Sharon Hallshipp and Rob Turner have kindly left comments on my last blog where I mused that viewers seemed drawn to feathers and I wondered if they were an emotional signifier of any sort.
Sharon bypassed the feathers and felt drawn to the concrete – as am I. It’s surprisingly vulnerable for such a heavy material. I like its weight and the fact that it is what it is. Its solid and heavy, its colour is reminiscent of unloved 60’s buildings and of building works……take me as I am, no pretensions, not asking to be admired or loved. No poems to concrete.
If I choose to continue by interrogating concrete it would be an exciting journey – of continual revelations I think.
Rob offered the Indian brave and the feather headdress that signify warrior status. Now of course all I can see in my piece are Indian feather headdresses! Maybe why I felt the piece was strong where I had expected vulnerability.
Images are just so complex aren’t they?
As artists we adjust and adjust until the medium, shape, colour, frame, placement, lighting give us back the emotional charge we were searching for – and then along comes the viewer with their box of completely different Life Experiences packed with images signifying emotions quite other to ours….
As human beings we do seem to have a culturally agreed encyclopaedia of symbolic images and colours that we share and that allow us to ‘read’ non functional objects from an emotional standpoint. Only so good so far though. White being the colour of mourning in much of the Asian world it is instantly obvious that as an emotional chart and primary reader of an object/image its worth is pretty limited.
Maybe that’s why we are so interested in images and objects that are ‘unreadable’ on that scale?
Objects and images rendered in new media, in new ways, new ideas, out of scale, objects in juxtaposition to each other in ways not seen outside art………..
