Whining

Practice /  by Justin Harrison

I'm surrounded by a mess of clamps, stray wood and glue. I'm wondering how I made any work before. I'm challenging myself to another spontaneous fast piece. I'm getting in my own way of making and it's annoying.

I have a creative tantrum and brake stuff.

/// Day 2

I had managed to glue and clamp some stuff yesterday before I lost it, as I continue to work on it I make different choices changing layout and direction, I question the wood where it wants to go what form it needs to take to speak, to articulate of the in-between, at times I purposely plane and smooth off the wood from it’s original texture. You can't see it easliy- but I know. Changing states. The wood came form a couple of boards I found in the street, the wood is coarse and rough with glue residue. I also blacken two slats - I’m constructing some strange object - born for the liminal. On object of negotiation.

I wonder wether to paint some or all of the wood. Normally I recoil from painting the material and hiding its nature, but I'm also considering my instinctual colour palette, black browns amber and occasionally blues. As I look over my blog and instagram account I see a strange consistency.

I'm asking, looking for the poetry of the work

I also have been dreaming about the clay drawings, about camping overnight beside the tree, ritualising the process

Heart spirit Mind soul in alignment. Generatiional imbalance.

 

Studio /  by Justin Harrison

I don’t know what I’m doing to be honest. But It kinda feels ok or even right. I’ve constructed this monsterous stencil from collected disposed of card. Almost like what one would do when cast adrift on a desert island cobbling together some sort of improvised solution.

It’s growing into some large drawing, evolving. It’s not finished, I have more to do…when I figure it out.

I’m looking for the work to have ‘presence’ for the drawing to move in some way. I’m deliberating - what does it need want. How does it speak?

I stop the drawing for now and lay out more materials on my bench - various types of wood I’ve collected. This has now become part of my process, to collect and set out materials, give them space to breath and speak to me. I strip the laminated boards I found and break them down into slats constituent elements. I’m processing materials looking for dialogue.

It’s a mush mash of materials, I don’t know what I’m doing but its ok. I’m asking questions of the material and myself. I start sanding a fence panel and that feels ok or am I repeating everything? Am I genuinely experimenting? I want to develop more the initial trials that felt successful. The clay drawing. The looped animation, and where are the films I was promising to make?

And conclusions what can I conclude? Or do I just make…

 

I don't know why I like this /  by Justin Harrison

There is something about this that I like, I’m not sure how I feel about reducing my drawings to a gif. But then I’m not sure it’s reduced them, it’s done something else for me. I wonder where I could take it, and what it means right now.

I think there is an element of strangeness that I like, the transitioning the movement that is somehow honest, it’s not trying to be an animation with a distinct narrative. It’s a broken moment, a haunting, ‘time is out of joint’.

I’m now obsessing which can be a good and a bad thing. The paddle is now a key object, I’m making them in my studio and in my drawings. The tool for navigation, immediate and resides in our hands, yet partners with a craft of some description.

I’ve been listening to Anish Kapoor interviews and reading text as research for y paper - and them there was a brief discussion about making a series of the same object or work can up, and I found it encouraging, to explore an idea - open it up and out. I think I worry that I am just repeating iterations endlessly and that there is no value to it. I am annoined that I feel like I need permission.

The drawings are strangely pleasing for me, I’m connecting with the way the ink bleeds out to granular and the empty negative that it creates.

This particular media I’m using was ironically made by Stuart Smeple in a reaction to Kappor’s Vantablack, it has a quality in its miss use that I especially like. When diluted it has a granular property that separates out into delicious bands of gradients, leaving small tidal marks and tracks. Something deeper in me connects to specific marks, moments. Yet it leaves this gritty feel, like BhaBha’s scalar interstices, the bundle divisable. Collective moments spread across time inconsistently. The bleeding through, the threshold melts, margins fade.

 

Pushing /  by Justin Harrison

I kind made work and unmade work. Well it feels like I messed up. I attempted a bunch of stuff and it really didn’t come out how I was hoping.

The Draw paddle joint I was cutting came out clean and then as I was ‘tidyin’g the channel with a chisel I took chunks out, now it looks horrible, I don’t know how to feel about it, I was enjoying the clean lines. I want to make lots and I’m trying to let the perfectionism go - but how far fro I go in letting go?

I forget the lessons that wood has taught me and have to relearn them, the character of there grain and what it will and won’t permit.

I sent a good part of the afternoon stripping a green branch, I discovered they bend far easier than one that has had a chance to dry out. I thought I’d found the perfect branch in size and diameter, but on stripping it I signifiacantly reduced the diameter. It surprised me , then wen I was bending it I pushed it too far and too fast - it began splintering unable to cope with my expectations. This is for a piece that I started agues a go and have been waiting to find the right material, now I’m still waiting.

I am learning but I am annoyed and I feel the pressure of time against me. The work is not where I want it to be and right now I don’t feel excited by it. It could just be a bad day, but there is a feel to pieces that are succeeding - they have more dialogue with me.

Blah blah blah - I’m annoying myself.

