So good “you would not know it was done by a woman” – Hofmann

Krasner’s larger works feel full of authentic emotion. Her marks are charged with a raw energy. I’d be interested to explore a similar loose, large scale technique but relating it to nature, expressing the feelings evoked by different environments. Perhaps a kind of contemporary landscape painting.

Krasner talks of her art tuition defining art out there and the individual here. These concepts became one when she met Pollock. Olafur Elisasson suggests that we polarise ourselves and nature but tries to encourage us to consider the two as part of one organism. I think nature has the capacity to provide a sense of the sublime and that this is increasingly important in an instagram era that focuses on self. Rather than thinking, environment there and people here I like the idea of incorporating a sense of the sublime in my work as a way of taking us out of ourselves and considering the bigger environmental picture. I’m not sure whether this will be incorporated into this project or a later one.(Side note biomorphic shapes).

Inspired by Krasner, I’d be interested to try collaging discarded paintings and drawings, reconfiguring and reworking to see what could be said about looking at something from a shifted perspective. One position might not work but that another might. That actually a fragmented image might be more interesting than a complete one.

As discussed in his Reith lecture on ‘The Artful Brain’, neuroscientist Ramachandran discusses the notion of ‘grouping’. He notes that our vision developed to overcome camouflage and decipher prey and predators in undergrowth. The brain receives a reward signal, an ‘aha’ moment when the brain is problem solving and visual grouping results in such a signal. I wonder whether Krasner’s paintings and collages are so pleasing as a result of an ‘aha’ moment.

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/radio4/transcripts/20030416_reith.pdf

Perhaps ‘grouping’ could be seen as a form of ‘navigating’ ones environment safely and therefore incorporate this idea into the project.

I tried mark making with the greenery that was planted by the ‘river’. There was one plant that looked like a nettle and I found I was wary of touching the plants not knowing what they were.

(I liked the look of where my pen meets the page and causes a shadow.)

The green leaves all make different marks. Some require more effort to be pushed into the page. Others sweep easily. Some leave a tattoo of my nail.

I was intrigued by the light reflection of the water on the wall, by the shadows, by the light reflections that happened in the shadows. The liminal. The areas where light doesn’t behave as an immediate reflection off an object.

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I liked the idea of using slow mo during the derive as both encourage you to slow down, change your perspective, observe at a different rate and allow you to perceive things you may not otherwise.

I found myself being encouraged by the architecture to move in a particular direction and in an attempt to counter this I walked into the car park. It felt like a space I wasn’t being guided to as a pedestrian.

Here, controlled movement was more obvious as arrows literally told me where to turn at every opportunity. My sense of smell was repressed because of hay fever but I could smell dank.

The lights reflected beautifully off the cars, reflections streaming across the bonnet. I could hear the trickle of water, footsteps and someone wheeling something. The noise rattles.

The air was heavy and a little moist. The yellow lights reminded me of Olafur Eliasson. I’m reminded that the yellow helps you calculate distances more easily. And there are colder blue lights too.

I found myself being drawn to green areas. In an attempt not to focus on the green I took rubbings from the stone, concrete and bricks. I took the rubbing with a biro as I didn’t have a pencil and wondered whether the latter would be better. Looking at the reverse page I actually preferred the embossing the pen had created to the rubbing.

I tried the slo mo on some plants in the complex to see if it changed the way I perceived them. I preferred the smaller, more delicate leaves in the wind as their movement was almost like breathing when slowed down, anthropomorphic.

As an area built to manipulate movement, I found myself drawn to the magnetic seating by the water, drawn where I had been told to go. It’s a strange combination of nature in the city. Nature has been forced to conform as the pedestrians are. But it’s not unpleasant. In fact when you take the time to sit and observe it’s special.

Fish are swimming, a visual I’ve rarely (if ever) encountered in London.

Brutalist architecture has a foreground of rushes.

A school, a theatre, a gallery, a church – it feels like an area of education. But also familiar. My feeling here is one of a vignette. I’m reminded of my Dad’s side of the family even though I can’t think of a specific memory that associates them with this area. It just feels like somewhere they’d go. It reminds me of the photographs I’ve seen of them all together, all seven of them, all with unruly, dark, long, curly hair. Their different directions.

I can hear planes, building construction, traffic, whispers, talking.

I feel wind, I feel hot sun on my skin and the cool wall of air that dissipates when it reaches my skin. It’s a strange envelopment of hot, cold. Stationary heat and intangible, inconsistent breeze.

A fish rises out of the water. A hover fly lands on my biro, I think it’s a wasp.

I change my seating position. The uniform bricks are warm through my jeans. I’m reminded to feel this as my feet move from the ground to the level of my seat. The sensation in my calves reminds me.

A couple who have been making out on a platform in front leave. I imagine they felt the area was fairly private, by the water, concealed by a bank of greenery on one side. Though the stage they were on is not in the round, three sides are exposed. It’s difficult to get there by foot but there’s a bank of windows in front and people either side. I wonder if they knew how public they were. I think not.

(Later I sit in a similar place to whether the kissing couple were and realise how secluded it feels).

