25th January ‘I have begun a test piece of scrimshaw on the goose bone bangles. More difficult than I thought. I hope practice makes perfect.
Have set the eyes in the bangles – they look good. I will send photo when I have a second. I have spent the day writing a Q&A interview for the South East Open studios newsletter. More bothersome activity that gets in the way………….’
I also send a fascinating article on Loek Grootjans at S.M.A.K. Museum Gent, Belgium. An exhibition called ‘Leaving Traces’ – it is good to share things I find during the day. 27th January
During our day at the British Museum Rowyda told me of her research into the last of the Beothuk, an extinct race from Newfoundland. Trawling the internet I find a lullaby recorded in 1910 in the now extinct language. I send it on to R.
1st February. I spend the day collecting fishbones on Dungeness beach to try and make nests with them- as you do! I then sit down to think about the project.
R. and I have been discussing how to progress the central concept:‘I hadn’t realised that in writing down what I intended to do to the bones I was also silently telling myself about the woman’s character.
Having something written down has been very disconcerting I have discovered. It as if that first person kept slipping away from me as I worked and someone else took her place!
The bones now speak to me of a woman who was wealthy, powerful, able to instil fear, overtly sexual and very feminine’………………..
I am also now mulling over what I am actually doing by making these imaginary grave goods [belonging to an imaginary woman], from an imaginary culture, that I have ‘put’ into an imaginary museum…………………
The idea of the artwork as a fabricated museum object has a tension – in that we look at both art and museum objects primarily to feel and discover but we also look to the museum object to have a basis in fact.
By putting an artwork into a museum [even an imaginary one] I think I promptly transmutes its aesthetic value- but I am not sure into what.
Similarly the fabricated mythology of the artwork mocks the fact that the genuine museum object will have had other associations which are lost when the object is put into a museum; whereas the artwork has had no previous existence outside the museum………………..
I think we have reached a really interesting [and difficult] bit of this collaboration, namely the character as she lives in my head and as she lives in yours. Who is she to be?
I hadn’t realised that you too were working on making a story for her before you saw the work.
This leaves me with a problem;
Do I offer you the finished work and you respond to that?
Or do I now change it to meet your thoughts?
[If I do the second the work will cease to be imaginary grave goods in an imaginary museum and will become a work in response to a historical culture and deity]……..I still love the idea of uploading your poem onto Youtube/similar so it could be downloaded as an audio guide. Maybe we will have to get to the very end of the project to know if that will have any resonance with your final work. I think it important the two works have a related interface somewhere……….
