doing. action. verb. l’herbe.

I am trying to take myself less seriously – I get all involved in my subject matter and forget to laugh at myself.  And now I am diving in to my current concerns…  The rhythm of making calico boards for my 254 painting project, and painting the larger works is giving good contrast to the nature of my lost library work.  The Lost Library project is the work that is most scary right now.  It is pushing me to the edge of what’s possible. And I am scared.  To enable this project to really go full throttle I need to be very careful what I say Yes to.  I have to remember that people certainly don’t always say yes to me.  I have a tendency to want to help others without thinking through the implications to my own practice.  But before I say no to others I need to figure out when I am saying no to myself.  What are my own self-imposed limitations?  (There are many)  There are some project I’ll have to say no to – or at least no for now…perhaps put on the back burner to allow me to focus on Lost Library.  For the 254 paintings I can clearly see progress just in the making of the boards – a simple counting and I have a grid format to check off every 10 that I make and put in my studio cupboard.  With the Lost library it is much harder to track progress.  I have a ‘done’ book where I note what I’ve done as I go along each day.  There are distractions I need to get rid of…I faff, I watch a little tv late in the evening, I can take ages to switch from one task to another…perhaps I should switch less often?  I find it horribly difficult to get tasks done in the time I set.  Finding a way to be realistic without limiting myself….  I need a lot of quiet time, i.e. reading and writing.  A balance of working up the road, going out to meetings and quietly working in my shed and on the computer is hard to get just right.  On non-commitment days I spend my time between my shed (painting and making mini-canvas boards) and inside (can’t get internet out there) communicating (often via email) about the Lost Library project and currently writing a news sheet about it. This news sheet is the most urgent thing now, I must get it done as it’ll help bring the whole project together and be something to encourage participation – I’m planning to hold drawing, text and printing workshops at Abergavenny Library and in the Abergavenny Community centre and possibly one further venue. I would also like to invite local schools to be involved and make prints of the subject of the value of libraries, with the work potentially being shown at the Eisteddfod, either in original form or displayed on a screen (in a grid).  Now I have decided this news sheet is the most important thing to do I have started on it – got a plan, have begun drafting different sections out, I know I have to get it translated, find a printer..etc, but just the getting the draft ready and with the importance I’m giving it is paralysing me!  This is idiotic!  I just need to bite the bullet and do it. And it is not going to be perfect, maybe not anywhere near. I think the problem is I have a vision in my head of a clean lay out, on FT light salmon pink (hex value #fff1e0 – when the FT originally changed from white to salmon it was apparently partly to do with it being cheaper because it involved less bleaching) square paper with information about the projects clearly laid out.  And understandable. Also – clarity in what the project is and what it stands for.  I am hugely fearful I can’t do this one thing.  Oh – and another thing, I want it done by the end of the week!  Really –do I need to choose between quality and timing? Is it even possible to get the quality in the time frame I’ve given myself?

(Also I am working up the road 7 hours today, Friday and Sunday, with a meeting on Saturday of the Friends of Abergavenny Library – I would like this ready for then. Plus I have an interview on Monday!)

Why am I blogging at a time like this?  Well, it is helping me think it through.  It is no good all this rumbling around in my head and sometimes even on the old typewriter or pen and pencil just doesn’t cut it, I want to put it out there.  A modern thing?  How I have grown to function?  Something like that.  Right, now let’s see what I can do in my time left today.

Right, my Lost Libraries project is going up a gear now.  I have spent almost 3 weeks of the past month with this dreadful cough-flu that is going around. Though not ideal or welcome it has provided unforced time of less activity to reconsider ways of working.  I am forever needing a way to monitor my progress.  Things I am focussing on now are: the lost library project – work involved emailing people, going to meetings (the friends of Abergavenny library and the Eisteddfod committee, artists making the mobile library, musician composing a piece to be played from it, and anything else necessary), I have a risk assessment hanging over me, need to contact the police re permission, and find ways of publicising this as I’d like the community to be involved in the performance and to get involved before the event by making drawings, prints and writing about how they value their library.  I am currently working on a news sheet on the project because there are so many elements to it that I imagine it is hard for others to grasp exactly what the project is.

