Drawing and Dimensions – Part 2
In part one I wrote about the lines of ink on paper, wire in three dimensions and the shadows cast back onto the paper. I have a handle on where I am with them. The ink and paint travel right to the edge of the paper, implying its journey goes beyond. The shapes I bind with wire have defined edges, the lines form the mesh that can feel like a surface. Whether it is or not depends on who you talk to. But it could keep going…
I have the good fortune to have a clever son who has an impressive background in physics… and incidental philosophy… our conversations make my head hurt. I do have to sometimes remind myself after the conversations that the scientific truth is not necessarily to be held onto in my art work, or in philosophical terms, but an exploration of terms and meanings in those disciplines is really useful. Thanks Dan! Our references range from Aristotle, to Kierkegaard via Homer (Simpson) and Terry Pratchett, in an attempt to aid (my) understanding of dimensionality. The conversation we had attempted to place sound within my work. I’m trying to establish a few rules for myself to explore the issue.
If I see the drawing on paper as two-dimensional drawing, and the wire sculpting as three-dimensional drawing, then the song, of determinate length, becomes a temporal fourth-dimensional drawing. The extent of this is defined, and explicit, and a lived experience over that time. And it is still a drawing. My questions and rules now then, as I create these sound-temporal-dimensional drawings (I’ll probably find a better term as I work) are as follows (for now):
Will they be separate pieces, made to sit alongside specific drawings?
Will a stop~start of the sound be a sort of annotation of the drawings? A point from which travel occurs, for the duration of the song/sound?
Will it be a continuous looped piece, to reiterate/echo that carrying on past the edge?
Will this create a possibility of different starting points along the continuum through paper/ink/wire/sound that can travel in any direction?
What quality of sound do I want to convey to the viewer/listener?
Is there a direction to this dimensionality? Does it all come from the paper, outwards, or does the cause and effect travel in both directions?
I ask these questions, aware of overlap between them in the phrasing of things, and also that I may never answer them.
The experience of the viewer/listener, in the gallery at the end may effect how I construct things… but it feels too soon to be considering that, and yet it is in there… If you see a sound piece in a gallery that runs for 45 mins, do you stay for 30 seconds and walk out? If it says 3 minutes do you stay to listen to it all. If it is a continuous loop do you treat it differently and just stay as long as the installation holds you? So how much of this produced sound will be actual proper songs?
Should I be bothered? Yes… because another ‘dimension’ here is the mutability of the sound drawing for the viewer/listener. There is the possibility, if they stay in the gallery long enough, that the thread of it stays with them, when they leave, and they find themselves recalling it later…
