I tried applying glass to the prints and photographs I’d taken.

I tried scattering the glass and placing them with intent. Often the act of carefully curating the glass looked more interesting, a broken object applied with intent, however at times the base image lent itself better to scattered glass.

I tried covering the image completely with shattered glass and then placing smaller quantities. By covering the whole image, the glass looked like a smashed screen or broken picture frame. With smaller quantities, the image was more intriguing. It looked like something had interfered with it, it did not look so accidental. I liked the idea of elevating/evolving the broken glass from the status of broken glass. By actively interfering with it and placing the pieces, the material became more of an adornment, no longer an accident.

I tried taking pictures of the images with glass, obscuring the lens with shattered pieces and trying to cast light through the shards of glass.

When lit from one side, the light caught edges of the glass. It added another dynamic to the distortion of the image, highlighting areas, bringing parts of the image into focus, obscuring others with light reflection, casting shadows.

Lit from behind, the image and glass took on a glowing quality. By combining lighting from behind and the side, a glow was achieved as well as a highlighting of the glass edges.

From above, the light reflected of the larger surface areas. I found this to be less interesting as the interaction between light and glass was as one might expect on a window or glass surface. There was no real subversion of expectation in the way that broken glass might behave.

I wanted to try obscuring the lens with shattered glass however could not focus the camera so that both the glass and image were in focus. Moving the shattered piece further away created an interesting image, almost like an iceberg.

All the images were nature based and the glass adapted to the different images. For the water it looked like ice or the glistening surface of water. For the trees, it looked like sunlight coming through the leaves. It highlighted for me particular qualities of glass – surface based, morphing into a context.

A Kitchen surface had broken at home so I gathered the pieces with the intention of painting with them. I did not know how I would incorporate these pieces into my art but they were collected and stored in preparation for use.

As a found material, a surface that had been broken in the home, there was a new interaction with something that was usually overlooked. Now that it was broken, it was almost treasured. Both hazardous but also more beautiful.

I wasn’t sure where to go with using the material with regards to painting and so I started by loosely placing it in different configurations with different acrylic mediums and pigments.

These were rudimentary experimentations that I thought could be explored further. However I wasn’t satisfied by the outcome and wanted to try experimenting with the glass in different ways.

Clouds are ever changing, they are not quite an object, an organism, a thing. They are matter.

I wanted to explore the different ways of printing a cloud and so created a laser cut plate to print with.

Ironically, when I put it through the press, the prints were so saturated with water they looked like the sea rather than clouds. Elementally they are essentially the same. The sea is a sort of grounded cloud, water based, ever changing, temperamental.

I actually liked the sea images created by the plate and so I created a number, exploring the effect. I felt they captured the movement and feeling of water well. I didn’t create any successful images of the clouds, but those that more accurately represented the cloud plate seemed less interesting. The more interesting prints whispered a representation but captured more the feeling of the elements.

I tried printing white ink on black and white ink on neutral paper. I preferred the black and white as the image evoked more drama.

I also printed onto different cloths. It’s was difficult to transfer the ink onto the cloth. The organza seemed to pick up the clearest ink areas however it was very inconsistent. When I returned to the dry cloth, the white ink was barely visible on the translucent white cloth.

I think the laser cut needed to be deeper to create an effective printing plate. It was difficult to get the intended image as the distinction between the shallow and deep areas of the plate was too little. Next time I would change the settings on the laser cutter to create a deeper engrave if I were to achieve a more representational image.

I’m interested in our perception of things. In the primal and learnt. How we relate to our physical world and make sense of it (culturally and sensually).

As an image and entity clouds intrigue me because of their liminality. They are elemental, changeable, fluid, physical yet intangible. They are neither object nor thing. They are experienced by everyone but never in the same way. Everyone’s perspective is different and a glance a second later will perceive a different composition.

As children we try to make sense of clouds, a game, trying to see recognisable shapes within a mass, an elephant, a unicorn? In some ways this provides an analogy of how we try to make sense of the world, pattern matching. Looking for shapes we might recognise and if it can be loosely squeezed into that category, we attempt to define it as so.

A cloud is constantly at an irretrievable point.

It feels both present and absent.

Verisimilitude

Moribund

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New Materialism(s)

New materialism focuses on “the vitality of matter” human and non human. It serves as a consideration of how physical bodies, spaces and environments contribute to subjectivity.

Physical things and bodies inform experience. There are physical and social constructions.

Nature/culture question.

Fausto Sterling – our bodies experience the world and respond to environmental signals at cell level not just surface.

Ontology.

Matter as agential.

