The Spaces Between

Last night I relaxed after a nightmarish day at work by completely unplugging for an hour. I put John Coltrane on the stereo and sat on my living room floor with a sheet of lining paper and some marker pens. It started off as an exercise in intuitive, expressive mark-making; but after a while I became immersed in the sheer child-like joy of scribbling. Literally. Pure process, pure freedom, not caring where the next mark went or fretting over composition. I used both hands, which I am noticing is becoming quite an integral part of my emerging practice.

Although I cheated a bit afterwards to do some image editing.

As part of Sketchbook Circle 2016, I was asked to produce a piece of art using the contents of a mystery envelope.

This piece has come about as a result of some ideas which I have been exploring and attempting to express whilst locating my artistic practice on the Artist Teacher Scheme at Birmingham School of Art. I have become very interested in making large scale drawings which express movement and energy, and which also seem to me to embody somehow the internal thought processes my mind goes through as I make them – process made visible. Elena, the course tutor, remarked that I am a ‘taker-awayer’, meaning that I put things into a piece and then move them around, or remove them, until I am satisfied. Addition and subtraction, ebb and flow, assertion and obliteration. I am now conscious of this as a valid part of my creative process, and actively embrace it in my work. This finished piece has gone through several versions and modifications as I thought my ideas through and came up with what seems to me to be a satisfactory way to express them.

The emergency blanket I received through the post was smooth, shiny and reflective when I opened it and it reflected fairly clear images; however, as I worked with it, it became crumpled, torn and fragmented. These opposing qualities took on many meanings for me; fragmented memories, stories, narratives; self-reliance and self-reflection; my own image and my own environment mirrored back at me, alongside my own inner landscape. A reminder that what I need is right here, and all I have to do is look for it.

I felt the need to cut and shred the blanket, which seemed to be about the many shards and fragments of existence and experience which make me who I am; as I did so, the sunlight and the warm red of the curtains was reflected back at me.

I didn’t really know at any point where I was headed with this idea, and it’s only a stage on the internal journey. I’ve continued to pull bits off it (addition and subtraction), and I’ve photographed it and manipulated it with the (many) photo editing apps on my phone; will it ever be finished? When is a piece of work finished? I’ve put it aside for a while now, but I’m sure I will revisit it and change it again, as this seems to be an enduring part of my emerging artistic practice.

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Yesterday was the first session of the second phase of the Artist Teacher Scheme. We met at the School of Art in Margaret Street, and looked at the MA final show before sitting down in the basement to share some of our 100 pieces of work and talk.
I’m still attempting to get my head round what it is that I’m trying (struggling) to express, and I have no idea where I’m going with this, or what my practice will look like when I finally manage to locate it… all I can say is that I feel like an avalanche has been released in my brain (not that it was an tidy and uncluttered place beforehand) and I am frantically trying to capture thoughts and ideas and write stuff in my notebook and record things, and try to find ways to record things I’ve never even thought about before – trying to catch hold of it all before it is carried off like a wisp of smoke in the wind.
This afternoon I suddenly decided to wallpaper a large piece of packing cardboard that has been sitting in my living room for several weeks. Don’t ask me why. I don’t even know what I’m going to do with the bloody thing when I’ve finished it – it’s actually too big to fit anywhere. I am veering between amused exasperation with myself, and a niggling sensation that this is something to do with the emergency blanket piece that I’m trying to make for Sketchbook Circle. It’s about the physical expression of the process, the reflection of the self, the idea that it was inside me all along and all I had to do was look… or something.

Something below the surface is fidgeting to be let out, and all of a sudden that doesn’t frighten me. All of a sudden I think I want to take a look.

I am still pondering movement and how to make it visible on paper. I am fascinated by the process, by the things which lie on the peripheries of our consciousness and experience; background noises such as the noise made by a pencil moving over paper, footsteps on a quiet morning, the wind blowing through the leaves, the sound of distant traffic; abandoned spaces where no-one goes; discarded objects; disintegration, defacement and decay. I prefer to be near the edge rather than in the thick of things.

I have been travelling around by public transport this weekend, so I used my time on the motorway to stare out of the window and hold pencil to paper, allowing the movement of the bus to move the pencil. It was a peaceful and meditative activity. My daughter wanted to have a go; I watched her as she became absorbed in the process, quickly losing the urge to correct, rub out, control. I think that this is one thing I seek when I make art; opening the self to the experience, relinquishing of control, acceptance of the result, whatever that may be.

This morning I sewed a pencil to the bottom of my bag and clipped my sketchbook to the top of it, and thereby managed to record the movement of my walk. These drawings fascinate me; the movement expressed in them is so much smaller and gentler that the actual experience would suggest. I’m struggling to articulate a growing idea about the disparity between something experienced in the imagination and something experienced in the real, physical world.

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The experimental mark-making continues, with the continued absorption in the physical aspects of the process; pushing away, pulling towards, heavy marks, lighter marks, the sounds of the graphite and my hand moving across the paper. As I upload these images, they seem to me to echo the patterns and textures of the wood offcuts with their intensely tactile qualities.

I am considering now how to record my own movement by holding pen to paper as I am out walking; this inspired by a piece of work found as I browsed one of the Campaign for Drawing’s Power Drawing books looking for ideas for our Big Draw event. Everything seems to return to the same point.

So the 100 pieces of work are progressing. I am considering how my obsession with longhand writing and my love of abstract mark-making are going to marry up – or indeed if they are going to marry up… there are sure to be more twists to the tale, more changes of direction, like Alice chasing the White Rabbit; after all, it’s still early days.

Meanwhile, there is Sketchbook Circle, a new Art Therapy course, workshops and training events, community projects…. and a brand new joint business venture to work on and look forward to. Exciting times, busy times, with huge changes and huge amounts of growth. I am petrified and exhilarated in equal measure.

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