I feel as if my work is all about discovery at the moment, I’m learning a lot about the different materials that I’m using; their limitations and possibilities. I have only a certain degree of control over the materials. I am to a certain extent initiating the interplay between materials but then standing back and allowing chance happenings to occur. Dropping the ink onto the water saturated surface and then watching as it disperses and follows the form and direction of the water.
Drawing or markmaking can express what language cannot. As Heiner Bastian says in relation to Cy Twombley’s drawings:
“No artist has in his work, as radically as Cy Twombley, substituted language for an expression that suspends and interrupts the discourse, the rhetoric of occidental culture. Twombley insists on the transparency of the most transient of all forms, the state of conception and comprehension, when the form itselfis the untranslatable event.”
I’ve been experimenting with ceramic surfaces using different stains and slips and I’ve been trying to set up a similar interface to the ink and paper drawings. I’ve had varying results so far. I’ve liked the qualities that I’ve achieved with the pieces where I’ve applied a thick brush stoke of slip and then applied a mocha stain over this. The stain bleeds into all of the feathery lines left by the mark of the brush on the slip.
I’m currently reading about phenomenology as I’m going to write my first essay on this particular position. I think the idea that metaphor can contribute to perception and the creation of meaning is a really interesting one. I’ve been examining Clare Twomey’s pieces as I’m going to examine them through phenomenology. The interaction between the artworks and the audience and her response to the gallery space is fascinating.
I have realised that I need to set myself an agenda for my days in uni if I am going to achieve anything. I need to organise myself better. Perhaps giving myself a script to follow, or timing myself would help?
It had been my intention and it still is my intention to set up an interface between drawing and ceramic materials and surfaces. I didn’t realise how important the drawings were going to become to me. They’re entities in their own right now, they have a certain independence, which has surprised me. Perhaps a continuing translation and retranslation of different materials will make me more informed of my visual language and how I choose to express it.
I need to carry on being explorative with materials and not rush into final outcomes before I even begin to investigate the potential of the materials that I’m working with. After my group tutorial I realised that my work in clay needed to express more of the qualities that I had achieved through my drawings and work on paper. I need to be more conscious of why I am choosing different materials.
I had a really interesting lecture from Tavs Jorgenson about 2 weeks ago. He’s a research fellow at Falmouth and is involved with autonomatic research there. I was really fascinated by the digital drawings that he had done by using a data glove to capture the motion of his hand. Even though it was using technology it was almost a truer line than one you would make with a pencil or paintbrush.
I’ve got quite a few different strands of my work that I want to explore. I want to investigate how I can use colour to create movement or how I can distort an image or mark by my use of colour. Some of the groupings that I’ve put together of my marks are almost reminiscent of DNA type structures or code. When I inverted some of my drawings they had an almost etheral quality like they were floating in mid air. I’m approaching my work on paper in a very empirical manner and I’m going to take the same approach to the work I’m starting with ceramic materials.
I’m really enjoying reading the material for my theory lectures, even though some of it is not easy. It’s helping my to develop more of a theoretical framework, so I can talk about my work within this context in a more articulate and informed manner.
Paul Crowther says in ‘Art and Embodiment’ that:
“the experience of an artwork can bring a unique reflective awareness of the nature of the human condition itself. This moving revelation and celebration of the enigma of embodied consciousness is what I shall call emphatic experience. In a sense it marks the logical extreme of all human self-awareness, in that the only way beyond it is to invoke communion with a transcendental reality, i.e. religious experience.”
This sums up for me the kind of experience that I think is important for the viewer when encountering a work of art.
