I’ve finished a piece, I finished a piece, I’ve actually finished it! And now I can’t stop making, and thinking and wanting to make stuff. ‘Bedtime Stories’ is a collection of stains, some very faint and really quite beautiful, some large, some tiny like the one attached. All from duvets and bedding, edged in the text from a romantic novel ‘The Business of Loving’ part of a series, subscribed to by a woman I barely know. I have her subscription form, her name, address and date. Perhaps I will frame it and display it with the piece.
Looking back at Rob’s ‘A Walk with Cosmo’ (you can’t help but love that blog) I noticed that something I commented on along with a couple of others turned into a mammouth run of 24 comments of which I was totally unaware of. I think Andrew Bryant got the feeling that I was sternly anti MA but just to put the record straight, I am certainly in favour of MA’s at the right time, in the right place for the right reasons. I am just concerned that curators etc. respect an artists integrity to make that choice among many others and judge the work on it’s own merits.
The comment on thinking through making/language etc is something I’ve been mulling over myself recently. In my recent work the making has really become the thinking and through dissecting and remaking, ideas begin to unfold, construct and destruct again, bringing me to an understanding of the subject matter I would never have arrived via another route.
I have always considered my work as quite literary even though I don’t think I have ever brought myself to introduce words of my own. It has often been my intention but I have never quite overcome the fear that once words are introduced the viewers thoughts are tethered down in a way to a particular train of thought. It’s a kind of visual poetry if that’s not too generous a term for it. With written words, a poet can take from the every day and play with words, constructing them in a manner which enables us to view ourselves from a point not possible through everyday language. In a way I think that’s how we operate in a visual sense, drawing from the everyday, combining and constructing the quotidian in a manner which enables us to climb up a hill and view things from a new standpoint.
