THE SEA (THE ARTIST) THE WRITER (THE SEA).
I have this art writer friend who lives in London, she’s originally from Surrey and likes Iris Murdoch novels. We once took a walk through the park opposite the ICA together talking about literary references to art. It was invigorating and summery. For a while now, well since she wrote an accompanying text to my first exhibition in Leeds back in 2008, she has said she would like to make the transition from being a writer in to being an artist – I contacted her a few months ago via email to say that my practice as an artist is taking hold of a writing practice also. Its as if we were engendered to meet in the middle.
One way that writing meets visual practice is through interview. So I proposed to my friend that we both interview each other at the same time via email. That way an artist is writing and asking questions of a writer and the writer is writing and asking questions of the artist:
As an artist, what is your attitude to the idea of ‘permanence’?
I want to begin with an artist statement:
“My practice feeds off the placement of idea-based conversation, site-specificity, documentation, research and their relationship to drawing and writing. These then engage with the definition and presentation of art making using curation, photography, projection, performance and object association. A foremost concern is to deal with the connection between artist and audience and the underlying task of conservation embedded in art practice. In this, drawing and writing are used as forms of initiating, collating and recording ideas.”
When I think of permanence I think of how often they way I write about my work changes. And how the work I produce is defined perhaps by the short concise piece of language and grammar squeezed in to a paragraph.
Permanent is not something an artist should be nor aspire to be as far as their practice goes – but I suppose another way of looking at things is how artists exist permanently through self-conservation – archives – documentation etc. And my work does deal with documentation quite a lot…
I suppose there are two edges to the sword then…
Do you think this interview via email is organic? Are we talking at each other rather than to each other? Is that important?
I do not think that we are talking to one another or at each other. We are leaving notes for each other – we’re playing chess with words and awaiting replies together. That’s how I see it. I do a lot of interviewing other artists via email and I think it does seem to work as often, visual people do need time to consider their response if their writing it down. So in this sense, I suppose it is less organic and more engineered…
One thing I will say though is that with my blogging and the writing I often post along side images – is more so organic and also automatic. I type, edit slightly, post, publish and then erase the actual text off my computer – it exists in the organism of the Internet instead, which I also see as an archive.
