Dover-London Return

This is my last post for this blog as I won’t be going up and down to London much over the next few months and not at all to college. I was actually quite looking forward to using the new High Speed service from Dover to London!

I have started a new blog and am going to try and keep blogging, working and reading the blogs of the a-n community.

Sadly I have had to defer from my MA for health reasons. This is quite a blow and I am upset about it. The health stuff is pretty serious though and I shall only be able to dip in and out of the blog from time to time or I may set up a new one. Fortunately, the college will hang my work for the interim show – opening 28 Jan at 6pm at the Bargehouse. I’d like to try and get to the opening but have a feeling I won’t be up to it.

A rather fuzzy image of work in progress.

Still thinking about form, content, subject, subjectivities and reading more on Klee.

“The work of art, too, is first of all, genesis; it is never experienced purely as a result” (Klee, quoted in The Nature of Creation).

There is something about my recent work which I feel is finally tapping into many of the things that make me tick and which I am “allowing” into the work. My Chinese background on my mother’s side, my experience of Indonesian batiks, the fine stitches my mother makes when sewing …

For my sister this reminds of of spilling ink on her homework!

When making the work though I was not thinking of those things, but of how Klee divided up the space in a formal way first.

I have also been reading Susan Sontag’s essay, “Against Interpretation”, and thinking about her assertion that formal considerations can allow us to experience an art work more fully than considerations of content.

I haven’t absorbed the essay in full yet but what Sontag argues for, I think, in arguing for a critical language based on form, is a heightened sensory appreciation of the artwork.