I am also steadily m

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aking 254 business card sized mini canvas’ made out of thick card and calico.  I have 140 out of 254 made.  Although I have now bought some new canvas, it will not be enough to finish the 254 at the sizes I tend to work.   Also, working on larger canvas, I tend to vary the size.  Working at such a small scale might give me a better rhythm of working.  I describe the practical way I work musically, with my painting, drawing and printing being the rhythm and my other projects – such as Lost Library, Portrait Tachbrook and Little Museum of Ludlow as being the vocals.

I am writing as I am thinking and am considering how I might take this further and consider my art output in more musical terms:

Melody -or pitch(vocals) pitch is a perceptual property of sounds that allows their ordering on a frequency-related scale,[1] or more commonly, pitch is the quality that makes it possible to judge sounds as “higher” and “lower” in the sense associated with musical melodies.[2] Pitch can be determined only in sounds that have a frequency that is clear and stable enough to distinguish from noise

Rhythm (beat and meter)

Dynamics In music, dynamics are instructions in musical notation to the performer about hearing the loudness of a note or phrase. More generally, dynamics may also include other aspects of the execution of a given piece.

harmony… Different aspects of my practice together – harmonious?

Key—(context? ) A musical key is a song’s home. The key tells you several things about a song: the sharps and flats used, the scale the song is based on, the scale note that serves as is the song’s home note, and much more.

Texture (number of layers, and type of layers in composition) In music, texture is how the melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic materials are combined in a composition. Texture is often described in regard to the density, or thickness, and range, or width, between lowest and highest pitches, in relative terms as well as more specifically distinguished according to the number of voices, or parts, and the relationship between these voices. Affected by how many parts are playing at once.

Timbre (quality of sound that distinguishes one voice or instrument from another)

Tempo (different for each piece of music, or work)

Order  In music, order is the specific arrangement of a set of discrete entities, or parameters, such as pitch, dynamics, or timbre.

I am painting (large canvas’) following my interest in foliage and growth forms, settling on trees, or at least parts of trees, braches with leaves.  Willow has featured and I am using my Grandfathers Readers Digest ‘Gardening year’ book for reference material for shapes of leaves and some of the text.  For these paintings I am simply doing what I feel like doing, following my nose.  I am enjoying productivity in my streams of practice.   I have made a small (so far unsuccessfully printed) etching of willow on plastic.  Even tried running it over with the car to print, but I only have water based inks, so need to book myself into the Print Shed to do properly.  I am currently reading about ‘The Secret Life of Trees’ by Colin Tudge.

Looking at the musical analogy I am wondering what my timbre / quality of sound I am making through my work?  Hmmm.

And, something I have been really trying to figure – where is my works home?  I am gently looking for places to show my work where it sits well.  I have also wondered what might happen if I painted on tarpaulin and hung the work outside.  I suppose one thing I could try is simply to take some existing work and photograph outside (for some reason I picture woods).  But this would in no way be the same as what would happen with tarp – for a start the type of paint would change – vinyl inks and I’d lose the texture of the canvas…

I have some of the larger 254 paintings currently on show at The Apple Store Gallery in Hereford as part of the Framework Now! Exhibition (Framework being a group supporting emerging artists in the area) – we had a great private viewing evening last week, great attendance and plenty of new faces.

With the longer and brighter days comes a more focused me and a clarity after what feels like a winter long spring clean, by clean I mean clear out mostly!  The garden is getting more attention since Christmas.  Meetings about what Is now called Lost Library (previously mobile library performance) have been happening and a funding application laboured over and submitted (late January).

Dancers are now not involved.  I have approached a few possible dance groups, but the logistics, funding and timing with the Eisteddfod being in the summer holiday just added up to huge complications.  Taking the dancers out of the equation means I can work with who and what we do have available and go from there.

(A little late for this project) I have found and read Education for Socially Engaged Art by Pablo Helguera as it is particularly relevant in this Lost Library project.  In particular, I had vaguely thought about levels of community involvement, but not known how to talk about it.

