The residency includes weekly mentor sessions with Veronique Maria who is challenging me to push my practice further. The sessions provide a platform to review the developing ideas, identify themes arising from intuitive process, to take risks and to consider the context for the work made.
Whilst the blog is written as a daily account, the ideas continue throughout the week:
At the start of my arts career I created installations, spaces designed as immersive environments using film, sensors Re-Sembling Nano, sci-art installation
The projects were designed and then built in exhibition space. When I rented a small studio space at Unity Studios the audiences that visited found the work interesting, but it was documented versions rather than immersive spaces. I returned to working with materials with which I could physically engage and experiment with and present. The work with the residency is very much about the space, immersing myself in a natural environment, claiming space and transforming it through the ideas in the work.
On Nicholas Bourriaud and Relational Aesthetics-
“He saw artists as facilitators rather than makers and regarded art as information exchanged between the artist and the viewers. The artist, in this sense, gives audiences access to power and the means to change the world.” – TATE.ORG.UK
Questioning why I anthropomorphise the trees?
Association for psychological science, Feb 2010:
“Neuroscience research has shown that similar brain regions are involved when we think about the behavior of both humans and of nonhuman entities, suggesting that anthropomorphism may be using similar processes as those used for thinking about other people.”
He goes on to say that to anthropomorphise an inanimate object gives a sense of moral duty to care and punish, and that objects are selected that look more familiar to human forms than others.
When I walk through any forest I notice immediately the shape of a belly, an eye, a grin, a torso.
A root pull presents: a sense of striving and surviving.
A branch fallen to the ground: of pushing onwards. Sprouting bunches of yews on a fallen tree: rebirth, refresh, infallibility of life.
The opposite to anthropomorphise is to dehumanise. Apparently those socially isolated are more likely to anthropomorphise and those that dehumanise (Nazis, soldiers at Abu-Ghraib prison in Iraq) are more likely to be socially connected.
“Social connection may have benefits for a person’s own health and well-being but may have unfortunate consequences for intergroup relations by enabling dehumanization.”
‘The authors conclude that few of us “have difficulty identifying other humans in a biological sense, but it is much more complicated to identify them in a psychological sense.”’
Does someone more socially isolated have a heightened sense of anthropomorphism from trying to understand other people?
Religious icon objects hold power of association (a sculpture of Jesus, a drawing of the Prophet). Social religious grouping can lead to dehumanising of other social groups.
Consider the power of association in making work that gives an experience to the viewer.
The sensory drawings I made have significance to me, they represent my physical location in time and sensory experience of the body and landscape. The marks on the paper have a relation to each other that is experienced in a different way. The text informs the viewer of what the drawing is about to facilitate their relation to the experience of another person, the artist.
Alongside this residency I’m preparing for a group show at Chichester Guildhall with ARTEL Contemporary Art Group. The material object will be a wardrobe and the significance of this resonates with the ideas forming on this residency: I’ve requested permission to instal one in the landscape.
