Managed to catch 2 things on the radio that I enjoyed today; John Gray on Radio 4’s A point of view, talking about J G Ballard and memory and Tacita Dean on Radio 3’s Private Passions; John Gray was before taking the dogs out and Tacita Dean was on the way back! I don’t normally have dogs – usually just one, but it’s my turn to return a favour.
Spent most of yesterday in Whitstable for the launch of Nicole Mollet’s Atlas of Kent – an alternative map of Kent produced as a result of travelling around Kent with the Kent Cultural Baton http://www.kentculturalbaton.com/ – followed by the launch of the Whitstable Biennale http://www.whitstablebiennale.com/ Also took part in Jane Pitt’s Sonic Flash Mob project, which is part of the Satellite programme. Had, of course several conversations but one thing that sticks in my mind was the discussion around the often underestimated fact that one’s audience includes to a large part other artists. Yes we make work for “the general public”, include the public in our projects and talk alot about increasing access and opening up opportunities, but the public is not just some amorphous mass , it includes friends – artist friends and non-artists friends and other artists and arts professionals who may or may not become friends.
My recent work has been selected for “The Meeting Room” at the Kaleidoscope Gallery, Sevenoaks from 27 September to 17 November. Really pleased and quite excited too as I will be in a show with fellow DAD director, Joanna Jones, whose work i really like. The brief for the show was to consider the relationship between the mind and body, between consciousness and the physicality of the human brain. I ummed and ahed for a bit as to whether my work fitted the brief and then decided that actually it could. When I draw I might be thinking consciously about something I’ve read or what someone has said – but what comes out in the work are marks, a record of how I as subject touch the world back, after it has touched me.
The drawings start with a sort of hunch, an impulse that “this might work”. Each mark gives rise to another mark in response. It is as if the drawings create space for the ebb and flow of sensations and impulses, for memory to do its work: the past inserting itself into the present.[1]
[1] cf. Bergson, H. Matter and Memory, Dover Philosophical classics, 2004 (originally published London: G Allen & Co. 1912)
