Having said how nice it is to sit in the gallery and contemplate the work as it is, and the possibilities of what might be next, I find that visitors to the gallery have started asking me now too.
Thing is there are many possibilities. And of course, there are still drawings in me that probably belong to this body of work, so they have to come out first, before they morph into the “next”.
I think then, the next period will be one of following up, exploring. I have said I will visit other artists, carry on the conversations we have started. In those conversations are the nuggets of new ideas… or rather ideas that seem to happily follow on from this… extensions, revisions, consolidations.
Michael Clarke and I have plans to carry on writing songs together. I’ve been writing while the show is on, seeking solace in the verbal rather than overloading the visual. This is a common way for me to go about things. If I hit a sticky patch, I will switch languages and see where that takes me. I’ve been writing about water in its many forms and uses… accidentally, and then I noticed… so now intentionally.
Bill Laybourne and I will carry on making noises, and carry on having interesting chats over cups of tea, it is in conversations like this with him and his studio partner Helen Garbett that I find myself navigating through a tangle of ideas and lines of investigation. Clarity of thought only seems to happen when I am communicating with others. I can’t seem to figure it out in my head, it happens when it is expressed beyond the edges of me… my voice, the lines I draw…
Sarah Goudie has been a critical guide through this, a periodic gentle questioning of what the hell is going on… an objectivity of sorts… a view from a different spot… useful… I am sure that will continue too.
That’s the how and who…
Today I find myself pondering the what and where I travel to from here…
The thoughts are vague, but connected… water… the air between… those bits beyond me, as above, the voice and the lines… molecules and connections… the bit where the bicycle becomes part policeman and the policeman becomes part bicycle… (Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman). The stuff of matter… how the doorposts might have a gravitational pull upon my atoms and if I pass through slowly enough I might disappear…
I muse along thoughts about the digital and the material. I was told when I joined the RBSA that they hold a material, real life archive of all members. In this digital age that seems both archaic, yet forward looking… the digital moves on so fast, becomes corrupt, is deleted… a collection of paper and real work if looked after carefully can survive for centuries, long after the digital has disappeared into the ether. I write this blog, digitally, it sits there… it has sat there for ten years… but for how much longer once the technology moves on?
I have started reading ‘Correspondences’ by Tim Ingold (having been enthralled by the ideas in ‘Lines’) and I am caught up in the idea of writing letters. Real letters on real paper. In real ink. With a real pen. I sometimes think of this blog as letters to myself, rather than a diary or journal. Who can I write to? And will it be important they write back? or, like Ingold, do I write to the things?…. the doorposts… the water… the drawer that contains my archive for people to handle an read two hundred years from now if they can be bothered?
