Layers and lines
From a purely visual, aesthetic standpoint I’m happy with how the work looks. I like the forms and lines, the wrapped lines and the drawn lines. I like the grouping and the spacing. I like the soft, limited palette.
From the conceptual perspective I enjoy playing with the semiotics. I have fun taking the objects and changing them, affecting them in some way, and seeing how that changes what is signified. If a twig fallen from a tree is a child, disregarded, what is happening to that child when I dry out the twig, select a strip of fabric and wrap it tightly? If I haven’t got a twig, can I make one with waste paper? Is that still signifying a child or is it something different now?
If I look at the physicality of these twigs… a grown line, fallen from the tree full of lines, onto a surface to be kicked about by humans and beasts and weather, other lines intersecting, overlapping…
I layer more lines over the top and stitch lines in, and leave them trailing like roots. Layers of metaphor, layers of meaning, connected by lines.
I visited the Lapworth Museum of Geology this week. I found it overwhelming. I’d gone intending to draw stones. Which I did, a bit, but found distractions in the cabinets of samples.
Four hundred and forty million years ago, plants were growing, underwater, that we have evidence of in these cabinets. I find in them the same threads and traces I am drawing today. That’s a hell of a long line…
I’ve been exploring the rootlessness, the short family tree, the knowledge I have of it that barely goes back to the beginning of the twentieth century…. And yet I am – we are- connected by these lines and forms to everything. The dust we are formed from and that we return to forms the same patterns… the plants, the rocks, compressed in layers over decades, centuries, millennia… there is nothing new, and nothing goes away. It is all absorbed, and everything created is fuelled by the same atoms. Over and over again.
On a cellular level, nothing much changes. On a societal level probably that doesn’t change much, or if it does it’s very slow, and often seems to be regression rather than progress. But then I look at the lines that show the folding of rock. These things take time. And I look at the lines and forms of plants preserved. They’ve not changed much in four hundred and forty million years. Is it rather arrogant to presume we can change human attitudes to other humans just by voting. Or warring. That just seems to hurry the decay. But Caring? Wrapping? Preserving? That might give whatever creatures are here in another four hundred and forty million years something to think about. If there’s anyone here at all to do any looking.
