Drawing demons

The ethereal nature of the figures allows them to interact with any environment and immediatley I got the sense of a ‘haunting’ from the pictures.  This to me is not a ghost, but more a representation of my own inner child trying to gain attention.  It reminded me of a repetative dream I had some time ago – a child hiding in my wardrobe, lights that would not function and christening gowns floating at the top of the stairs.  Terrifying to experience but points to a need to acknowledge and begin to deal with long buried issues.

The process of making the work, a continuous extruded line of plastic, is a product of the mind being allowed to wander and the quality of line is affected by the direction and speed of the movement.  It is like writing without using words.  In a very real sense, the work is made up of my thought processes and feelings – harsh straight logical lines, curved more emotive marks and lines that work over previous marks like the process of overthinking issues.

The following link is a short video of the process.

https://youtu.be/7GPc7whb6aI

I began to think about producing a full scale installation of a domestic environment that the viewer could actually inhabit.  To test the validity of the material I produced a dining chair using the same method.  The trick with this is to leave parts of the sculpture open and disconnected in order to be able to remove it from the chair.

The results are very encouraging and will be moving on to doorways and walls soon.

During a particularly foggy day at the studio, I took the chair into the field to photograph.  I was hoping for some haunting, unusual imagery and was not disapointed.

After reviewing the images one in particular stood out to me.  Your presence lingers 2017 is a tribute to a friend who recently passed away.  He worked these very fields for many years and was also an accomplished carpenter – making some high quality oak furniture some of which I have the honour of owning.  It made sense that the ethereal chair sculpture represented his presence and though the image is somewhat sad, it also brings a sense of intimacy at odds with the landscape.

Along with this I am currently reproducing the child figure to produce a larger scaled sculpture/installation.  Though the figure has the same source, I endeavour to keep them unique through utilising a random drawing pattern and diversifying the sections of the figure used.

The family of demons will only get larger!!

As good progress is being made (6 of 8 figures complete) on the figurative installation I am producing for #FluxExhibition 2017, this entry will focus on production drawings to expand the project.

The intention of this work is to produce pieces that describe anxiety and depression.  To this end I have been making drawings of the technique used to produce the figures, as design ideas to make works using ceramic techniques.

These drawings were produced by loosely describing the form using the same motion as with the 3d pen.  Using traditional drawing pens I completed the drawing using a humble scribble motion to make simple areas of tone which give the image a more 3D feel.

The images are produced firstly in a random fashion, then control to render the shape and finally a combination of random and controlled.  Controlled chaos are the words that came to mind during production.  These words accurately describe my struggle with mental illness – a cycle of chaotic thoughts followed by attempts to reign them in.

The drawings are also reminiscent of symbols or even characters in a written language (mandarin for example).  Producing 26 seperate images in this respect would give me an alphabet which could lead to some exciting abstract text based work.

The next stage however is to make these forms in ceramic which is a subject for another entry.