All or nothing, I can’t stand the word moderation … Perhaps this can explain why I go months with no entries on my blog and then in one day I work my way through scraps of paper, various note books and posters that have documented my working and thinking and try to write something that somehow incorporates all of my thoughts in some kind of half comprehensible manner.
Much of my thinking and the way I create work has changed, most notably since writing my dissertation. However, there are quite a number of documenting images of my work before the diss’ and I think it’s important to include them, even if they only serve to illustrate my understanding of why they don’t work or what I can take away from their creation.
Prior to the dissertation I was working on a series of drawings in a small installation room at university, with a heavy emphasis on the process of creating the work I was exploring different ways of creating drawings. The time in the space allowed me time away from other people to display and view my own work in an environment outside of the studio, this was an invaluable realisation and one that continues to be part of my working practice. Without the distraction of all your materials and half produced ideas you begin to see your work in a new way, in the way that the viewer would see it perhaps.
My concentration on the process had, on some level, been a resistance against the idea of the object, I was struggling to get my head around producing objects that were just going to be either ignored or consumed and in this confusion, I felt that the only pure way of producing art then would have to be one that totally privileged the experience of the artist.
An important discovery during this period of work was also how to document my thoughts, I constantly think about and analyse my ideas and as a result, sometimes I somehow think myself out of ideas or I have days where there are an overwhelming amount of ideas… I always liked the idea of the sketchbook as an object and I suppose (a recent awareness) as a work in its own right, I have never found it particularly useful for those moments of pure inspiration and excitement where you have a stream of ideas floating to the surface but rather as a tool for more contemplative days of general understanding… So I decided during my time in the installation room, to whack a long piece of paper on the wall and to write down understandings of the work I was creating and any ideas that came up as a result on its surface. It was an invaluable discovery that allowed me to keep hold of these thoughts, where normally I would have written them on a scrappy bit of paper and often lost them, or even worse, not written them down at all!
I continue to use paper on the wall as a tool for recording ideas and thoughts and in some way this tool seems to be becoming a work in its own right, I haven’t yet fully managed to get a hold of how this will work and I look forward to a moment when I suddenly realise how it will work as a piece of visual art.