Nominal, Directed, Creative or Collaborative participation.  Nominal is when viewer contemplates the work, directed- the visitor completes a simple task to contribute to the creation of the work. creative – the visitor provides content for a component of the work within a structure established by the artist. Collaborative is when the visitor shares responsibility for developing the structure and content of the work in collaboration and direct dialogue with the artist.

I am complicating things by seeing the Lost Library project as a bit of all  four structures.  I need to brake down the elements of the project into their parts.

The performance day.. Mobile library built on a 1950’s wheelbarrow (this fits with the Border Country book), eing designed and made by Art Students from HCA. An idea put forward at last meeting was for the public to join in by bringing their own wheelbarrows from home and using them to transport books from Abergavenny library (spoke to librarians on Thursday and they have plenty of spare/old books) to a place within the Eisteddfod festival site.  I have spoken to a music tutor at hca and am waiting to hear if any music student are interested in composing music for the performance (this could be played from our 1950’s wheelbarrow).  I have been wondering how to shorten the project title from Mobile library performance based in Border Country by Raymond Williams for a while and then got more seriously thinking these past couple of weeks and think currently that ‘lost library’ fits well as I want to have the feeling of the possibility of losing, or already ahaving lost libraries.  This could also be played with in the publicity and involvement of festival visitors…wheres the library gone?  Find it at the Eisteddfod… ! Maybe think again on that one… My public facing blog on this project is on wordpress (wynnepatonblog.wordpress.com) where I am drawing parts of the project together, and developing reference pages for the project as things are decided.
Anyway, I’m doing a fair bit of reflection on my practice and of course overthink on certain things and completely ignore others. The last year and a half out of college has felt excruciatingly slow, with practical progress, but I do feel that I am finding my own rhythm and ways of working. Some things I am adding structure to, others loosening up. One thing I find hard with having my shed studio at home, is getting out there with perpetually so much to do at home.  I write myself a note the other day simply to go to my shed.

Things that I am mulling over now:

Things…foliage alongside text
Animating these forms
Bring text to life
Saloua Raouda Choucairs’ latent movement in the forms – lyrical. Clarity.
My individual practice vital in bringing my hesitantly intuitive preoccupations into focus.
Synthesis with science.
My full engagement with the physical world -how? Dance, drawing where I

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am…engagement in contemporary art…

#portrait:TACHBROOK (performance)
Saturday, 19 December, 2015, 10.00 – 15.00

19th December 2015
10-3pm
At Tachbrook Market

A site-specific exhibition of images that have been created by people within the market and within a set timeframe, all portraits will be taken with disposable cameras purchased locally and developed at the local camera store.

Ash Roberts (http://www.ashrobertsart.com/works.html

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) , Vivian Barraclough, Becky Sumpter, Catherine Wynne-Paton, are a collaboration of four students/graduates of Hereford College of Arts.

(words that follow are adapted from Vivian Barraclough’s, see her website here: http://www.vivianbarraclough.uk/ ) :

We were one of a series of performances undertaken by a wide range of artists. As a group we agreed our proposal, had it accepted by Rufus Stone (http://www.rufus-stone.org/), worked out the logistics, and popped up in the market for a day, with the wish that we didn’t want to turn up and just ‘do art’ at the community (one sided-conversation), we wanted to arrive and be responsive and sensitive to our surroundings, whilst doing the work we set out to do – capturing a  portrait of people in place, just for that day.

This work of ours has now been documented by others – we commissioned a photographer who will be curating the images of the day into a magazine,
another set has been uploaded onto the Tachbrook Market Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/TachbrookStreetMarket/?fref=ts) by the market’s official photographer, and each of the collaborative group have our own photos on mobiles, iPad and maybe other devices. A short video taken by another is now available on the commissioning website (http://rufus-stone.moonfruit.com/archive-performance-space/4590736371 ) and YouTube (https://youtu.be/GC2Nd9fT7i4).  This demonstrates how our work has been very much part of another community and valued by its members.

