More and more I have been realising that creating my art work is not about what mark I get it is about living and breathing art, exploring the possibilities that float around in my mind… some of them work and some of them don’t but what is important is that I am visualising my inner thoughts and ideas, representing my thoughts on life and experiencing a process.
I have been exploring ideas that are both new and have been living in my head for a while, waiting for an opportunity to break free of the confines of my brain and emerge and grow through the process of creating.
The photographs attached to this post are a record of an experience I had with paint, or perhaps even the work itself… I was transcending thought and to a certain degree the act of my own hand. I was exploring the possibilities of creating work that is beyond me and subject to other forces.
The experience was fantastic and I found once again a meditative process, watching the cup spin around and around as the paint dripped and splashed over the paper was at once mesmerising.
The physical records on paper of this process are in their own right very interesting and create a detail with the paint that would be incredibly difficult to acheive in any conventional manner of painting.
The progression with this was to explore my continuing use of circles and spirals, it was brought to my attention in a group critique and I began to grow increasingly intrigued in what this could mean.
When I explored the symbolism of the circle I came across the zen buddhist symbol Enso. In buddhist painting this symbol is said to
‘symbolise a moment when the mind is simply free to let the body/spirit create’
I felt that this was a strong link to my work as it describes what I have been exploring in a succinct way. I began to explore more about zen buddhism and much of what I read and found out resonated very strongly with who I am as a person as well as what I am doing with my art work (as I am discovering the two are always very tightly intertwined).
I have also been exploring creating 3d works using repetitive gestures of rolling up/ folding sections of magazines. I was interested in the results of continuous actions and my idea was to take the works as far as I could physically, almost like the ink drawings where the paper determined the end of the art work but instead here the size and managability of the piece would determine it’s end point.
One work I have been creating is made by ripping a4 sheets out of a magazine and folding them up into long rectangles and then winding them round each other again and again, I have been photographing the process all the way along and am intending to use all of the images to create a stop motion of the experience.. almost like a nature documentary where they speed up the plants growth so you can see a massive progression in a really short space of time.
From creating this magazine work I started to experiment with cutting the rectangle up into little sections and turning them over, exploring their potentials.. this in turn gave me fresh ideas for works and experiences. I began to consider the possibility of using the cross sections of the magazines to cover an entire wall. I will update the concepts and physical manifestation of this idea as it develops.
Alongside making these works I have been continuing to write my dissertation and the ideas and concepts on process art that I have been reading about have largely informed new thoughts and ideas. For instance the idea of decommodification is very interesting, the idea of rejecting the very thing that you as an artist are setting out to create.. or at least I thought that was what an artist was meant to create. From pondering the potentials of decommodification I have become more and more interested in ways of working that value the experience and process over the end product.
By creating works that seemed to transcend my thoughts, I began to look at artists like Linn Meyers (who I mentioned earlier in this blog) and an artist called August Ventimiglia, he has created a number of works where the completion is determined by the materials rather than by the artist himself… the work is complete when the materials cannot take any more and begin to disintegrate.
This idea kind of stuck with me and I explored creating some ink drawings on paper, I was interested in this new way of creating a drawing where the end point was completely determined by a force outside of myself.
I allowed myself different amounts of time and created circles over and over again until the paper fell apart and then could take no more ink. These pieces where created as experiments but I later displayed them on my studio wall and I feel that in some way they are more important than I gave them credit for, they mark a transition point where my inspiration for and understanding of what I can create expanded greatly.
As a result of my realisations about my unrealistic expectations of how I create art work, I started the third year exploring making work that went beyond thought.
I would start with a line or a dot and keep repeating the form until I felt that the art work was finished. By constantly repeating gestures over and over I seemed to be able to go further than my conscious mind, a place where my drawing was the artist and I was the pencil.
