Sibling exchanges

The project lurched through a tumultuous final few weeks before the exhibition was scheduled to start. The holiday period over Christmas and New Year with children and other family around cut into the time available for the final exchanges, and we positively sprinted towards 1 February.

It was interesting to see how the visual language developed during the last couple of exchanges. For my part, it was quite literally impossible to spend the time I like on preliminary drawing and exploring. I went straight in to my responses, collaging, sticking, scribbling in haste. I used spray enamel paint, household paint, wire mesh, anything to cover ground quickly. I found myself using unadulterated raw colour: powder pink, acid green, unmodulated in any way. I loved this phase. I wanted the last word, but i didn’t get it. I somehow knew my sister would do whatever it took to have the final visual say, which is why I think there is potential for continuing the conversation after the current exhibition. All conversations have their rhythms, their pauses, their silences, and this one is no exception. In one sense, it cannot finish until one of us is no longer there to continue it.

We had a fair few debates before the show. Whilst I was very reluctant to ‘talk’ about the works themselves during the period of the project, we clearly had to talk about the show, and resolving issues such as publicity wording, labelling, artists’ statements and invite design was not always straightforward.

The final hurdle was the hanging. My nightmare scenario was one of wanting to edit out for aesthetic reasons, but being unable to edit out in terms of the whole process and rationale for the exchange. I didn’t like the idea of ‘gaps’. So I was relieved that visually it all ‘worked’. We had sufficient space to give potentially conflicting yet consecutive works their place, and I was pleased with the final look of the gallery.

If you would like to see the final works, these will be available for viewing on my Life and Art blog: www.gilliansblog.wordpress.com. or copy and paste this link http://bit.ly/hJ7lf6. I have also posted my sister’s comments on the process and experience. I would like to do a further blog entry on the discussions we eventually had on the actual artwork, and the process of responding.

Action | Reaction: A Visual Conversation is on at the G2 gallery in Solihull Arts Complex until 12 February 2011.

It has been a while since I posted on this project: the nature of the exchange process means once the image has winged its way across cyberspace to my sister, I forget about it all until her response hits my email inbox. This is a novelty for me. Normally I am consumed by ongoing projects and find it difficult to let go.

Three days ago I recieved the latest response. The conversation is taking shape. I had no idea at the beginning how it would evolve, and how the works would relate, and it is fascinating to see the ongoing references and quotations beginning to make their presence felt.

I was unsettled at the beginning, and nervous about opening the initial responses. My underlying fear was of not liking what I saw, or not thinking it good: I realised I didn’t want to “not like’ her work because this might infiltrate my own response and I didn’t want it to be critical- but I did not want to feel I was censoring my reaction. In actual fact though, liking/not liking/judging has become irrelevant because I am more fascinated by the underlying content of each piece, and this aspect becomes the basis of my response.

This is an encouraging revelation for my wider practice. The discovery that I can happily be inspired to use any piece as a platform for my own work has opened up some exciting possibilities for more collaborative work, a couple of which I am actively pursuing.

Well, I’m off painting my second response.

I was quite nervous opening the package containing my sister’s first response piece. What if I hated it? What if I was annoyed by it? How would I be able to articulate my thoughts?

in fact, I was interested by the work, and it provoked me in a positive way. I hadn’t really had a clear expectation, but I was pleased that I hadn’t anticipated the form of her response. I was excited to think that ANYTHING was possible in the framing of my reply. So much of my recent work has been digitally generated, but my immediate desire was to slop paint around; to have a physical wrestling match with real materials, to make something, break it, make it again, with all the history and traces evident in the piece and not buried invisibly under a layer of pixels.

And so I have taken myself into the studio, have prepared boards, and have engaged with two surfaces with a very open mind. Each time I work on the piece will reflect how I feel about this most recent visual exchange at that precise moment. I have done some preliminary drawings, but I am not working from these. The important thing is to move forward with the reply as honestly as I can, and listen to my instincts.

My sister is, I think, struggling with the lack of verbal dialogue. She wants to talk about what she is doing with anyone who cares to listen. In contrast, I’m in a sort of hibernation. I will be interested in responses of others at a later stage, but for now it is all a work in progress where I don’t feel I want input from anyone else. Only I can articulate my response, and I feel the works will need to be viewed in their wider context for anyone else to be able to meaningfully respond.

So the first response has been done and sent. Created digitally, and sent by e-mail, so it only exists in a virtual sense, but that won’t be obvious to my sister. The apps I used to create the piece did not allow for movement or editing of text, and so I was forced to digitally “Tippex” mistakes, and edit with conventional-looking proofreader’s marks. Paradoxically, it looks more ‘real’ than an actually printed perfect piece of word processing.

At the start of the project, we had talked about how to work towards a coherent joint exhibition, but I hated the idea of working to a theme as a way of achieving this. This reaction is fallout from years of risk-averse, goal-orientated and highly focused legal practice. It took a good while to get rid of that mindset. I love the fact that my work now starts with a ‘something’ with no idea at all of where it might lead, and how it might be developed. But even though I rejected a joint theme, my first response was ironically about clarifying the constraints of process I would work with.

I find it fascinating that psychologically, the idea of a themed goal for me feels restrictive, whilst actual ongoing process constraints (such timings and modes of response etc.,) prompt an exhilirating feeling of open-ended creativity.

I anticipate an underlying tension developing throughout this joint work. We have agreed not to discuss the artwork save through our responses, but we both tend to read between the lines the whole time when we talk to each other, and so it is inevtiable, I think, that we will be reading possibly far to much into everything we send each other. The author may be dead in a postmodern sense, but we have too much shared history to be free of the other as author.