There were 54 ‘selfies’ that existed as a temporary exhibition within Tachbrook market.  There are also 43 ‘selfies’ left over, there are 11 more ‘out there’, that were picked up by their subjects, … others have taken ownership and continue to engage with the work…. I like the notion that the piece started in September 2015 with us coming together as a group, working towards the nitty gritty of getting it together, the performance and now the documentation, plus the added unknown of the physical (!) photographs given away on the day.

Once the performance is over, all that remains is documentation that should not be confused with the work itself (Bourriaud 2002) but the images will ‘live’ on in other forms, as above.

I offer a short quote from Bourriard:

The aura of artworks has shifted towards their public

Today’s art …..encompasses in the working process the presence of the micro-community which will accommodate it. A work thus creates, within its method of production and then at the moment of its exhibition, a momentary grouping of participating viewers.                                                

Viv’s unchanged words: I think that as artists we ‘set the stage’ but once underway we were as one with the ‘viewers’ i.e. we all became both ‘artist’ and ‘viewer’. To me the idea that you had to be there and be part of it restores ‘the aura’ for me within a world that creates so much ‘stuff’.  I think that is why I find site/time-specific work so exciting, I think that it offers ‘experience’ to the viewer rather than commodified ‘stuff’.
My words again:

I consider retaining personal authenticity throughout this project a particularly important aspect within this group of artists.  All through the development, the performance and the follow up we have debated issues around what is vital to the project and what is right for us at each decision making time.

Through discussion we came from designing the magazine ourselves to realizing it would be more fitting and valuable to our way of working throughout this project to invite Lucy (our photographer on the day of the performance) to design and edit the images for us. This allows us to stick to dealing with the ideas this is all kicking up – but also because of our divergent ways of thinking we may end up taking forever.

Why should we ask someone else to edit? Because then it is a separate entity to the performance, a pause, a standing back and taking stock.  With someone who is not a Fine Artist compiling the magazine, we will have time away from the images and when it is time to print it, we will be revisiting it with fresh eyes, time and another persons’ hand having come between.

If the design was left to me I would take forever to do it. I have so many options of design and figuring out what I want to achieve with the magazine. And I’d want to do something that is a simple idea in seed form, but that takes enormous effort to get done, i.e. images onto receipts for shops in Tachbrook Market, in the place of advertising.

Also – if we don’t design and edit it ourselves then the documentation is a separate entity and stands alone. Maybe even has more value being done by a viewer, rather than us, the performers?

Result:

We’re giving bare details about the project to magazine editor and designer Lucy, including Teresa’s blurb on us:

Saturday, 19 December, 2015, 10.00 – 15.00

#portrait:TACHBROOK A site-specific exhibition of images that have been created by people within the market and within a set timeframe, all portraits will be taken with disposable cameras purchased locally and developed at the local camera store. Ash Roberts, Vivian Barraclough, Becky Sumpter, Catherine Wynne-Paton, are a collaboration of four students/graduates of Hereford College of Arts.

‘What are we doing this for?’

Primarily to document our performance.

Do we want anything to result from documenting our performance? Is this a full stop, a taking stock, or is it turning into something new?

“If you are alone you belong entirely to yourself. If you re accompanied by even another companion you belong only half to yourself, or even less.’ Leonardo da Vinci.   This quote comes to mind when considering the outcomes of working in a group of artists.  How much do I need to belong to myself? (Quite a lot! While we discuss options at various points along the way, we each come up with such different things, we pull against each other, we reason, we figure, we in actual fact come up with solutions (of course) we would never have come to individually, so it is impossible to say whether it is better or worse than working alone, it is simply a different entity altogether.  To me it is like trying to compare a fish to an elephant!

How much does this work belong to each of us?  In a way I have felt a little at sea all along (this goes in waves of feeling more or less connected, with a subject I am not, on the surface, working on within my own practice, but, I do see my artistic output all as a form of self-portraiture, it’s my signature work, even if outward appearances are very diverse)

Is all art a form of self-portraiture (individual work) or portraiture (in a group)?  How are our artistic influences lost or found within this collaboration?

