lot of it. I do find it useful and use it, but I don't like the way it kidnaps my time and energy.

I like making work that is devoid of this, and in a conversation with George, he mused on it having a 'prehistoric' feel to it. Which led to us wondering about the final show, could it just be a set of coordinates to site specific work in forest somewhere, or if that warrants the use of GPS, just some hand written directions. In rejection of the capitalist gallery space and commodification of creativity.

 

In-between /  by Justin Harrison

In-between having purpose, being discarded, becoming waste. The wood and cigarette packet lie in the passage awaiting transformation from one state to another. Passing from one territory into another.

Passage is the beginning of movement of all things, references, being, knowledge, place, identity, territory, history, home, meaning.

More materials to process, strip back and rePlace. I’ve taken them back to my studio, to see what they say.

 

Interstices /  by Justin Harrison

In the intersticies the edges are blurred , indefined, indistinct. There is no clear demarcation, margin, boundary. Yet the apperature is clearly perceivable.

The liminal represents the free play, the opportunity for change. The change in the angle of vision, the change in space, time, concept. It is the opening up, where deconstruction can operate freely and generate the new. Broader passages of movement.

Hauntology, spectral, third space, void these too are different angles of vision through interstices.

Everything and nothing, liminal and void, inside and outside, interior and exterior. These appear binary terms - where is in between these? Differance?

We fear change. Being in passage. The moments of uncertainty. Movement.

Change - Passage - Is movement.

Again - Differance free play.

Stasis is a little death. Stagnancy.

Do I make ritualised tools of passage?

 

I wish I had taken this image /  by Justin Harrison

I found this whilst researching, thinking about submersion, drowning, afterlife, and transformation.

Taken from the website: https://www.fieldandstream.com/photos/gallery/hunting/deer-hunting/2010/12/triple-tragedy-three-bucks-drown-antlers-locked/
Article by BY STEVEN HILL | PUBLISHED DEC 15, 2010 10:18 PM
Image possibly taken by: Jason Good

It’s not my photography but I wish it was. Curiously, I suspect the image was just for documentation rather than a consciously creative endeavour. However it just has so much happening in it.

In a muted palette of olive, amber, brown and blacks. Three bodies have come together in a triste tri-union. The trees appear to sprout out of the cadavers spines, blackened and wirey, as though some mysterious transformation has occurred through the incident. nature has reclaimed the moment. Above and beneath a quiet worlds are entangling. Bleeding through.