Since humanity, culture and history intrigue me, I found this museums perspective a great spring board for the project.

I rarely consider the history of London and love the idea of hunter gatherer communities being governed by seasons and the ever changing river in a city that now feels so far removed from nature.

It stimulated ideas about the river, how central the Thames was to London. It’s a physical and psychological boundary, you have to travel over and under, you can’t get around. How the river changes the way people interact physically, emotionally. How it changes a space and the way people relate to a space (this got me thinking about Olafur Eliasson -see prev). The river as a source of abundance and imagination. It made me want to research the folklore and mythology of the Thames over time.

I liked the idea of considering the movement of the river, the water, the geography. I considered using materials like mud from the Thames to paint. How would this be done.

The idea of the hearth setting, the fulcrum of a community, the importance of the circle. I wanted to research how communities in past and present navigate London.

My research response to our manifesto seemed to be one of many threads that I resisted plaiting. Leitmotifs included the human relationship with technology, links between art and science and the exploration of screens in imagery. My work aimed to provoke questions and at times served as a warning to think about the dark side of every day technology and thus encourage a balance. Time frame was a challenge.

Adam Eve and Apple Mac:

Inspired by Frank Eugene’s photogravure print of Adam and Eve after the fall, here I have removed charcoal dust with a rubber, performing an excavation of sorts to reveal Eugene’s biblical figures and an Apple Mac logo. The technique and subject matter intend to raise questions about the repercussions of technology on humanity. I’d like to explore this technique and concept further using some of my own photographs with dramatic chiaroscuro.

Great Thanks Goes to Cambridge Analytica:

I read an article that talked about the Swedes implanting a microchip into hands for contactless payment, and the article was illustrated with a demonstrative X-Ray. Having gleaned information from the Netflix documentary The Great Hack, about Cambridge Analytica using online data to manipulate voters in Trumps election, I chose to represent an x-rayed hand in a gesticulation associated with Trump and included a microchip to raise questions about our acceptance of technology as a tool when we rarely consider the deeper, hidden truths about its capacity to manipulate. The title references Trumps acceptance speech.

Gray Matter:

The use of taxonomy in our title led me to explore the scientific/medical side of our manifesto. Having found an old copy of Gray’s anatomy at home, it struck me how robotic some of the diagrams seemed, arteries and veins looking almost like wires. I wanted to print over the pages with loose, wave like movements juxtaposing the text below. Potentially looking almost like a heart beat. While printing, I was struck by the screen like impression of the Perspex over the page and so removed the ink by the heart and took a picture. I’d like to explore this idea of screens and layers further in my artwork. The title alludes to Gray’s Anatomy and encourages viewers to engage with what they’re seeing cerebrally.

Belvedere:

Juxtaposing the weeks I spent on this charcoal drawing of the Belvedere Torso, I created various reproductions with the laser cutter on Perspex screens within the hour (with the help of Anna and Annie). Inspired by the Perspex in the print room, I wanted to try different effects of layering Perspex to see how this would affect how we perceive an image. Would it be overwhelming? Beautiful? Intimidating? Visually richer? I photographed different combinations in different locations and particularly liked the irony of using light from the window, since technological screens typically use artificial light. It was an exploration of man vs. Machine, nature vs technology.

I went to the Tate for a fix of Van Gough and found it was completely sold out. As a result I went into the Frank Bowling which happened to be the happiest accident.

I loved his use of paint and colour, his exploration of the medium. Looking at one painting from a distance it had a simple beauty, on closer inspection there was so much variety on the canvas.

I immediately picked up some board, plastic sheets and acrylic on my way home to play with the medium and materials. Inspired by his experimental approach, I wanted to see what movement the paint could achieve on different surfaces. I added oil, zest it and water to different mixtures to see how this affected the flow of the paint.

The notion of layers was important as I’m interested in how layers contribute to our perception of an image. The concept alludes to technological screens and windows. Do the layers make it overwhelming, do they contribute to a bigger picture, do they work better together, create more complexity? These were all ideas I wanted to explore.

I wanted the layers of paint to be on transparent surfaces so that they could be layered but also as a reference to computer/phone screens.

Unfortunately the combination of oil and acrylic on the plastic ‘screen’ ended up looking like bird excrement on a window. Somehow I didn’t mind this effect when layered with the other images.

The plastic sheets had come with tissue paper in between as protection. I attempted to drip the paint and zest-it combination onto these layers but the wind (I was outside) and fragility of the material meant the they ripped and the results looked splashed rather than dripped.

I liked the way the tissue paper moved in the wind so I started taking photographs. Alone, the image was ok but together I liked the narrative of movement. I explored different orders for the images. The small square-ish shapes felt almost like pixels/building blocks. Curated in a square the images felt orderly. Placed at random on a page gave a sense of wind and movement.

I was excited to discover Rothko, Monet and Gerhard Richter curated so close to each other in the Tate permanent collection.

