I’m back in the studio this week after two months of domestic distractions, travel and other work, so going back to my August blog is a great way to re-ground myself and pick up the threads from where I was then:
“… next week will be different again as I will be spending six days in the Open Studios which are part of Towner Gallery’s Art School programme…”
That week in August at Towner turned out to be hugely significant – a break-through week, because it was the start of a process through which I began transforming the Blood Music cluster-based work into something completely new. The challenges I set myself to re-use and re-purpose materials, plus the basic practicalities of what to do with the huge Blood Music clusters filling my studio, prompted some radical thinking. This combined with the week long period working in public at Towner provided the impetus and continuity to try something new and persevere with it. I began the physically challenging process of crushing and compacting the clusters, thinking about the processes involved in geological transformation, binding them tightly with tape, and eventually wrestling them into submission as much smaller, solid objects.
So now, back in the studio, I’m trying to refine this process with the remaining clusters, but most importantly trying to work out how to record this process of transformation as this seems as important (if not more so) than the objects themselves.
From this…
to this…
