Passage

It seemed like a good idea at the time /  by Justin Harrison

Mud

Smells bad

I look weird

Forest smells good, wet

Trees look fecund, perfect light

I rush

Forget to photo in sequence. My keenness blindness

Mud applies odd full of sticks and stones

Realise the smell is also duck shit

Drawing is hard, feels silly

Like a bad idea, not how I had imagined

Run down my arms

Not as good idea as I thought

Drawing is not working how I planned

Maybe that’s ok

I left in a hurry and didn’t ask the tree how it felt about it

///////

The above is my notes - I was gonna write a detailed journal entry but I think I prefer just the notes.

Further thoughts.

I think about using terracotta clay it would apply easier and I’d have more control with the drawing but I also know that the materials would need to be integrous, If I were to buy the clay it might feel synthetic.

I need to look around and find a river with red clay, maybe go onsite and collect it and work with it. A set of drawings across 5 or so trees?

Sources for naturally occurring clay

https://victorianweb.org/science/geology/smith3.html

https://nativehands.co.uk/2016/11/wild-pottery-clay-digging/#:~:text=You%20can%20also%20look%20for,area%2C%20that's%20a%20good%20sign.

I did like the blackness of the pond mud against the lightness of the tree. It has a quality to it that feels satisfying. The materials matter. It was textured too with leaf matter and sticks, this to gave it a unique quality and tone of voice.

I do need to go back and visit. See how the drawing changes as it returns to the forest 🌳

A ritual tool

Addendum///

I returned a month or so later, I really wasn’t expecting to find much and was suprised to find most of it intact. I find that I like it but not enough, it feels like it needs more, but I can’t quiet figure what. I do like that I’m drawing in mud. Mud made up from decaying elements of the immediate surrounding, leaves , twigs, dust and yes duck feaces. Some how it rising up from the ground feels interesting. I do still worry about it feeling ‘Andy Goldsworthy’ but again if I could push the work a bit harder it might stand on it’s own better.

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Passing Through /  by Justin Harrison

Hmmmm - it’s ok but the scale change pulls me out of the work. They need to be closer in scale. I wonder where this can go. It feels interesting like it could go further. Well first of all I need to really identify why the paddle? Why it features so much in my recent work. There doesn’t need to be a direct leading narrative -but I want the work to travel further.

I guess it’s good to experiment. I also wonder what would happen if I were to work larger. Film a drawing and let it unfold as a Gif. There’s a drawing I want to make on a tree. It could be interesting to document as it progresses.

 

Wangechi Mutu /  by Justin Harrison

I’ve known of Wangechi Mutu’s work - but feel like I saw it for the first time today. Some artists work goes deep, and she is one. I’m a sucker for beautiful mark making that carries difficult resonances to it.

I guess I’m interested on a superficial level because of her use of bled inks, collage and layering. But then her work occupies and very interesting and challenging place. Her dialogue in the work confrontational and powerful. I hadn’t known of her sculpture before - so this is new to me. It’s encouraging to see an artist working between sculpture and drawing so successfully, I struggle to reconcile the two practices a lot of the time.

Mutut’s work broods on the paper and in content, it has a slow but purposeful movement to it, never feeling rushed. It’s fascinating how she controls time and pace with colours, textures and marks.

It has a sense of resistance and strong independance - creating her own aesthetic language. It also has a feel of the liminal, the sense of time, ghostly and refusing categorisation, the figures feel as though they are constantly evolving refusing the binary.

https://vielmetter.com/artists/wangechi-mutu

 

Movement and Passage /  by Justin Harrison

Image my own

Notes whilst cycling home...I've found my processing happens at interesting moments and not always the most convenient! I've learnt to record messages to myself to scribe later.

An aperture opens up through/by the interstices, and can connect to any number of possible apertures, the rhyzomic, with no guarantee where it will end. This is the 'Unknown' the 'fluid', the 'frustration' of 'being in passage'.

