I sometimes feel exhausted by all the ideas I have for the work I want to make. I felt like that today. Having so much focused time to ruminate and reflect on what I’m making has caused a huge outburst of creative thinking. This is great, but I’m working to a very tight schedule (just five working days left after today) and there’s no way I can develop all of the ideas I have. I spent some time this morning looking at what I’ve made so far, which at that point was visual research, exploratory drawings and some speculative experiments with materials. To spare my sanity I’ve decided to be realistic with the time I have, to make comprehensive notes about what I’m thinking of doing but probably can’t in the time, and to not let myself worry about ‘finished’ outcomes.
Much of what I’ve done so far on the residency (today is only day three) have been rudimentary explorations of the physical environment, finding interesting features to respond to while in the space. One of my aims now is that all the work I make will be diagnostic in nature. If I had longer in the Centre for Drawing I would like to collaborate with some other academic departments and technical support staff to make fully resolved pieces of work, but today I’ve decided that the residency is offering me some rare concentrated development time and I’ll be best served by continuing to test and evaluate my ideas.
As of today I’m now concentrating on two distinct lines of enquiry (although this doesn’t mean that they won’t develop into other things). Firstly, I’ll continue to develop the monochromatic line drawings of disrupted architectural features. Today I made two more drawings in black acrylic on paper. They are visually simple but have a reductive quality that I enjoy and I think could be developed further, if only after the residency. I also started to recreate one of the large disrupted line drawings from my sketchbook on the wall of the CfD Project Space using thin black cord, stretched and held in place with black mapping pins. This is still in progress, I will hopefully finish it tomorrow. I have worked with stretched yarn before to create lines in space, but this feels like a more controlled use of the material. It felt good to work outside of my sketchbook, actually engaging with the room itself. Hopefully the bright sunlight will return to the room soon, introducing some shadows into the space between the cord and the white wall. My second area of investigation is also inspired by the light in the space (which incidentally, and rather annoyingly, I now haven’t seen for two days). Using yesterday’s investigation of folded reflective papers and card as a starting point, today I made some drawings from the folded structures, exploring line and form. I feel that there’s much left to develop with these pieces – scale, materials, colour – too much to do in the time I have left at the Centre for Drawing. At the point at which I finished work today I was feeling exhausted by all my ideas again *sigh*.