Barad – object/subject divide, based on particle physics and quantum field theory – moves away from an human centric approach

“Human does not act on matter, but rather humans and non humans are agential actors in the world as it continuously comes into being”.

I think Bogost’s proposal for us to “consider perceiving objects as things, rather than filtering our perception of things through human experience” could be interesting but I also think it is impossible to filter information through any other lens than a human one. We make sense of the world through human experience. Perhaps Bogost’s proposal is a kind of anthropamorphistation of objects in itself?

Bennett’s “thing-power” promotes that objects “manifest a lively kind of agency”. “Thing-power gestures towards the strange ability of ordinary, man-made items to exceed their status as objects and to manifest traces of independence of aliveness, constituting the outside of our own experience”. Establishes a hierarchy with the word “status” and would like to read more about Walter Benjamin’s object aura as Bennett’s proposal seems to align with the notion of object aura.

Within the theory of New Materialism, I’m interested in the idea of a more holistic approach to understanding the world, of an interactive approach to the environment rather than an anthropocentric one. I am particularly interested in the way that we as humans perceive the world and the way that we relate to our environment. I am interested in the spiritual/imaginative elements of humanity that make sense of the world around us. Perceived relationships. The individual and shared perception/memory. Yes matter has agency and objects have agency but I’m interested in how we make sense of that through different and shared lenses.

The broken teapot, a found object from the home, from the kitchen where our interaction with objects is more active.

How does this render the object? It is no longer functional. Is it now rendered a thing?

A teapot is indicative of a social interaction. Tea is usually being shared if it is made in a pot. Tea can be nourishing, meditative, ceremonial in a number of cultures. Within the U.K., tea could be a marker of colonialism and trade. The pot carries with it ritual, memories, cultural indicators.

As an object from the home that carries with it cultural, social and personal markers, I wanted to explore what the purpose or meanings associated with it were now that it was broken.

I placed film within the teapot. Exploring it as a vessel of memories. The brown of the film cast a tea coloured hue and shadow mirroring the remnants of tea in the spout. The transparency and colour of the film lent itself to the liquid that would usually be held by the the object.

I experimented with different images and curations in and around the pot but there was something in the contained film that drew the focus towards the thing itself. It alluded to its past functions, to the memories associated with it. When it was placed within a collection it looked more like a broken object rather than a thing. A thing that was enigmatic with a narrative that was no longer a functional object.

Glass has many properties. Glass reflects the surrounding context. It takes on properties of its surroundings. It can morph into and distorts an image. It can clarify or blur an image. It has a water like quality and yet is a fixed state. It can serve as a barrier or a window. It can be functional and adornment. It can be a vessel for something, a container. It is like fixed water, like ice.

How do we consider glass when it is broken? Functionless? Indicative of a crime? Of a night out? Of clumsiness? Glass is something that requires care. It is fragile, easily shattered. When broken, glass becomes a hazard, something beautiful but potentially harmful, a marker of danger.

There is something cyclical about broken glass – something man made from sand, in the process of returning to its granular level.

When glass is broken in the home it is an irritation. It is something that will require replacing, it may be something of value that is now lost. I have collected two broken glass objects from the home. Usually this act of collection would be in preparation of disposal but here, there is an intention for reuse.Both happen to be from the kitchen, probably because that is where there is most activity and movement in the home, where we interact most with objects.

I would like to explore using this glass as a material. What meaning does it take on when for example it is used as paint, or broken glass is placed in a new context?

Thing Theory interests me in terms of how we relate to and perceive the material world. How objects and things can be indicative of a particular culture’s value system. I made the following notes from this book.

Ponge wrote about how ideas make him feel queezy whereas physical objects delight him.

He expressed a “desire to make contact with the ‘real’” which I think is particularly relevant in an increasingly online world .

We make sense of objects in the external world which we make sense of through our internal world.

Leo Stein “things are what we encounter, ideas are what we project”.

“As they circulate through our lives, we look through objects (to see what they disclose about history, society, nature, or culture – above all what they disclose about us), but we only catch a glimpse of things.” – does this suggest a changing status in things? The status of things isn’t fixed?

“We look through objects because there are codes by which our interpretive attention makes them meaningful, because they are a discourse of objectivity that allows us to use them as facts. A thing in contrast can hardly function as a window. We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working” – does the brokenness of something actually free it from typical classification, fresh potential?

When an object becomes a thing it denotes a change in human perception, a shift in subject object relation.

“The word designates the concrete yet ambiguous within the everyday”.

An enigma, a thing may be difficult to define.

“Somewhere beyond or beneath the phenomena we see and touch there lurks some other life and law of things, the swarm of electrons”

Simmel “Coming closer to things often only shows us how far away they still are from us” – different understandings from different distances/perspectives?