To pass through requires movement, and this is fundamental, movement must always occur, because to not move is stasis, a 'little death' and that is the structure, the structure does not move, it cannot take passage through the Liminal, for it is an aberration.

The structure has an 'illusion' of movement because it has a centre (((Derrida Structure sign play)))and everything (((WHAT? All that is termed/defined by the binary of the structures definition))) is tethered to the centre, and it can only circumscribe a circle of a given diameter, territory. A false moment, an ersatz movement, a 'performative'.

Where as once displacement has occurred for an agent, then there is a' line of flight' as Deleuze describes in Minor Literatures. This displacement can come through two sources, either structural violence where somebody is ejected - removed form the structure for failing to fullfill binary demands, or violence to the structure where somebody rejects the structure and remove themselves. Rejection and Ejection - this trajectory requires 'movement' through new boundaries new borders new apertures, new interstices.

Other thoughts

The trouble with the Binary is that it is a 2 dimensional in it's approach. It lacks holistic thinking and fails to acknowledge the differance, the movement, the third dimension, or third space as Homi Bhabha describes.

AK makes work that sets up perameters that manifest the void. It messes with the binary logic, rational. Making the untenable - the untouchable

UVR makes work that stands in defiance of ejection the weigh and size, the oversized. Defiance of authority. (Often self elected authority)

 

Materials Matter /  by Justin Harrison

Finally back in the studio.

I’ve taken the clamps off the paddle roughly made form fencing panels - I still like, although it feels slightly out of character for me. There is a curious freedom to it that I would have resisted before as poorly made, lacking craft, and although I do miss my beautifully made items - there just isn’t time to fuss. I have a number of things I want to see completed, ideas manifested.

But somehow the Fence Panel Paddle feels like its not doing enough work. I think it needs a mixture of textures - I wish I had fine sanded and polished one layer to stand in contrast and resistance. Do I make another paddle and put in the fine layer on that one? Do I like the work enough. Especially when there is more to be made. The value to making the faster care free work is that I am more generative. Make more…

I move on for now and cutting the wood for a jointed paddle. It’s hard to do it well and cut straight by hand but I am learning. The cuts straighter - it’s hard working in green wood, everything blunts faster, and it’s super tough to drill. The green wood has a high level of resistance I get as far as I can for now as I left a key tools at home.

I move on to strip some other branches for a bundle and realise that they are not Holly. Most of the time I have been picking up fallen Holly branches and I’m used to the colour and feel of the wood. As I take the bark off a branch it reveals fine stripes and yields it’s bark differently not quiet as satisfyingly. I don’t like it, it feels all wrong.

It makes me think of my research artists Anish Kapoor and Ursula von Rydingsvard. The materials are vital, a core part of the language of the work, even with Anish Kapoor who often worked with negative space and voids, the materials that are the genesis of the void are a vital part of the tension. The rock, wax, glass and fabric. It’s unavoidable, not just the material but the way an artist chooses to work them. The materials matter. Even the spaces in-between the materials, the ‘differance’, because it is influenced by the neighbouring elements.

I feel like in my work there is more for me to do, to find to visit upon the materials, but then I’m not sure I have the language I want yet.

I realise that I am in a transitional place, quiet normal for an art MA, but never the less it’s unsettling, I see that my conceptual underpinning is far more rigourous - especially from all the research I’ve been doing. I’m not there yet, my work still isn’t cogent, but I feel the difference the movement. And it’s quiet ironic yet not surprising that I should enter into this having been writing about it.

I’m troubled by my work which today feel overly simplistic and lacks essence, presence. But I continue accepting that ‘passage’ is rarely a comfortable space and this is my work. The jointed paddle itself a tool of passage, awkward and it’s purpose ‘offset’, present but impractical. The differing of meaning in my work - ‘Differance’

Growth and Decay - I like the abstraction of the process. the gradual loss of recognisable form and purpose, the granular yielding back to constituent elements.

