Bathe in Ignorance has progressed through words from a large English dictionary (a few pages) that I don’t know. So far I’ve responded in paint to: abate, abatis, abature, abaxial, abay, Abaza, abb, abbacy, Abbe, and now abbess in light – pinpricks on black paper projected a short way onto wall with a torch shining through a tube.
Getting rather carried away with the possibilities of this and how it relates to the starting point with the phrase Bathe in Ignorance. When I consider bathing the first substance I relate it to is water, but then through my responding openly to the words I have arrived at light. For a while with this Ignorance piece I have worked with paint and gone with the flow, but today I have been considering changing the systems and techniques I have been using repeatedly (words and intuitive painting). I feel as if my painting is suitable for my first response, but that I can move my work on further by taking elements of the work to different extremes. In Abaza I began painting dots, and then using large white dot stickers and then making further grey dots within cut up loo rolls as a guide.
The grey shaded dots of abbe were done using a cork dipped in acrylic in various shades of grey. I’m currently editing a typewritten image of abatis and it’s definition on photoshop into two tones to print out onto layout paper to do a screen print at The Print Shed when I can next fit it in (working at a B&B most mornings next week). The idea with doing this is putting the unknown words through several / many processes to see what, if anything, it does to the understanding of the text.
Abbess projected onto the wall leads me to consider a way to project words in installation form from the walls of a room towards the centre of the space (and therefore onto anyone or thing that is there). I have a strong feeling it won’t seem like that, but I need to try it really. I’m considering projecting inwards rather than outwards primarily because if the light were dispersed outwards it would focus at all and it wouldn’t ‘bathe’ anything in the light.
