Saturation

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How can one drawing do so much to me ? I’m sat at home feeling pretty lousy, a virus has spent the best part of this week trying to interfere in my practice based research, and THAT is unforgivable. However I want to focus on this drawing by Gerhart Richter. Understand why it speaks a previously unchartered place in me.

Every now and then I encounter a work which is far grater than he sum of it’s parts. Deceptively simple in it’s execution of ink bled across paper. This one drawing is flooded with emotive waves like a symphony. It feels as though it is the the distilled essence of a passage across hope, love and loss.

I suspect that it is no chance that Richter created this drawing and it is born from years of study and making in colour and form. I don’t care necessarily for a lot of Richter’s paintings but I see his craft.

When I look at the drawing I see sadness and beauty occupying the same space, a lament -( as discussed in this weeks MA session). I’ve always connected with the notion of the lament, the sadness in seeing the gap between what is and what could be.

It’s also important to consider as I’m using this process of bleeding ink quiet a lot in my own practice right now. Something I am a little suspicious of due to it’s popular nature, the though needs to work in sync with he aesthetics. And where am I taking it?

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Breaking Down

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I saw a blown out tire on the way to work. Cast to the curb. There was something poetic in its appearance. The confidence of it’s thick black tones counterpointed by the twisted ribbons and threads of it’s insides. Somehow it felt like it had now become a victim of a hit and run. But by whom? Then the leaves add another texture to the scene for me. They too have fallen, curling and twisting in their passage. All transitioning away from their known purpose. Exit.

I’m not sure what I want to do with it, just leave it as photographs or progress it into drawings, there is something about the forms and shapes it takes that is a little provocative to capture - maybe printmaking. Maybe a digital composition of all four images.

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Imagined Bundle

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There was a pleasure in the process of making the drawing, a simplicity to the rules, regularity and consistency that pleased some deeper part of my brain. I’ve returned to the drawing and still like it which is a good sign and want to make more - I feel like has something more to say. The drawings stand as preparation for more sculpture, a way of understanding and creating.

It also falls into the enquiries I’m currently connecting with ‘constituent parts’ and ‘everything is divisible’. Real and imagined. A physical wrangling with the ideas I’m wrestling with.

I’d like to go larger more obsessive in the repetition.

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Holly is a sticky wood

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Out on location in woods. Looked for and found a resource of wood to process for ‘bundle 1’.

A number de-limbed branches were on the ground so I took the opportunity.

Again to hold materials in my hands feels good and adjusts the course of my thinking.

I realise that this project is going to take longer and more energy. The holly doesn’t give up its bark easily and is a stick wood to work with when green but pleasingly dense and heavy, and to process a number of large poles will take some time in addition to resourcing them.

I stripped one shirt Barton and left a little bark which gave a texture that spoke differently to what I expected.

I was short of time and didn’t get to burn the wood or test it against copper. However I processed a pile of wood and worked up a sweat despite the cold. I want to capture the whiteness of the wood Before it greys. The contrast to be pronounced when I burn one end.

Staining paper to in preparation for drawing letting the inks ‘bleed out’, possibley another form of dismantling my work.

Research: artists, context and connecting theory.

During making I also recorded the sound of me working - I thought of my friend who I’m collaborating, with who’s first instinct is a musician, I figured it would be fun and provocative to make a recording of the sounds of me working on the sculpture for our collaboration and send it to him instead of pictures///

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Currently Reading///Researching

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Collections

Sculpture as constituent parts///

Language and it's relationship to compositional elements of sculpture or artmaking

Deconstruction in language and the physical.

Derrida it appears has a dislike of the term Deconstruction and the resistance to it becoming an 'ism'

‘Deconstructualism is a word used by idiots.’(McQuillan 2000, 41)

Everything is divisible rather than deconstructible.

How is this reflected if at all by atomic structure and constituent parts?

Letter to a Japanese Friend"///Jacques Derrida///10 July 1983

Derrida and Differance, ed. Wood & Bernasconi, Warwick: Parousia Press 1985, p. 1-5

An insight into the problematic nature of using 'deconstruction'

Jacques Derrida /// Nicholas Royle///Routledge 2003

Not sure the below statement is true... but I like the idea of interrogation. Scrutinisng our understanding of Law and Justice. Isn't this what Jesus did?

For him it was both ‘foreseeable and desirable that studies of deconstructive style should culminate in the problematic of law and justice.’2 Deconstruction is therefore a means of interrogating the relationship between the two.

https://criticallegalthinking.com/2016/05/27/jacques-derrida-deconstruction/

Interrogating Law and Justice - But who's law and justice?

Thread to Physics ____

Thread to Language____

Thread to Sculpture____

Thread to Spirituality____

Further reading required?: 

Derrida Difference

Deconstruction

Law and Justice

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Trashed

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I feel like my mind has the landscape of an angry 3yr olds bedroom. everything is everywhere and nothing resides in its proper place. It's all out and on the floor. I'm filling pages of my sketchbook with odd disjointed ideas, some manifestations from years ago, some from just now.

I've gone down rabbit hole with Derrida and doubt I'll ever return from that one with any useful information other than he makes your nose bleed if you read too much.

Continuing to build up a glossary of random words I like:

Passage///

Diagram///

Constituent///

Honouring///

Threshold///

Threshing Floor///

Refine///

Filter///

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Key wOrds///

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Key words from drawing and researching today, in no specific order///

Burnt sugar

Bundle

Wad

Banding

Strap

Steps (descend ascend)

Return>>>

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I feel like making large format drawings in oil. Large greasy drawings, I desire to see thick black and sepia marks commanding the paper.

Portraiture

I still really enjoy making drawings. I feel guilty as though I am old fashioned stuck in craft, but I find making marks, making certain drawings so satisfying. The feel it has, the presence it carries. I worry as it feels as though there is no concept, idea or thought in the work. Just self indulgence and showing off. That there isn’t really a place for it in contemporary art. Is representational art over.

What is the purpose of portraiture today? Where does the thinking and conceptual value lie? Observation? Deep observation of an individual.

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Proof & Approval

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I noticed a connection between the words approval and prove - that had not occurred to me before.

The two set an interdependent in a negative frame. That to have approval I must prove myself, yet this is a futile task. My identity should not be scaffolded by others approval that I must first evidence.

My subconscious harangues me…

“If you really are…

…an artist

…intelligent

…likeable

…worthy to do an MA”

 >>>Or insert any other angst based self-defeating doubt>>>

…then prove it…(by fact based action…)

It seems the moment we step out, we come under unfair and unjust scrutiny. Rather than be encouraged to take risks, make new work or suggest a new way. Eeverything must be first justified and evidenced.

Prove///Approve - it’s a shitty equation.

How would you describe 'a healthy artistic environment’?

One free from the need to prove myself. 
Challenging yet collaborative.
A space where risks are taken.
A fringe space liberated from standard cultural capital.

Thinking about what my fellow students are doing to enhance my social and learning experiences; What do I most value in them?

Honest, challenging and rigorous discussion.
Experience beyond my own frame.
Kindness and understanding.

Thinking about what I am doing to enhance my fellow students social and learning experiences; What do they most value in me?

Experience outside of themselves.
Kindness and understanding.
Honest, challenging and rigorous discussion.

Sorry to be cheesy but I can’t ask something of someone I’m not prepared to give myself.

///Currently reading::: 
Theastre Gates:::Carol Becker, Lisa Yun Lee, Achim Borchardt-Hume