I have recently made more of the sort of drawings that initially interested me when I started sculpture. I also want to talk about my recent assessment and about how question rather than suggestion is more helpful in pushing work forward.
I showed some drawings that I subsequently decided I didn’t like. They seemed to be all about surface. Tony Cragg said that drawing should be about the ‘avoidance of the expert, the articulate, the known and the humourless’. With this in mind I have been studying objects by drawing them. I feel that what I have produced is more genuine because it relates to the study of form which, in turn, propels the imagination of possibilities. The process is one of tentative exploration.
I have also been taking inspiration from an essay by Rungwe Kingdon on sculptors’ drawings and about how drawings can ‘vary enormously from their three-dimensional work’. This was interesting as I had been concerned that my drawing was not related visually to my sculpture. A good example of this is the work of Bryan Kneale whose anatomical drawings ‘look’ very unlike his sculpture. While drawing he is studying form that exists due to function, and this has to be of great interest to a sculptor. Knowledge learnt through studying form can provide the basis for a wide range of interpretation.
During a recent tutorial a number of suggestions were made. Later I realised that if I followed them through the work would not be truly mine. Advice that I gained from my assessment was that everyone would have different questions and answers in response to my work and that I should question their answers. When the work is answering to my questions and my answers then ownership will be indisputable.
I think my work in the near future should try to more demonstrably describe the search process rather than show a superficial surface.
