Metaphysics and Memory

The Haden Hill House project ran in several newspapers and was appreciated. It has also been extended till end of October. The feeling of the work been up in the room for so long now gives me the impression that it is becoming part of the fabric of the house, the people in Rachael’s photographs, the places in my drawings. It is possible to feel them alive somehow when the house is quiet at night. The work belongs. It has worked very well, the collaboration, we are keen to start another project at some point, a new place needs to be found with the same interesting dynamics, or even more so. I think it would be good to stretch the power of history further this time, to really get to grips with strong sensations of the mysteries of life. It was a way of showing me that using my drawings in/on other forms was an interesting experiment but that I should stay with them as they are. For Rachael, I think it would be good to develop the potential in her own work away from the usual projects she is involved with, to help her engage with her self to a deeper level. What place will reveal itself will be interesting, I believe that once we start to think about it, it will be evident in its own time. For the time being, this project has become part of the history of the house, as I like to see it anyhow.

Well the exhibition is up, I completed all of the drawings and drawings on objects that I had set out to do and Rachael in the end achieved some very satisfactory and thoughtful photography. I tried three larger drawings with areas of line only to emphasis parts of the pieces and this from looking at the work of Patrick Caulfield, although the stage of experimenting with the drawings stops with this show. I also tried some small works, the detail of the woven pencil is not really possible here.

Rachael’s photographs give the viewer a possible history of the house, taken from her own family, I have been interested in the textures and nostalgic feel to them and maybe this will feed into my drawings. Altogether, I feel that our work ties in very nicely, even though the mediums are apart from one another. We will get together at some point and talk over how and what we have achieved through this collaboration, positive results all round. It would have been nice to have been able to have more time to talk, but with Rachael’s schedule in schools and so on this was difficult. There is an agreement, however, that we did feel what the other was about and was ‘in tune in absence’.

It remains to be seen what feed-back we have, I certainly have had time to try to realise a slightly different approach to a domestic interior, away from my own home and those others more intimately known. It has allowed me to reassess my pevious drawings and how and what to try to feed into them from now on.

Made a visit to Haden Hill House today, the first in a while. I informed Rachael I was paying a visit, she busy with schools at present. With such a misty, damp and dull day, she wondered what the house would be like. However, by the time I had gone up there, the weather had brightened a little and the house was full of children on an educational visit. I took a walk around the grounds for a while before I left, the whole being full of buds and birds and the delicate first signs of new growth beginning. There are trees at Haden Hill so huge they look almost prehistoric. Anyway, the place was welcoming as in summer, the feel of family life apparent and the community involvement still alive.

While there, I spent time looking at the rooms and mirrors, I want to take some reflected drawings again. I think the staircase will be linked quite nicely to the mirror in the kitchen, the feel of servants and family linking both areas of the house.

The undefined, the past allowing the future to flourish, spaces never being finished. These thoughts in my work run over to this project. How I may reflect them through the drawings of the house I am yet to decide, but one element is that the white paper may be exchanged. The past of the house is so long ago, it is more of a challenge to bring in that universal feel to the work, but then maybe the lives of those even so long ago may not have been so different on a personal level. This will no doubt be brought through the idea of the ‘uncanny’ that Rachael speaks of, an idea that has clear indicators for me. Maybe the house has remained in the half-world, or that it remains within it.

I have developed now a clear indication of the ideas that concern me, the collaboration is allowing me the chance to link directly with the thoughts of another. For Rachael, I wonder where the search is taking her? Is she developing her current ideas, or is the project bringing out some new questions that involve self discovery and the exploration of personal memory, and of how to react anew to place? I look forward to talking through this. The question to us all is one based around what it is we are searching for.

The whole process is about digging into the timeline that moves in continuous flux from past to present and I believe that working in the intimate spaces of lives opens up the real possibility to our own life being revealed, it being a constant process of moving through the ‘not quite familiar somehow’ which is, perhaps, the place where the mysterious can reveal itself in the most intimate and intriging ways.

I’ve been away a lot lately. When I visited CAC Malaga in December I saw Tarifa artist, Chema Cobo’s exhibition. It was a great place to be introduced to his work; the old market hall’s massive white-walled rooms create the calmness you need to contemplate his mystifying images.

Amongst my initial impressions was that of the distinct element of the uncanny in Cobo’s work – a theme that clearly runs through Anthony Boswell’s drawings. In Anthony’s drawings of interiors you get the feeling that what you are seeing is intimately familiar to you yet somehow unrecognisable as somewhere you’ve actually been. It’s like a memory you can’t quite place. I had the very same feeling viewing some of Cobo’s paintings.

The following text is taken from the CAC Malaga website:

Chema Cobo’s exhibition ‘is serene in appearance yet full of illusion, tension, hidden messages, secret codes, juggling acts and satire…“Out of Frame” is a selection of 33 artworks done in the last ten years. In them, we find a Chema Cobo who wants to free his work from anything distracting; it is the viewer who must be able and astute enough to discover that things are not what they seem. We are therefore faced with a series of works where order and sense will be provided by visitors themselves…one of Chema Cobo’s main objectives was to free his work from colour and any other superfluous element, thus making it more mystifying, sophisticated and intellectual. For him, grey tones and luminosity allow us to get to the essence of things; the “Technicolor” of daily life makes everything frivolous; it gives us a vision of reality devoid of nuance.’

Cobo certainly achieves his goal of forcing the viewer to “discover” meanings and messages in his work; my friends and I all read narratives peculiar to us in the different works we saw. To one person a certain painting conjured maybe one, two or a myriad of ideas, emotions, scenes and moments, to another the same image was one big meaningless blank.

For me, a narrative only took place when I experienced the uncanny in the painting, when I feel like I’m looking at snapshot of one of my own memories or moments. I do not know if this was the same for my friends but each of us had very different ideas about which paintings evoked some kind of response and our responses widely differed too.

This brings me to wonder about the way metaphysics (if this is indeed what is at play in Cobo’s work) and memory work. Maybe one has to be a certain kind of person with a certain set of experiences committed to memory and ready to access in order to have a metaphysical connection with Cobo’s art, to make sense of what we see. Or, to stay with Freud, maybe some people are less receptive to the triggers in Cobo’s art, maybe they repress emotional, uncertain and uncanny thoughts and feelings. Maybe I’m reading too much into the whole experience and the fact is that some of his paintings just don’t work but I have to say that I found his work fascinating. My friends did not. Maybe Anthony and I will suffer the same responses (or lack of!) to our Metaphysics and Memory project and discover that what we think is a fascinating journey through the corridors of the mind to get to the essence of things is actually an elaborate exercise in the art of claptrap. I hope not!