The Cultural Tourist

My, where has time gone? It is something that seems to stretch in front of you full of opportunity and potential and then collapses and amalgamates behind you, becoming blurred and unrecognisable. I haven’t written a blog for ages. Can’t say why, don’t know why. It’s too easy to say there has been too much going on. Yes, there has, but that has never stopped me before. One thing for sure, is that I haven’t been in the studio much and that can have something to do with it. Anyway, I am back now and look forward to long summer days of musing and creating.

I have been working on some insect pieces; a moth, woodlice and a snail. This is following on from my other garden creature series using paint and collage. I continue to explore the idea of interconnection between man and nature, the sharing of space, the blurring of boundaries, how these everyday creatures float in out of our consciousness and how in turn there is a mystery surrounding how other creatures might perceive us.

With these pieces I am trying to portray this idea of creation and disintegration, juxtaposition and interconnection, the ebb and flow between the real and the imaginary, form and abstraction, absence and presence.

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I am currently working towards an exhibition with an artist friend. It will be held in CornerHouse – a community arts centre in Tolworth and I am grateful for the opportunity to have something focused to work towards. Our exhibition will be called ‘Reimagining the Domestic’ and we have chosen this title as the exhibition explores our individual imaginings of the ordinary  and everyday such as objects and scenes in our urban environment whether that be within our homes or outside in the street.

I plan to install previous work I have made – my garden series, a few urban street explorations, possibly my garden animal collages – we shall see. I am also making some new work based on photographs I have used before; small scenes I have captured and montaged into an overall feeling, such as the reflections of a plant in a pool of water seen on the lid of an outside bin, merged with berry stains on the ground or camellias that have fallen from an overgrown bush onto the pavement reminding me of the New Zealand pohutakawas flower of my childhood.

These are just small works – they are small memories but they remain inside of me; ethereal and haunting.

Sometimes it is just hard to focus. Trying to experiment and develop feels like the hardest thing to do as pressures, emotions, and other commitments block and scrambles one’s progress. I don’t feel inspired, I don’t feel driven. It is all I can do to get myself to my studio in the first instance.

But it does help to just get there.

This is always a particularly busy time of year anyway. My other work in the Theatre industry is full-on (and given the last couple of years with Covid, for that I am thankful). Family stuff is full-on too and unfortunately much of it, not in a good way. Again, this is where I am glad to be busy. So I schedule my studio time. I actually open up my electronic calendar and optimistically type it in on the days and times I might be free. It helps give it importance. It helps me balance things. I might not have a clue when I get there as to what I will be working on that day but so be it. At the very least I can stretch a canvas, prime a surface or even just tidy a corner.

It helps me breathe.

The piece displayed is a work in progress – painting and collage. It is one of a series of works that explores human’s connection with the natural world, specifically garden wildlife and how it oscillates between the edge of consciousness and reality.

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Unlike the title of the book by Julian Barnes, there is no sense of an ending. I am still inspired by the research I did as part of my Masters of Research in Art: Theory and Philosophy where my final dissertation looked into the tropes and mechanisms associated with ideas of the fragment within modern literature and modernity. As part of this one of the reoccurring themes was the idea of a fragment as never being fixed but being ever-changing and continually being influenced and in turn influencing all that it comes into contact with.

Such ideas are commonly associated with human-kind’s detrimental effect on the natural world. In respect to climate change and the extinction risk to many species of flora and fauna, it is well known that this clearly has a knock-on effect on the survival of mankind and the planet as a whole.

But there are more subtle connections that are becoming more and more prominent such as the positive effect on mental and physical health of humans being at one with nature. Is it possible that other animals and plants can sometimes feel the benefit of human-kind? We are just another creature that inhabits the world as they do, intercepting their space and interconnecting in ways that we cannot even imagine. That moment of connection is fluid, malleable; forever transforming and impossible to pin down.

‘We operate between the lines, the fragments and fissures, the detail and the signifiers, between the body and its senses and these invisible strands of connection…’ (Masterton F, 2021, p 51)

Following on from my August blog where I talk about the edge of my everyday consciousness and imagination and the birds that visit my garden, I have been trying to make a series of artworks that reflect this idea of the unfinished but interconnectedness of nature with humankind. The 2 works displayed are in themselves incomplete and whilst I will be doing a lot more work on the orange ‘Robin’ piece, it will deliberately not be resolved.

‘I have tried to portray an interconnected drift between content, time, matter, thought, what I imagine and my own reality’ ( Masterton F, 2021, p 50).

Reference:
(Masterton F, 2021, ‘My Grandmother’s Plait) – to read contact CSM Museum and Study Collection. https://www.arts.ac.uk/colleges/central-saint-martins/about-us/museum-and-study-collection

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I have recently started on a new series of works, somewhat larger than normal and inspired by my previous doodlings of strange insect like creatures and also my garden series. It is at a very early stage but it will be a mixture of collage, painting and drawing, focusing on some of the birds and other wildlife that I see every day through my kitchen windows.

As I sip my coffee in the morning I easily become transfixed by the wildlife that pays a visit to the garden. This includes foxes, squirrels, the odd neighbourhood cat and a myriad of birds. There have been a pair of magpies that have taken up residence and certainly dominate the garden. They tolerate me sitting outside on occasion but after a while, they clearly think enough is enough and start chortling very loud at me and pressure me into moving out of the vicinity. There are also a couple of pigeons whose soft cooing is frequently heard, which is just as well as they do appear to have their eye on coming inside. I am wary about having the sliding door open as they ever so quietly inch their way towards it and it is only their soft cooing that gives them away every time. They seem very non-aggressive birds and unlike the magpies, inhabit the space peacefully with all the other creatures. Meanwhile the magpies vehemently protect their territory and often chase the other birds (and squirrels) away. I have also witnessed them stealing my little tea-light candles in their metal casings which makes me very curious as to what else might be contained within their nest.

Then there are the little birds – they perhaps give me the biggest pleasure. My garden is so overgrown such that coal tits flit in and out of the foliage in a delightful manner and robins hover close by on low branches or perhaps on the edge of an outside chair. Robins really do seem like they want to engage with you and I do wish I knew what it was they were thinking. I can’t help but have a little chat with them when they come and visit.

In this very hot weather I have been sure to keep the birdbath filled with water as well as the little tea light lanterns I have hanging from the trees. The coal tits and others delight in these as they can drink and bathe in relative protection.

Thus the garden space and its habitants sits on the periphery of my everyday consciousness and imagination. It operates as a kind of background that floats in and out of focus. Whilst I haven’t progressed very far with this lastest series, I have prepared the painted ground on canvas which I display here. As one can see these backgrounds are themselves gestural and organic. They are created in a relatively random way, allowing time and chance and the layers of paint to do it thing.