Over the course of our collaboration we’ll each be posing ongoing questions to each other that relate to our work, individual and collaborative. Firstly Sarah Laing responds to three quesions I asked her after our first meeting.
Q.1 Please outline your thoughts and where you’re at with what you currently imaging making and thinking about as part of the New Collaboration Bursary.
During my first visit to Islay, the biggest challenge was trying not to sightsee and to get over how beautiful the whole island was to focus on the specific. My immediate reaction to what I saw on our hikes is to churn out small drawings and produce as much information for myself as possible in the studio. I am thinking we work in similar ways in that we choose a subject, isolate it (from colour and/or situation and/or name) and break it down through descriptions from our own perspective. Once it’s simplified in this way, represented through drawing or sound, a new, abstracted, complex subject has been created. I am thinking a lot about why we were drawn to what we were:
· objects that are normal to find on an everyday walk, but in one location appear displaced
· objects that are in their natural environment but sitting in an unusual way
· objects that are man-made set into space or where a human has rearranged things. Then Nature has accepted and integrated this new arrangement into the environment.
I am making small drawings from the many photographs we took: mainly Dune-Faces and rock surface studies. I am thinking up ways to replicate objects we found on a mass scale through tracing and mould making.
Q.2 Can you tell me of any methodology that you used when choosing objects or routes you found on Islay? How do you think this way of selecting images or objects will feed into the work you aim to produce?
When we were walking we chose accessible routes to follow. I had never been to the island before so we followed routes you had travelled and looked for things you hadn’t previously been able to get to. When travelling, and in your case re-travelling, we would stop at places you may have not found interesting before, but I thought were worth looking at and we also discovered new things that had changed since you were last there.
When choosing subject matter for drawing, I tend to draw from the landscape and avoid man-made objects, people and animals. I look for subjects in their natural environment that might be sitting or acting differently than they normally would there. I look for the unrecognisable in recognisable forms, or ways of isolating parts of a form to create anthropomorphism, multiple things happening in one thing, something that is in the process of becoming something else, a curiosity or a curious relationship.
Q.3 You’ve previously worked with scale when creating drawing based works. Can you share how focusing on the small, everyday and mundane objects may affect how you work with and will interpret scale for the New Collaboration Bursary project?
I focus on objects to the extent where I focus on the parts that make up the object, taking a small sample or a cross-section. The hardest thing about capturing landscape with photography is showing how large everything is, how vast it feels, its context and the space it takes up. By focusing on the tiny parts and details that make up that object you can present a feeling of magnitude by describing how much information there is on a very small scale. You can draw off the page and suggest endlessness, you can remove colour and contrast by placing all the drawings on an even playing field and forcing attention on every small part. I think one thing that comes from focusing on the tiny parts of an object is that by giving a very detailed account of a little piece of a subject you can make a suggestion of how vast and indescribable the whole subject is. This is where I am at right now in regards to beginning to use and interpret scale for the New Collaboration Bursary project.
