I’m going to give myself an hour to write here today. I risk Elena’s wrath if I don’t keep up; besides, work is rather exciting at present and this always helps to clarify my thinking.
I’m in the middle of my exam week at school, so surrounded by creativity on an intense scale for at least three hours a day. Young minds bringing together their research in one final piece that celebrates their youth and enthusiasm.
I’ve been constructing my sketchbook. Work and ideas were getting out of control and some order needed reestablishing. I enjoy making books. Looking back, planning forward… I enjoy constructing… de-constructing.
My terminology has changed. “Pixel” has been substituted for “Code” as the work finds certainty in the path I’m now pursuing… the science of photons, protons, and protein’s now guides my direction, fused with Mayan hieroglyphs, barcodes and virus’… it’s the building blocks of matter that now interest me… DNA…
I can match colour to science… to our human makeup… and am generating links to what I perceive to be inherent patterns or codes of life. Like the Pythagoras Tree, there appears to be some sort of mathematical order behind things. It’s these patterns that fuel my investigations… I’m deconstructing order and the real question now becomes about what that leads to?
Elena insists that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, but I guess I’m at the other end of that consensus. I’m finding real beauty in the things that we can’t see, are so miniscule that they go by unnoticed yet underpin our very existence. I feel like I’ve been oblivious… blinded to… a whole other set of worlds that pre-exist my existence yet somehow magically make sense of it.
Elena has injured her hand.
It has been suggested that perhaps we should swop roles… that I should attempt to sew… the presumption being I suppose, that as a male, I can’t! (Goad).
I can… kind of anyway. I had a good education…
Strangely enough, a while back I booked myself onto a course at the National Centre for Craft and Design in Sleaford, (a fantastic exhibition space from which I regularly draw loads of inspiration, and well worth a visit if you’ve never been), with Michael Brennand-Wood, entitled “Subtraction. Erasure. Conjecture”. It takes place this weekend and I can’t wait. Two days of making art with a leading artist who works around physical and conceptual deconstruction with a diverse set of materials… the missing ingredient… the next step forward… the learning…
I’ll be able to collage alongside paint… progress new materials into the work… represent in a original, vibrant way… move my practice forward – which for me of course, is the whole purpose of this – and then discuss and blend freshness with Elena’s stitching, perhaps even bring our work together again…
My hour of luxury is up…