So, the project brings us four elemental forces together, which then pull against each other. It is like a tension, a bit like taking a fix as navigator on a ship and because of the differing ideas (forces) we are not a clean point where lines meet, we are a ‘cocked hat’ of artists, though we are four, not three!
(http://www.working-the-sails.com/fixing_a_position.html : When compass bearings are taken of three marks when navigating, it is unlikely that the three position lines will meet at one point, instead forming a triangle known as a [ cocked hat ] or 3 point fix.)

How fellow artists within the project describe their work:

Ash ‘a practitioner exploring the use of found materials and site specificity’

Viv ‘exploring ideas around space, place, time and being

site-specificity is fundamental to my current practice’

Becky – (awaiting)

For me:  My practice explores the textual and physical world’s (separate and overlapping) realities.

 

Quote on Rufus Stone webstie:

“What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?”―    Michel Foucault

It came up on Friday’s meeting that what we are doing is closely related to Relational Aesthetics as described by Nicholas Bourriaud in his book.

 

I used a disposable camera on myself (often my hand) in Abergavenny in the run up to the performance in Tachbrook, to get the hang of taking a selfie portrait of myself in the town I live.  We used these initially in our Tachbrook performance to help give an idea of the project to visitors to our set up.

I have used a few of these photos, setting them against printed text from Border Country by Raymond Williams (book I am centring the mobile library performance upon).  The photographic images (with my hand and landscape of Abergavenny) against the text is my attempt at having the physical world invade the textual world. This was done a couple of days ago. Am still thinking about it. I have a photo of this work on my phone for consideration away from the studio.

Things I have bubbling away, in no particular order, these are

• Text invading physical world & the physical world invading the textual world:

  Text invading garden at The Print Shed

  Blog to song…link to Tim Dallings recording of my words.

  Text on hands – John Dinnen’s and my own.

  Using the #Portrait: TACHBROOK test photos I took in Abergavenny in textual and physical exploration.

 

• Mobile library performance

Text into movement, first video of my movements while reading done in March 2015, not shown on blog to date. In my year review I’ll be tracing my work on this since its inception in images, video and writing as I’d like to see the evolution of my thinking.
I am currently writing a short piece on the ideas behind the work.

• 254 paintings – currently on hold, awaiting funds from new job to buy more paint and canvas.  Plus 254 words on autocue and video, recorded in spring last year, shown in September at The Print Shed.
• Scratch-card poem. Return to the pavement somehow? What I’ve done until now with it.  Recording of found scratch-cards and pennies in log.
• Magna Carta Framework group project, it needs to get out and be shown!
• Drawing where I am. Screen-print these? Feeling these are my connection to physical world, these could help explore the physical-textual worlds overlap. Text could invade these drawings to differing extents. Subtle inquiry.
• Recording reading progress in spread sheet of book 1040 pages.
• Aborted recording of time spent doing physical and textual things.  (Was attempting to record this over a week)
  

 

To support ‘flow’:
Overview of past year (meant to do it Midwinter, but got waylaid!)
See some exhibitions/shows soon (not managed to venture out and see any since the Midwinter break)
Exhibitions to get work out there
A place to store old work out of the way. Don’t want to chuck it out, but only want to show work done in past year. (Keeping sense of momentum in work is vital)

I am currently doing a review of the past 13 months, and considering how can I change how I use my time reflecting so I focus less on the details and look from a more objective point of view at my own work? I would like to develop my judgement and for this I need experience, but exactly what experience I am unclear! Also, gaining better judgement might seem quite vague yet I am certain it is worth developing for me. Ad Reinhardt from ‘Twelve Rules for a New Academy (taken a little out of context):

“Study ten thousand paintings and walk ten thousand miles.”

Now, that would be an experience, I can walk miles here, but paintings are harder to come by, they are often hidden in homes and business’ around South Wales! But, seriously, I must find a way of ensuring I see more contemporary art as part of my ongoing development. I have a feeling I said the same thing this time last year……