NOTES:

Listening to Homi Bhabha whilst working in the studio - this lecture is crucial to my research - if only I could extrapolate and assimilate it all.

Start at about 25 mins in:

///How we see and where we look.

///The displacement in the angle of vision.

(((UvR and AK displaced through occupation and othering)))

They have a new angle of vision in their displacement.

This is manifested in their work - only it will be translated again.

28 Scale/scalar

30 Benjamin quote: Displacement angle of vision a positive element emerges anew…..Dialectical contrasts

Breaking constructed intention.

Interstices smallest change makes a small difference - scalar notions of translation and history - small movements  - it is from them that Life is born anew.

Translation is a temporal displacement of scale.

 

Kenosis /  by Justin Harrison

Revenant -one who comes back from the dead.

Kenosis - the renunciation of the divine nature, at least in part, by Christ in the Incarnation

I’m still struck by the scene in the movie ‘Revenant’ where Glass(DiCaprio) has accidentally ridden over a cliff in escape of pursuit and certain death. His fall is broken by trees and he lands in snow relatively unharmed. His horse however is not so fortunate as we discover when Glass crawls his way to its broken body.

The weather is worsening and a snow storm 🌨 is rising as dusk falls and night soon follows. Glass with what feels like no other choice enviscerates his horse, it’s huge stomach and intestines emptied out to make a shelter.

It’s this moment that I am especially caught on. Although not voluntary, the seeming sacrifice of the horse feels almost Kenotic. No I am standing on the threshold of Blasphemy,  however I am not saying Jesus is a dead horse 🐴 But the emptying out of the self, with a sacrificial element has resonances. Furthering with the sheltering in its breast. Its a physical and metaphorical emptying. Space is made. Yet there is also displacement and occupation. In the morning Glass emerges as though born again. The cavity encrusted with ice white and shining.Time and space also seem disrupted with the emergence of Glass in the morning, the landscape has changed a thaw has begun.

Again there is a form ‘passage’ but it also includes a scared motif.

 

Spectral Interstices /  by Justin Harrison

Crossing boundaries and boarders

Forms never to be repeated

Appear and disappear

Present and yet not present

Geographically ambiguous

Free

“Shrouded in a forest of signs that render the conditions of speech and action barely intelligible or translatable. We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings we glided past like phantoms wondering and secretly appalled as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a mad house”. Conrad Joseph - Hearts of darkness.

An opportune moment, light in constant flux, crossing boundaries and margins, formal demarkations denoting space are ignored. The small spaces giving an ‘angle of vision’ - generating the new. A fleeting demonstration of the liminal, impossible to possess or repeat.

I like that this was another video opportunity, a sketch in time. It may benefit from editing, taking out some of the less successful moments. There is a pace to certain excerts that I prefer. To slow and it becomes static, too fast and the spirit is lost. As for the rogue leaf - well that can stay.

 

Cleft Paddle - Same, not the same. /  by Justin Harrison

Same, not the same.

More paddles, there is some kind of satisfaction in making these. Touching on presence and absence, time and space. I am also tempted to return to the ‘imaginary bundles’ stacking elements in and around. Items being grouped, bundled and divisible.

I do wonder about the drawing technique - is it too simplistic? Childish. I find it is a useful short hand to explore the negative, which I am also making up larger in card. I still want to make large drawings more involved and descriptive.

Also what am I saying about the paddle? Anish Kapoor talks with Homi Bhabha about making series - the value to it. But I don’t want to be repetitive and not develop my visual language alongside my research.

I keep on finding more connections to space and time and I’m not sure I can justifiable pull them altogether. I’ll try to document as much as possible but it feels like the accumulation of information and evidence is becoming overwhelming. Just trying to find a system to categorised and catalogue everything would be a work of art worthy of an MA in itself.

