15 april 2015
Gathering thoughts on practice
Phrases: wood for the trees, bathe in ignorance, raging torrent, pull your socks up, man up, sheer weight of traffic, gulf between dream and reality…all phrases I am drawn to.
Bathe in ignorance – using the dictionary as a source of possible unknowns. Why the dictionary? Because I focus on text. What about other things I am ignorant of – more. My word knowledge isn’t all that bad, what about something else that really shows me up? Something I think I should know about. How do I know what it is I don’t know? Politics, history…I reckon I’m not too hot on. The dictionary is a good starting point in that each word tell a story – often words are to do with historical content, so if I don’t know the meaning of lots of historical things then this will show up. But also – as I don’t know what I don’t know, then it might be that words on other areas of knowledge come up more as I’m unfamiliar with them?
Selected page numbers to start with that are Fibonacci numbers – I needed to start with a limit to pages to photocopy and so this is one way of limiting the number of pages, and I didn’t want the words to all be starting with the letter ‘a’, for example. Yes – I could have picked the pages randomly instead, but I am interested in keeping a bit of control in there.
Highlight words I don’t know
Use these as starting points.
TOO CONTRIVED? Why exactly?
What’s the point of work flow without direction? (I keep coming back to thinking my work is completely unfocussed) Why does this worry me? I’m simply worried, nothing more. Apprehensive about the unknown. My wanting to develop work from certain phrases as starting points isn’t directionless and I don’t know what might develop. It would be a bit odd to make something that I know exactly how it will turn out before I start, that would be design, not art.
My fascination is with text, misunderstanding and message distortion so all of this fits with the possible way ahead above.
