Started back at college today and our tutor was talking to our year group about the importance of always having your journal to hand – to capture your thoughts as you think them! She pointed out that by the time you have got to a computer they may have disappeared.
On the way home I was thinking about my proposal for work for the coming year – my thoughts were vivid and clear – but I was driving so couldn’t just jot them down.
I’m going to try and recall them here – it may be a little random – here goes –
I’ve made some large drawings/paintings recently which I originally constructed in the form of a frieze. I highlighted the negative spaces with the addition of black card. The dynamic between the black card, white background and the paint and pastel creates tensions and relationships; and plays with the idea of concealing and revealing histories, of controlling the space/personal story.
This is in the light of my interest in my relationship with my own past, the recall of memories and the truth and lies within family histories – concealing and revealing.
I intend to make more work like this using the black card as a movable element capable of exacting change to the figures, representing the emotional space and dynamics within relationships. I’m interested in the idea of blocking things out and of redirecting a personal narrative – which in turn adapts.
Through this work I’m attempting to pair down the visual information – and playing with the irony that surrounds the emotional power of a simple personal object. Almost like the trace of something being more significant than the object or person itself . Because the trace contains a response – a loss, a longing or perhaps a resentment.
I’m also trying to force my compositions from flowing and pleasing to the eye to awkward and uncomfortable; as a reflection of elements of family relationships and of the difficulties of dealing with the past.
I have been looking at work by Peter Stilwell and Rose Wylie and notice how their use of negative space sits uncomfortably and how I try to re-arrange it in my head into a more flowing state. But their work is made so much more interesting because of this characteristic. I want to explore this idea in my own work.
My smaller collages with tracing paper allow me to play – and make me realise that I need this tactile element in my practice – where I feel that I am ‘making’. Within these collages I want to continue with the theme of creating codes and signs through the repeated use of certain marks and colours. The use of thick pastel outlines, the sun ray halos and the use of highlighter to define certain areas of the body are all developing as ways in which I can express ideas about states of childhood.
All in all – I’m developing visual metaphors to deal with the complexities and intricacies of our relationships with others and the perceptions of our pasts.
