Threads

“Can the unsettling feelings of rootlessness be conveyed through the subversion of traditional observational drawings?”

I asked this question earlier this year, and it’s written on a bit of paper pinned to my studio wall.

Alongside the phrase “Assembled Utterances”

This blog post popped up when I was looking at my website stats – always interesting to check out and re-read what other people are reading… I’ve often found it provides a useful reminder…

https://elenathomas.co.uk/2024/03/19/exhibition-and-other-words-beginning-with-ex/?_gl=1*1sho0nb*_gcl_au*OTc2OTc4NjUxLjE3MzMwMDU1MjA.

This feels timely… as I am about to embark on a course using Tim Ingold’s Lines as a guiding text. I’m reading that again, or at least dipping in and out to particular relevant chapters, also Correspondences… both of these hold ideas that are helping me to contextualise the different and often seemingly disparate aspects of my practice.

I already feel a winding down happening, and I do feel I need a break. But I have a plan of action in mind for the new year. A need to “stock up” with input to work from. A trip to the School of Art library with my alumni ticket, and a trip to the Lapworth museum of geology with my sketch book.

My brain needs feeding. So I need to observe and document, read and consider…

I need to make some observed utterances before I can assemble them, and I need to assemble them before I can understand what’s going on. I often feel if I just DO the thing in front of me, draw, write, gather information, then gradually things become clearer.

The gathering of things around me adds to the feelings of rootlessness. Until there is a weight of material… to sift through, find connections and lines between, I find a correspondence between what I see and draw and hear and write…

It’s almost like nest building?

Then there’s a settling, things start to make sense again…. A cycle…

Over the last few days I have recognised that I am at another one of those points on the mountain where I can take a seat, look at the view and reassess where I am and where I go next.

You’d think this was obvious, but sometimes it’s not.

It is in preparing for the course in January that has caused this pause and recognition of this stage. I expect that working through from January to July I will figure some more stuff out, but for now I am making notes of my thoughts.

https://www.singingapplepress.com/workshops

I’m doing new work, and I am asking questions about it:

Is the work about pushing the metaphor and exploring the semiotics?

Or is it about the materiality?

Can it be both?

Do I need to tell the viewer about any of it?

Are the thoughts valid, even if they remain in my own head?

They are probably best for now in my own head, because they are not particularly clear.

Historically my work has been representational: This stands for that… I am now wondering which way to go, because at the moment either that is not going deep enough, or maybe it’s too much and I need to concentrate for a while on the materials. I have a very broad practice, and I can sometimes flit about between different aspects and materials. But for the first time in a while I feel I need to set up camp in a particular place and concentrate on one particular thing.

The stones have been uppermost in my thoughts, because basically I don’t know what they are for. I don’t really know what they stand for. When I think about the sticks, they only became significant once I had worked with them A LOT. So this is what I am going to do with the stones. I need to follow the lines and learn about them. I have plans.

I believe the LINES are important. The lines that I make, yes. But also the lines that are drawn between works that I make, have made. I can see the time line form from fifteen years ago… assisted by the Full Circle retrospective at The Weeks Gallery in Jamestown New York… to the current work. 

https://elenathomas.co.uk/archive/full-circle-a-retrospective/ 

It’s a strong line, in my head at least. It branches off, returns, branches off again… but the path is there. It has led me to the stones. There’s been a paring back, a stripping out, and now I feel I need to study the elemental. The rock… beneath our feet, beneath the soil, from which the trees grow, and discard their twigs…for me to pick up… there are lines there to be followed.

I will always, I think, think in metaphors. But sometimes in order to find the right ones, I need to immerse myself in the real world first.