“Can the unsettling feelings of rootlessness be conveyed through the subversion of traditional observational drawings?”
I asked this question earlier this year, and it’s written on a bit of paper pinned to my studio wall.
Alongside the phrase “Assembled Utterances”
This blog post popped up when I was looking at my website stats – always interesting to check out and re-read what other people are reading… I’ve often found it provides a useful reminder…
This feels timely… as I am about to embark on a course using Tim Ingold’s Lines as a guiding text. I’m reading that again, or at least dipping in and out to particular relevant chapters, also Correspondences… both of these hold ideas that are helping me to contextualise the different and often seemingly disparate aspects of my practice.
I already feel a winding down happening, and I do feel I need a break. But I have a plan of action in mind for the new year. A need to “stock up” with input to work from. A trip to the School of Art library with my alumni ticket, and a trip to the Lapworth museum of geology with my sketch book.
My brain needs feeding. So I need to observe and document, read and consider…
I need to make some observed utterances before I can assemble them, and I need to assemble them before I can understand what’s going on. I often feel if I just DO the thing in front of me, draw, write, gather information, then gradually things become clearer.
The gathering of things around me adds to the feelings of rootlessness. Until there is a weight of material… to sift through, find connections and lines between, I find a correspondence between what I see and draw and hear and write…
It’s almost like nest building?
Then there’s a settling, things start to make sense again…. A cycle…
