I should definitely do more blogging. I find it hard to keep it up sometimes when I’m busy, but when I do get into the routine of doing it regularly, I find it really invaluable to be able to pop back to old posts and remind myself of what I was thinking at the time. I’ve just been reading my first post from this blog in March this year when I wrote about Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, the bit where he talks about the improbability of life and the “exceedingly improbable” occurence of “The Replicator” – a molecule which had the ability to create copies of itself. I remember when I first read that phrase, “The Replicator”, thinking what an evocative expression that is, conjuring up thoughts of sci-fi horror movies and the evils of cloning.
When I began enhancing my printmaking skills earlier this year, I started by bringing together some images from my research for The New Immortals. I was using images from a range of sources put together in a sort of lithographic collage – united through a single print process. Here’s one –
– but this didn’t seem quite finished to me so I’ve started drawing on top of it, in a way that is quite familiar to me, a repetitive process based on a simple motif – in this case a little shape which refers to the molecular structure of oxygen (O2). So I’ve been drawing lots of these little O2 symbols in white ink, forming a sort of cloud of O2s – repeated… replicated over and over again.
And of course I’ve also been repeatedly making large numbers of small paper tubes for my Pink Spread work.
So… The Replicators… of course printmaking is perfect for replicating, so I must give this a bit more thought and consider where this might take me.
Also, recently I’ve been writing my Grant for the Arts funding application for my new project, Only Once in a Universe and referring to another quote, a notion expressed by Hans Ulrich Obrist, “Extreme Present”… “a time in which it feels impossible to maintain pace with the present, never mind to chart the future”* – the time in which we now live. So I’m thinking about how this affects my reseach which “begins with the origins of life and goes on to explore possible futures”. I’ve been reading The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present.
I’ve also been re-reading my GFA application and wishing I’d written more about the ideas behind my work – they somehow got over-edited in order to meet the vicious word restriction. Ho hum. I feel a re-submission coming on.
*Hans Ulrich Obrist, The Future of Art.
