This week’s activity:
I’ve been continuing to construct my installation drawing piece. I’m pleased with how it’s coming along in my studio space but still anxious about how it’s going to work in the Barge House space. It feels almost impossible to envisage. Wednesday I’m going down to visit the space and discuss with Rita where the best place for it might be. Then I will have more of an idea of what will work and what might need working on more. I expect the space to affect the space but the uncertainty is always slightly unnerving.
So far, the response from fellow Digswell artists has been encouraging and interested. I feel doing this piece has really focused my ideas in the representation of space through drawing and the simplicity of line, altering our vision and referring to somewhere else. I have found out a lot about perspective and how all the lines relate to each other, I has not been possible to just make it by judgement of the eye like when you draw space on a manageable sheet of paper. I have had to apply certain technical rules all the way through to keep it visually working…measuring, re-measuring, standing back, altering and so on. It's a very different drawing experience, it’s all stop-start and no flow. It builds up very slowly and quite often I don’t spot a mistake until I have done a good few lines from the wrong one and then discover the last days work needs correcting.
It is an illusion but does not hide what it really is and this seems to be what builds up the tension of the image. The permanent static drawn line which you expect to be solid is the thing that bends and distorts the piece. It makes the viewer aware of the feel of real space and illusion of space represented.
Photographing it then does another strange thing because it all becomes less clear what’s happening, as it all becomes 2d again. One space is laid upon another and flattened. The photographic progress changes the experience of the piece completely. It almost makes the drawn space more real.
I am also going to build it up as more of an environment by extending it both within the wall and further into the actual physical space. As I’m working on it and seeing it emerge, lots of other ideas keep occurring in my head of things that I want to try next. I feel like I come away from the studio with nothing else on my mind but where is this going next? The questions keep surfacing.
