TODAY TODAY TODAY:
I’m giving an artist talk at Modern Art Oxford this afternoon at 3pm in the Project Space. Do come along!
I’m going to describe the processes I’ve been developing in step with this blog and in the context previous work I’ve made, other artists and ideas I’ve been looking at, and the Legacy Fellowship project as a whole.
Places are free but booking is recommended. If you’d like to join us, please book a place here:
A crucial radiator has broken. It’s cold.
Today I did not work on Sunday’s talk. I interviewed florists. Florists shouldn’t officially appear on this blog, they’re part of a separate project. But I can’t help it.
I’m making no attempt at all to think about what the florists might have to do with ‘Keeping Time’ and the ideas that surround it. The florists are for an unrelated commission by an independent London publisher called LemonMelon. In the past commissions have been known to take me far off track and I’ve gradually learned to turn down those that are completely unsuitable for me, and to interpret possibly relevant invitations in ways that allow my practice to develop through (not despite) them. This is one such commission. I was very happy to take it on because it seemed obliquely relevant from the outset, though I didn’t know what direction the work would eventually take.
And the work I’m finally developing from the LemonMelon commission—a book entitled ‘was’—doesn’t evolve from any strands of ideas I’m knowingly working with at the moment (there are no florists in the ‘cloud’ I described in my previous post, for instance). So this is one of those works I feel very much in the dark about, even as I create it. Some pieces of work seem quite clear as I make them; some are completely unknown to me; some balance in between.
I knew largely what interested me about ‘Keeping Time’ before the residency began: it draws upon work I’ve been developing for many years. There have been many unexpected elements along the way, and I couldn’t have predicted the final outcome in advance, but because of the public nature of the residency and the exhibition immediately afterwards, I made sure I had a good sense of the work before I set foot in the Project Space at MAO. The risks came before the residency; the residency itself was more to perfect the form of the work.
But I’m developing the ‘was’ book in the dark, taking the risks along with me as I go. I’m doing the work as it makes sense to me now, and once it’s a finished thing I will look at it as an outsider and see what I can find. I wouldn’t exactly call it ‘intuitive’, but I’m certainly not seeking to tie up loose ends, or even to spot which ends are loose.
It’s helpful to contrast the strategies of ‘Keeping Time’ and ‘was’. It reminds me that however prepared I was before the residency began, and however carefully I honed the visual form of the work, I will still return to ‘Keeping Time’ as an outsider now it’s complete, find loose ends I never knew were there, and see what I can find among them.
This week I’ve been working on the artist talk I’m giving at MAO on Sunday. Each time I set about preparing some kind of talk or presentation about my work I assume it won’t take long to put together – I’ve talked about my work before, I have pictures, I have videos, I have things to say – it won’t take a minute to pick out the right bits, add in the new bits, and queue up the slides.
And each time I realize NO that won’t do. It needs to change each time. It isn’t that the cloud of matter changes substantially between talks (though of course it does change) but rather that every time I broach the cloud it’s from a different position so the trajectory is unfamiliar. Parallels appear between bits I’d never connected before, new tendencies emerge, some bits stop glinting altogether and others beam suggestively. This video, for instance: a year old and for a separate project with the Chisenhale gallery, but suddenly very relevant here too. The more I look at the Chisenhale project the more similarities emerge. Likewise with ‘Doing Words with Things’, my BSL project that happened at RichMix and Tate Britain last year. I’ve been trying to work out how to describe the connections I see between DWwT and ‘Keeping Time’. It’s a good challenge, trying to join these things together coherently without forcing anything.
In this way I find preparing to talk about my work and working process becomes a very important part of my work and working process. It makes me wish I constructed more of these interim evaluations just for myself even if (especially when?) there’s no audience waiting. Is that what we’re doing on the a-n blogs?
Of course, in the end it’s more than just self-evaluation, because of the feedback and comments and conversations that arise around a process like giving a talk, joining a crit or a workshop or writing a blog. One of the points I want to make on Sunday is how helpful I’ve found the Open Studio part of the Project Space residency, and the way it brought in such a breadth of new reference points and perspectives. So I was VERY SAD to discover I’ve had the comments disabled on this blog all this time. I’m worried I’ve been missing out on all kinds of possible conversations, like I’d left the studio door open and marched out of it before anyone could say hello.
A video I made early last year. I had new felt tips.
At last here’s a clip from the final pair of videos. Compared to the draft videos in my earlier posts, here you can see the saturation and contrast are pulled low: I found it shows greater tonality in the ink, and it acknowledges the moving surface of the paper quite evenly without a shadow that distracts. The main thing is that it means the video looks much more similar to the real paper and the original marks of the pen.
Putting up the projectors yesterday and keystoning them against the screens was not fun, and nor was the slowness of editing software before that. I’m inexpert and I don’t enjoy the challenge. What I really want is a way to do this kind of work without the detachment and distraction of putting it on video then getting the video back out onto a flat surface. Maybe I’ll find myself painting, or etching. In the meantime – perhaps an interim measure – I’ve spotted a celluloid film workshop in a couple of weeks and I think I might go along with Stan Brackage in mind.
Two late nights and a show installed.
Tamarin Norwood is an artist and writer. www.tamarinnorwood.co.uk
