To engage with a practice that confronts problems can be problematic, but it also produces possibility: this comes from re-assessing understandings and concepts that come from the things I have learned and characteristics I have attained… things familial.
Many projects to date have been self-funded by scraping the barrel: I see this as pertinent to how I work fitting with my work ethic. Being at the tail end of a now “better off” working class family, the word resourcefulness was driven in to me as was the not so healthy practice of holding on to one’s thoughts, remaining proud but also quite unprepared. Thank goodness for resourcefulness and the ability to be experimental whilst unprepared.
A family of hairdressers and business degree graduates in the end produced an artist wanting to pursue his ‘career’, but to that I have phone conversations asking, “When will you get a job that earns you money?” I see my father less than I would like, whilst greying he holds on to less of his thoughts than ever before. I often think about where I get my creativity, is it handed down along with the grey hair gene? Does the fact that my father says he was “always good at technical drawing” – something he let slip not long ago – mean I somehow attained a knack for putting pencil to paper? I also sometimes think, “Why don’t I just become a hair dresser it’ll earn me money” As earning money was always presented as something essential in producing consolidation I’m standing by that inherited resourcefulness:
Finding my practice then, is a process that happens with the things I already have or things easily attained (things reminding me of my father’s garage). I then utilise a process driven activity to re-configure such materials (re-organising the garage…) rendering a practice that is more about notions of discourse, the problems of language and understanding, using words and objects, their descriptions and states: it is relatively open ended and non-problematic.
What is problematic is the nature of exhibition. My artistic concerns extend to the application of a work or series of works to visually communicable scenarios; they confront inherent problems and thus possibilities, using presentation as a medium. Working site-specifically is in some ways easier as I adapt myself to various spaces and intricacies. However what lies within this is the difficulty in having an overriding statement on what the work is about. What I do seems to be defined by the different projects I complete, by the certain places in which I intervene. I often think that in order to somehow consolidate the work that I produce I should do an MFA: in this I would hope that congregating with others in an institutional environment would make things clearer… or better placed.
But first I guess comes money before any such consolidation: meanwhile I can rely on my knack for technical drawing, solve problems by cleaning out and exploring a garage or two…
