Being a multi-form artist is a challenge. It’s also the MOST satisfying development in my creative career. Before branching out as a research based artist, working on themes of exile in my on-going post memory project, I was an abstract painter, concerned with colour and form. This passion has resurfaced in the painting side of my practice recently, where colour is again re-emerging as a concern along with texture.
My period suitcase obsession fuels these painterly explorations and my studio time is spent layering, sanding, applying textural mediums and reworking. It’s the most joyful struggle to bring a painting home, as it were. To complete it. To bring something into being that (for now) is the best it can be, is both compulsion and pleasure. I’m echoing the traces of history on the suitcase surfaces, transmitting memory, capturing it for other’s to see. This give me purpose and spurs me on.
Video work sometimes takes over and I usually get on a roll, pushing ideas this way and that, producing a flurry of filmlets. By this means I also increase my recently developed skill – though I could probably do with training and better equipment. Yet something tells me I have to learn this my way as my learning style is generally auto-didactic and a certain obsessionality allows me to overcome technical barriers little by little.
But I’m not in video mode right now. The studio is cold these days, the light is poor and my mind is elsewhere. I’m pretty focused on painting. Choosing off-cut boards from the local building merchant fits my practice perfectly. Improvisation is a core feature of everything I do, and I love to find surfaces that can suggest themselves to me. They’re often quirky, and rarely are two the same, though you can always find familial relationships between off-cuts. Some come from the same batch of board, or have similar proportions, but each is usually unique. I’m working with the idea of the painted sketch too – when the surface feels more provisional – and looking forward to exhibiting these process pieces.
So I ‘ve been painting, but I’ve also been developing a performance piece for the, School of Modern Languages and Cultures Research Forum, at Bangor University. Performance is actually the least developed form in my artistic practice to date. It takes me a long time to build up to performance, and I need a specific reason to create one, like the wonderful invitations I’ve had to perform in academic contexts particularly, where my work ties in with an area of study or a theme. Each invitation provides an opportunity to work on a new piece and gain a sense of what performance means for me.
There’s also crossover, where video work becomes performance too. This is starting to happen as I explore my neurological status and push forward into new territory. Actually art performance is a perfect medium for someone like me. I’ve suffered all my life with paralysing stage fright – I now understand that this is born of neurological difference and wholly to do with the need for a coherence in verbal language on command, which is a genuine biological block – brain can’t do. Difficulty with working memory and word retrieval in the moment, create a real barrier to conventional performance, but I’ve found that performance based on the symbolic visual act (particularly when manipulating objects) comes naturally to me. This is the language I’ve been waiting for and now I relish exploring it’s parameters when given the opportunity. Though I select my performance spaces carefully. My work is so intimate that spaces must nurture.
So my performance for Bangor digs deep into my post memory research, and deep into some of the more painful aspects of my family history. I will be referencing this obliquely, as the thrust of the piece is a more general meditation on exile, which spans over time from 1939 -2015, to encompass the current refugee crisis. The title of my piece, The Sadness of Being Nothing, refers to displacement; a silencing, a becoming invisible to birth culture, an expulsion from it’s history.
It’s about journey and it’s weight, journey and it’s traces.
I will be creating an action with a suitcase filled with symbolic objects. I’m not sure yet whether I will create a shrine, as I usually do. My intention is always to transform experience, speak to history and attempt ritual healing. This time it feels a little different and I may need to leave the piece more open, but that’s one of the interesting things about live performance when your spirit is one of improvisation. You never know exactly what you’ll do.
It’s a brilliant feeling when all the elements that make up your practice start to come together in your own mind, so that given space and opportunity I can foresee how the painted elements I include in my assemblage pieces, and as backcloths to my videos can also become part of the performance space. So that studio, installation and performance spaces become in this way pure extensions of my own particular universe of symbolic creation. Bring it on!