 

Studio Notes - Cabinet Paddle /  by Justin Harrison

Cabinet Paddle. I’ve had an old draw knocking around. It’s been waiting for me to do something, so I set to it with a saw. The lock and holes to fit the handle still present, it’s former life still marked, haunting it. (I also like the connection to draws that I have been drawing.)

I’ll put in joints again, the other preoccupation I have, it’s purpose and use rePlaced.

I love the history to the materials again, more than just a cut of wood it’s history marks it and places it in and out of time. ‘Time is out of joint’. (The wood smelt peculiar when I cut it, it’s history was given up in it’s scent, mothballs and varnish and everyday life).

I hope to make this a little better than the current ‘Physical Sketches’, cut the joints nice.

I also had a practice carving it that I will need to cover somehow as it detracts from the dialogue. More copper cladding perhaps.

 

I AM EVERYTHING YOU DON'T WANT. I AM EVERYTHING YOU LEFT BEHIND #8 /  by Justin Harrison

Image my own

This time I took the wood home. Carried it across London for 2 hours, cos I had other stuff to do. Walked into restaurants and shops clutching the abandoned under my arm, a surrogate father to the unwanted.

The plan is to make another paddle from only the constituent parts.

We’ll see there’s a lot of stuff mounting up in the studio that is half made…

 

The Forest /  by Justin Harrison

Image my own

Entering the forest requires a different way of being. One's presence needs 'toning down', for you are not alone and your presence perceived. We are not unwelcome in the forest, however there is a better way of moving and being. Sound is felt, pace absorbed, activity registered and at times resisted. It is good to sit, to let your thoughts meander as a river would pass through. Time is measured but not by any clock. Gifts are given freely but not thoughtlessly.

 

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.

 

Strip /  by Justin Harrison

This is gonna look like I’ve lost my mind….But then I guess when art is being it’s least performative - perhaps it’s being most honest and has greater potential for insight. Or to at least move towards something genuine.

There is simple pleasure for me in removing some of the bark, ‘stripping’ to raw wood. I’d like to do it almost surgically. However I also enjoy the rhythm of the cut marks across the surface. A rhythm that feels located in the familiar. I’d like to have multiples but worry about time and is it worth it for the work. Is this my work? I keep looking for clues from myself.

I’ve been listening to various of talks on Derrida, Mark Fisher, Marx, Julia Kristeava. Presence and performance and Image. . I don’t know that I can surmise it all just yet. But something akin to - Presence in crisis, the lack of location and reference - a digital malaise or palsy.

 

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.

 

The Forest /  by Justin Harrison

Image my own

Been thinking about ‘The forest’ as a ‘place of non place’, of unbelonging.
Of being lost.
Also does the Forest as a site resist colonialisation? Especially in it’s resistance of structure and the centre. An anti-land (Cixous)

The strong vertical presence marks a from of time - yet time also looses it’s bearing here. Bodies grow tall and then yield themselves to the ground.

Hamlet encounters the Ghost - the Spectral in the forest. His father pulled out of time in his orchard. ‘Time is out of joint’ Hamlet.

Ursula Von Rydingsvard’s work rooted in the body of the forest, her life a liminal existence.

What else does the forest offer as a site, no site. Does it reflect the essence of Derrida’s enquiries, of the nature of Differance, the spectre, and so on.

Is it a site of transformation? The passage through summing change. After all the forest is a site of constant change, growth and decay.

On a practical level - I keep returning here to dwell, think and work. I feel like there is an obvious connection that I am blind to.

 

Spectres of Marx /  by Justin Harrison

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJr0NwXWb6Q

Hamlet -”Time is out of joint”
Really useful video investigating Derrida’s concept of the Spectral. I’ve come back to this a couple of times. The idea of time manifesting in a non liar way creates space for reconsidering passage. And therefor the passage and place of transformation.

In looking to land on a specific line of enquiry for the research paper, I find this interesting. It sits well with the liminal and belonging. Expressions of the outsider and questioning who is on the inside, and how are these locations decided? Agreed upon and policed?