“The most familiar forms, once we look, seem unpredictable and inexplicable” – like repeating a word until you’re not absolutely sure that’s the correct word anymore?

Does labelling something a ‘thing’ provide a distance from the object that allows a different engagement – a shift in preconception, perhaps allows an experience of the aura of the thing?

Appadurai “even though from a theoretical point of view human actors encode things with significance, from a methodological point of view it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context”

Perceived order of objects and things?

“Subject-object relation in particular temporal and spatial contexts”

“Methodological fetishism, then, is not an error so much as it is a condition for thought, new thoughts about how inanimate objects constitute human subjects” – human perspective.

“What are the conditions for sympathising with animals and artifacts” – I would argue there is a difference between sympathising with an organism and an inanimate object

Baudrillard “we have always lived off the splendor of the subject and the poverty of the object”.

Castoriadis suggests we abandon representational imagery as “a projection screen which, unfortunately, separates the ‘subject’ and the ‘thing’”. Representational imagery only offers an element of the object/thing/reality. Again I think this could potentially relate back to the notion of aura?

Mauss “however materially stable objects may seem, they are, let us say, different things in different scenes” – context is everything, nothing is understood in isolation.

“By transforming the bricklayer of the dream work into the practice of everyday life, the surrealists registered their refusal to occupy the world as it was. Walter Benjamin claimed they were “less on the trail of the psyche than on the track of things”, acting less as psychoanalysts than as anthropologists.”

“Culture of things”

Duchamp’s fountain, Man Ray’s Object to Be Destroyed relate to object culture more than image culture.

Judd describes Oldenburg’s objects as “grossly anthropomorphised”.

“Though art may seem to be, most fundamentally, “a projection of our mental images upon the world of things”, this is art that instead shows how weary that world has become of all our projections”

Temporality of objects, objects as marks of time.

“New media – perspectives painting, printing, telegraphy – each in its way newly mediates the relation between people and objects, each precipitates distance and proximity”

Heidegger – “thinking the thing”

Having been introduced to the process in the previous project, I decided to explore riso printing further. I chose an image of clouds and played with the colour divisions and intensity in photoshop to create an image I thought might work.

I created the first image in green and blue. I liked the oceanic, global affect. I think it made the visual more intriguing, removing it from being just a cloud image.

I created prints in orange and pink as I had before. In the last project, this had mirrored the autumnal colours of the trees but I found when this colour combination was coupled with clouds it felt less sophisticated. I played with the colour intensities to see whether this would change the impact and found that when raising the intensity of the yellow, the colours were more saccharine. I altered the ratios so that the yellow was lighter than the pink in order to reduce this effect.

Whilst placing the images on my wall I found I preferred them in twos, one image reversed. There was a flow and rhythm through the two images this way. On reflection and particularly for the blue and green images, perhaps the dualism and inversion mirrors the relationship between clouds and sea.

I tried weaving two of the images together however felt this did not add value to the image or idea.

I wasn’t sure exactly where I was going with my project. Looking at Mark Bradford and my previous projects, I knew I was interested in materiality and looking at the capacities of paint and print.

I tried pouring paint and paper debris onto a wrapped piece of canvas to see how these materials would rest on the canvas and what kind of effect this would create. After a few days of repeating the process I decided I was not particularly interested in taking this idea further.

With Frank Bowling in mind, I tried painting with acrylics in different ways. First by pouring different combinations with water on paper. This left the paper highly saturated with water and whilst I left it to dry the colours merged to muddy affect. I purchased acrylic medium and found that this worked best for pouring when combined with a little water. I did not achieve a visual that I was looking for and so decided to leave this method and move onto something different.

I wasn’t sure exactly what I was going to do with it but I booked out the screen printing set. With a similar intention to the painting I intended to create an abstract image. Selecting colours and creating a print by allowing them to merge organically as the squeegee passed. Again, I could not see myself moving forward with this process.

Whilst cleaning the silk screen I thought the residue ink on the screen and the tape was interesting. With this in mind, I set up a piece of canvas on the wall and applied the silk screen tape over areas of a discarded print. I had seen Gerhard Richter use a squeegee to paint and so I thought I’d try it. I tried this on both “canvases” and realised that to achieve a desired visual, it would take many layers. Not only this, but as the colours muddied I realised it would take time to allow each layer to dry. Since the paint on canvas lacked originality and would take time to achieve a visual I liked, I decided to focus on exploring other pathways.

After a few layers of paint on the tape, I tried alternating tape and paint layers. I thought the effect was interesting and played into the idea of painting with debris that Bradford explores.