I really enjoyed creating these works, they were a lot more palyful…
I just went with ideas and tried not to be too hung up on the weight of art history and critical theory that can be applied (A side effect of reading that I have found)
I really felt the blue cassette tape on top of the canvas, the colour complemented the piece well and somehow reflected the slit in the canvas.
The text was all to do with fragments of memories, which I am realising inform the ideas that I start with… then by chance the painting ended up underneath and it really worked together.
I created the painting by stapling on a carboard box (I have loads lying around from a raid on the union rubbish ages ago – wanted to accumulate things to draw on at the time- so I felt it was kind of important that they made it in to the work as they have been a big element of my studio experience for a while).
Speaking of chance, I have been reading – well, probably ‘was’ reading at the time some of these were made – a book Chance all about the unexpected and spontaneous that I keep talking about with my work…. I was looking for another book in the library and came across it, I often find the best books that way!
Gerhard Richter’s writings have been a particular inspiration to my work (not just these ones but to my general practice and reflection of it) reading his work makes me feel like I am not alone in the way I create work and the way I think about it…
‘Letting a thing come, rather than creating it – no assertions, constructions, formulations, inventions, ideologies – in order to gain access to all that is genuine, richer, more alive: to what is beyond my understanding’ (Gerhard Richter Chance)
I really wish I had found the words to express this earlier, my explorations into meditation, process, spontaneous paintings and sculptures…. this is what I was getting at, not something necessarily beyond my thought… but beyond my understanding, Antoni Tapies seems to have worked in a similar way. He mentions observing this kind of thinking in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, it has made me really interested in reading the book, Tolstoy had an amazing mind and his words have often inspired me in its honesty and purity.
I could quote the whole book (Chance) because it just feels like post of the artists published in it just totally GET IT but I will settle for one more little snippet…
‘What I’m after is the liquidity of things, how one thing leads you on to the next’ Gabriel Orozco
There’s something really important for me in knowing that others have thought similar things about their practice, by my very nature I question everything (as I am sure many people do) but this inevitably leads to me questioning myself all the time and as a result my practice suffers a kind of yo yo confidence… where soemtimes I really FEEL what I am doing and what I am thinking (probably less what I am saying as I never manage to quite put it as succinctly as I would like) and then suddenly I question it all and look down on myself and think WHAT IS IT ALL ABOUT ANYWAY? What is it achieving? Is it valuable? Should it be? Does the work represent me and what I am about? Does it have to?
So on and so forth till my head explodes…
Text explored:
Iversen, M., 2010 Chance: Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary art. London:MIT Press.