They are three of my favourite painters and when I think of the common thread that resonates with me in these images, I think it might be the distinctly human touch creating something beautiful on the canvas. I wonder whether seeing the human touch in something is so alluring because, in the same way greenery or water has a calming affect on the human psyche because on a primal level it tells us food and shelter are near, perhaps as communal creatures we respond to seeing the man made marks since it tells us another being is near or has been here, that the environment has been inhabited before and is therefore probably liveable. (To be researched!)

I think this could be linked to our manifesto of Homo Sapiens to Homo Digitalis because while a machine can make beautiful things, for me they lack the allure of the hand made. That it is important not to digitalise everything, that we are not robots, we respond on an emotional level to human touch.

Having discovered an old copy of Gray’s Anatomy at home, I thought I’d try layering print on top of photocopies of the pages.

Our manifesto title is Homo Sapiens to Homo Digitalis and I liked how some of the diagrams in Gray’s Anatomy looked almost robotic. The front cover features a head that looks like it’s powered with wires.

First I tried printing loose waves by scraping ink across plastic and then printing on paper. I wanted these to be free and charged with energy, to remind the viewer of frequencies, neural pathways and transmissions.

Then I tried this technique onto a page from Gray’s Anatomy. I liked the idea of combining machine made print with hand made print, text with loose movement. I also liked the layering effect, how the overlaid ink obscured some of the text below. When the print came out of the press I thought that some of the hand created waves looked almost like a heart monitor in the new context, with the heart illustration behind.

As we were clearing the ink I lived some of the patterns the water and soap were making on the glass, how the ink was repelled into patterns.

(Any quotes taken from BBC documentary)

The Olafur Eliasson exhibition at the Tate felt like a thoughtful playground that made art accessible to everyone. The interactive quality of the art and subject matter of nature makes it feel that it would be relevant to all ages and backgrounds.

The documentary highlighted that the viewer is almost as much a part of the art as the piece. Eliasson is almost an architect of experience and sees himself as a host to the viewer. He offers a thoughtful playground for us to consider our relationship with nature and the result feels a little bit Alice in wonderland.

The room filled with a sweet tasting, yellow haze shifts all the senses. The air is sweet which defies expectation, you can see but only really the dark silhouettes of the people ahead of you haloed by the yellow smoke, you can hear but not see the door to exit opening and closing and I ended up touching the wall as I passed to anchor my position. The experience is all consuming and one I thought I’d hate… but didn’t.

In the documentary he says he uses yellow as a “vision amplifier” as it facilitates better evaluation of distance (hence used on motorways) and allows us to more easily decipher objects. I thought this was very interesting and would like to explore more about colour theory and the impact of colour on vision and psychology.

Eliasson also mentions in the documentary how understanding the scale of nature allows us to better understand our own scale. It is contextualising and humbling. His work has “expanded our understanding of the sublime and the spectacular”. I’m interested in in this notion of the sublime in nature and would like to explore it further.

He alludes to a symbiosis between ourself and nature. We affect it as it affects us. The environment isn’t “out there, it’s all of us together”. He states that there is no boundary between nature and culture “it’s all one thing”. He draws inspiration from nature and his homeland of Iceland. He sees the waterfall as an “entry way to the notion that everything is in flux”.

The documentary highlights parallels with Eliasson’s work and the Renaissance in terms of its beauty and the connection between science and art. He regularly works with scientists to explore our relationship with the world, how we see and interact with it. This notion of a contemporary Renaissance is something I would like to explore further.

Beauty (1993) was a work that I particularly loved. He has created a “constructed environment” and explored “sculpture as a phenomenon”. To me it relates back to his exploration of the sublime and the documentary highlighted that it is about a rainbow’s transience, “nobody owns it and that contributes to its beauty”.

Eliasson maps the psychological impact of the physical world (documentary). To this end I still think landscape painting is relevant, as a documentation of geography and the experience of the artist.

Elisasson asks “Can art help us change the world”. He has moved into architecture via his spacial exploration in art. His Circle Bridge aims to slow people down and to encourage interaction with their immediate environment. It is an example of how public space can be used to change the way we interact. I love this idea of using art and architecture as a way of encouraging community and interaction.

I also enjoyed his contemplation on abstraction as “the empty space between expectations and memory”.

I went to the Natural History Museum on a hunt for information about the human race and hopefully something robotic/futuristic. I did not feel particularly inspired to draw from any of the information relating to humans and so I headed for the dinosaur room.

Dinosaurs have an automatic affiliation with the past and yet somehow have an other worldly, futuristic feel (the lighting they chose above feels almost cyber punk). They allude to evolution and were also extinct suddenly having been the dominant species on earth and therefore perhaps provide an interesting parallel with fears about the human race today.

It was however a difficult place to draw as I would liken the experience to being in a factual Ikea. Herded in one direction, following arrows with every child and parent enjoying a constructive summer holidays. (NB. Do not attempt to draw the main attraction dinosaur, your view will be consistently obscured and your sketch book persistently nudged.)

Aside from the dinosaur remains, I enjoyed the area that provided examples of research drawings. I was drawn to the notion of art and drawings as a way of recreating the past, a combination of science, imagination and drawing. The relationship between past and present, science and drawing is one that reoccurs throughout history, perhaps most notably during the Renaissance.