Other people who blog, they plan and edit what they write. I don’t. I think this is for two reasons: one, I want it to feel fresh, and conversational, and two, because physically sitting at the keyboard with my books and notes and sketchbooks around me, the process of writing as it comes into my head actually helps me form the thoughts. My blog is foremost for me. If you have been reading this blog for a while, you may be familiar with the tricky posts, the ones where I’m clearly trying to work something out. I’m not sorry if they seem a bit disjointed, ungrammatical, hasty, chaotic, stupid, naïve even… when I look back on them later, they help. And I can see how far I have come when I realise I now know what’s going on. But of course, having mastered one thing, another bit of rubbish arrives in its place for me to figure out the fit.
And that’s the position I am in right now. I am on the edge of things I don’t really understand, reading and trying to see how things fit with my thoughts and practice. This time it’s semiotics. I think I am getting there… slowly. But, like my desire to talk with a Real Swedish Person, I also have the desire to talk to people who really “get” semiotics, just to see if I’m on the right lines.
In the meantime, I will talk with anyone who cares to listen, either to the Swedish, or the semiotics.
One of my questions about semiotics was whether I could have my own set of signs, signifying my own meanings, or was there a sort of international secret code? The answer is both and all, in varying degrees. Some signs are fairly universal (red light = stop). Some are cultural, historical, societal (think secret handshake, the sign of the cross, the logo on the door plate, the green beret…)
The rules of sign making do not have to be universal and they don’t have to be continually tangible either.
Context is important. Some semiotic elements can shift… for example, when I extract the text from a variety of sources to signify something different, do these words carry some of their original context with them? I like the fact that they do, and if you were expert enough, patient enough and possibly forensic in your method, you could identify the sources as the Sunday Times magazine, a crappy sci-fi novel, and a poetry collection dated 1956. The texts I recreate are a combination of what’s gone before, words uttered before, that I assemble, just as the drawings I do call upon over 50 years of drawing experience.
Of course… the person reading or viewing brings their own set of meanings to what I have made. They may be the same or similar to mine, or totally different. A lot has happened between me thinking, writing, making and showing it.
There are different ways of looking at this, and as I am not writing an essay for a tutor to mark, I’m not going to go into much detail here, other than to note what I have found useful in my own head.
What I have taken on board about the signs is that in themselves they are not important. The twig on the tree is a twig on a tree. (Trees signify many things.) The twig fallen can be a signifier for autumn, violent storms, children throwing things up to gather conkers. The twig picked up, assessed and selected in the eyes of the artist has become something else again. It is a suitable twig, in terms of its physical properties, for me to wrap with suitable fabric, to signify a child. This of course is a very personal pathway from twig to signifier to signified, that, during the process of making and the display/exhibition, I can explain to viewers through various means.
The meaning and “value” (?) of the twig has changed, as its context has shifted.
So… I am now thinking about the observed drawings. Even as quite a small child I used to draw and paint wild flowers gathered from around my childhood home, in rural Worcestershire. I’ve spent all my life drawing from observation, and my art school training instilled in me that this skill was to be valued and practiced as a tool that I could use whatever I ended up doing, and it has. I don’t think there have been many weeks in my life when I haven’t drawn in some way. And over the last 25 years or so I would say there aren’t many days when I haven’t drawn. Therefore, I believe that when I spend three weeks drawing a stick, it is well and truly drawn, and it brings my history with it. One drawing, on one piece of paper. It already means something.
What I am currently trying to do though, is change my signifier, so what is signified can shift. The more successful (in my eyes the closest to what I want to achieve) of the latest drawings are the large scale, closely observed drawings, out of context. So a stone measuring 5cm, becomes 50cm, a 15cm stick becomes a metre long. They are placed on the paper with no context, they have no landscape, and they have no shadow cast upon a surface. They have no roots, and no ground…
Some of the twigs I hung separately on the wall for Five Six Pick up Sticks are being reused now, bound together in families. I am shifting the meaning again. I wanted to signify that these solitary, individual children could be bound together in different ways, so I am experimenting using a variety of materials, to find the strongest signifier~method. Language is important here, I used the word bound. Which in English refers to the wrapping around of a thread. The twigs are bound/bonded to those around them. Being bound to another person can be an emotional bond. They may be from different trees, but they are stronger for being together.
I may no longer have my own parents, and I may never have known my grandparents, but in a previous post I decided that I could be the roots myself, now I have a grandchild. I can also gather around me a chosen family of artists, trusted and cared for, so that our community can also lend that feeling of belonging and rootedness. I have to ponder a little more on umwelt (Jacob von Uexkull, early 20th C) – a useful term to describe much of my thinking about experience and context…
The question will be something about how I can combine my practice that includes observational drawing, installation and songs, feelings of rootlessness, umwelt, and seeking out authentic, trusting, meaningful artist relationships to form my own community.
Tricky. But I am getting there. Slowly.
Thanks to those who have been listening to me and helping me find my way through.