 

There is nothing new /  by Justin Harrison

In researching for my art and paper - I am on an interesting/infuriating and yet somehow not surprising route. By ‘interesting’ I actually feel like none, a non route, nowhere. The more I read the less sure I am what it is I am doing. (Standard MA Fine Art emotion)

Frustratingly, but then perhaps mercifully I see work that I am making, or about to make, or want to make. With Theaster Gates I see the shingled roofs I begun to explore. The RePlacement of materials, I like to choose. Especially reclaimed wood.

With Von Rydingsvard, I see the paddles I have been drawing and want to carve out of wood.(She make shovels to be specific, but they are so close I can’t ignore them).

Repetition feels like a little death. I need there to be a significant departure from what has gone before to justify my making. Especially If I am going to ask others to view the work.

I also struggle as an artist, with the continual re-presentation of objects and images to be interpreted again only slightly differently, with the burden of interpretation on the audience to discover the newly imbued meaning. Especially with my own work. Originality is a troublesome notion. Very little is new, yet creativity for me requires a healthy does of originality, rather than a nuance one.

 

Paddle /  by Justin Harrison

The artist's activity is one of compulsive repetition, not under the law of a market as a narcissist among narcissists, but to envelop in the work the generative force of the world. Qua other. Plastic pills https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H13Unfk6UHs

It kinda gets obsessive, I try my hardest to make the marks consistent and always the same. It doesn’t work. But then I like that game.

The paddle feels somehow ‘held’ or suspended, and that if the marks were to disperse… so would the paddle.

Presence and place. Spectres manifested by the community.

For me the paddle has becoming a symbol of navigation and empowerment, a tool of implementing change. There is a deep desire to craft my own paddles in found wood, wrap them in leather and photograph them in place. But I have a lot of things pressing for my attention and it begins to block me.

I’m struggling to focus my attention, between thinking about my research paper, drawing, making. There’s a back log of work bits of sculpture I feel I need to finish to move on. Then there’s all the stick’s I’ve been obsessing over. I feel there should be a thread I can pull which will draw it all together. I also wonder about all the photography and writing that’s appeared in my Blog. (Although not for a while).

Somewhere there is a narrative in what I’m doing but it seems to elude me for now.

 

Sticky place /  by Justin Harrison

In my first few writings I talked about honestly rather than performative. And later in my statement about not creating work for academic approval but to make art that Is fiercely my own.

Even to this day, I don't know if I put enough of the hurt, anger, and love in the art I make. I still don't know if I'm too much of a good girl in the pieces that I do. I don't know, but I think I would like to be a lot tougher and more raw. Also, over time, I'm hoping that my want and my will have not been undermined in some way.

Ursula Von Rydingsvard speaking in The contour of feeling p35

It’s hard. I’m not surprised. I’ve come to a sticky place and I know to work through it.

I’m researching for my Paper, and not really coming up with much, my studio practice feels dry and infantile. I look through art books at contemporary artists and I don’t envy their work neither am I excited about my own right now.

I worry about being an object maker, generating endless objects of little or no significance. And then drawing …there are a million drawings floating around this world and the next, imbued with some significant thought or feeling I’m sure but I just don’t care. Does the world really need me to make another average assembly of wood, metal and plastic? Or another pensive little scribble endearly rendered in some familiar style?

I’m in the studio making objects and draughting semi abstract drawings, but the relationship of everything seems too disparate. I have grand plans of large scale drawings but the content seems to elude me. I can see the drawings in my minds eye, ink bleeding across stark white paper moments of black, suggested yet elusive in form. But all I seem to do is take photographs. I look back over my blog and it’s filling with images of banal decomposing machinery.

I do like photography and want to stage some specific compositions, similar to Gregory Crudeson, very specific lighting, carefully composed and staged. (Also aware that he uses a Phase One digital medium format camera - that I don’t have) But then this is another random avenue to go down!

I’m finding it hard to pull focus - what is my central practice? What am I really interested in? What is worth investing time in? I can’t keep on just making little bits and pieces, and random drawings…

I hope this mess is the ingredients all coming together in one bowl, ready to transform in the baking.

 

In the studio /  by Justin Harrison

Im stood in the studio drinking a dirty can of Dr Pepper and trying to figure what I AM GONNA DO. I have about 4-5 different things pulling for my attention and I’m really not sure what the priorities are. Maybe the thing that looks the coolest and will impress people....

I had every intention of pressing on with ‘Jericho’ a sculptural piece - but one thing has led to another and now I'm thinking about coracles.

Oh and there's also tattooed paddles and winnowing fan, and blah...+++

I do need to focus but also want to let all the ideas fall out of my head. It was ok before I started the MA life was simpler- I blame Jonathan K it’s his fault.

Also there's the Study statement and curated blog hovering menacingly behind my head.

Then I think about Passage and Place and consecrated spaces. Can a body or area of water be consecrated? +++

Oh and etching copper pipes - Id forgotten that needed investigating - along with ink drawings and encaustic wax. The list grows

Jericho ok Im focussing now. Why Jericho - a stronghold? I stop questioning and just make to see what happens>>>

There a lot of stuff on my desk - it’s supposed to inspire - today it's just irritating.