Possible lines of exploration:

Women as artefacts

Artefacts and memory (photographs etc)

Nature as artefact

Intend to derive

“The Museum has constantly evolved in its collecting and public interpretation of art and design.”

“Its collections span 5,000 years of human creativity in virtually every medium”

The depiction of women, the appropriation of an iconic image or artefact and how it changes in different contexts: https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/botticelli-and-pulp-fiction

Japanese woodblock prints, depictions of the everyday, Hokusai’s wave – nature as artefact, explore folklore, myth and heroism:

https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/japanese-woodblock-prints-ukiyo-e

Goddess, the changing meaning of an artefact, recycling/cultural appropriation:

https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/rolling-stones-lips-and-tongue-logo-by-jon-pasche-1970

Eva and I found ourselves drawn to seemingly different subject matters. We explored the routes that each of us were drawn to and collaborated by discussing our ideas and providing each other with suggestions. Throughout the process we clarified that our common aim was to encourage people to consider things from a different perspective. To encourage navigation over auto pilot.

On our initial tube journey, I found I was drawn to signs of deterioration, blemishes and shadows. As Eva articulated, I was photographing “marks of time”.

This became the premise of my work, which I explored within the framework of wabi-sabi. As a Japanese aesthetic, wabi-sabi can be defined as a beauty of the unconventional, the modest, the imperfect, the transitory.

The aim of my work was to encourage people to consider things from a different perspective, to reconsider their definition of beauty, particularly in this era of consumerism, Instagram and airbrushing. To encourage people to reconnect with nature and value what they have.

The first piece I did explored marks of time in a number of ways.

1. It was carried out over a series of days, each layer denoting a different moment in time.

2. It was created referencing different photographs taken on our tube journey, thereby triggering memory, referencing historical events.

3. The mark making varied from fast brush strokes to slowly dripping paint, sanding and thrown pigment.

The passage of time was an essential part of the process and product. It became I kind of collaboration not only with Eva but with time itself. I trusted that the uncontrolled marks such as dripping or splashing would play their part as mush as the controlled brushstrokes.

I hoped to create a visual that was intriguing, made in the vein of wabi sabi.

As part of the wabi sabi concept, Eva suggested I explore Kintsugi. The idea of repairing something with gold, highlighting the break and potentially adding value to the object. Kintsugi serves as a symbol of fragility, strength and beauty and I wanted to explore how this method would be perceived in nature. Placing imitation gold leaf within the cracks of bark, I wanted it to encourage us to re-evaluate what is broken and what is beautiful within the framework of wabi sabi.

The process felt meditative and almost

performative. I like the idea that the work will be seen by passers by, out of context, hopefully encouraging them to think outside of themselves, to use their imaginations rather than their phones. It is an impermanent piece which will eventually become a memory. It will only serve as a visual trigger to encourage people to shift their perspective for a short time but will hopefully last longer in memory.

As a symbol of transience, I wanted to explore depicting clouds in a permanent way. Having applied layers of acrylic paint, I performed a kind of excavation, scratching and sanding until I revealed an image.

As I removed my paintings from the wall at the end of the project I had left a kind of expanded painting, my own marks of time, evidence and traces of my progress through the project.

The library were giving damaged books away for free so I picked up this Le Corbusier book, having been drawn to the images and architecture without knowing much about him.

I loved the images in the book but found the quotes frustrating in the context of art. Removing pages from the book, I read the quote and responded with a contrary mark. It was an exploration of mark making, what could be conveyed without an articulated image or text. I wanted it to be organic in opposition to the structured, minimalist architecture.

Later, when I researched Le Corbusier I found that I respected a lot of his work and the quotes that I had found so rigid and aggravating seemed more philosophical than I had initially appreciated.

Le Corbusier considered the house to be a machine for living in. A purist, he believed aesthetic was a byproduct of form. Function over form.

He believed in the importance of green areas and large open spaces in cities. Considered local socio-cultural environment when designing for a place. Chandigarh was intended as a pedestrianised city.

Podcast – The Buildings We Create, Le Crobusier

I like the idea of a Haiku representing a moment in time. It feels almost like a window, giving the reader a brief insight into someone else’s experience that somehow feels both mundane and deeply profound. It is so short and yet feels like a snapshot that manages to convey mood, an insight, potentially a philosophy. It is both of a time and timeless.

It reminds me of childhood. In its presence I am reminded of now but more dominantly the many memories I have of the fair as a child. It used to come once a year. Now I think comes it comes more regularly. Always in summer. My memories are always in sunshine. It’s a marker of time. Past, present, transient. It is a temporary structure. A small Disney land. A momentary city.

A Stream of Consciousness:

I’m across the road from an abandoned fair. My thoughts punctuated by passing cars. Sun warm, glowing, breeze soft, cold. The flags wave but there’s little other movement save the dog bark. It’s a place of memories. The promise of excitement of going to the fair with my dad on the weekend to win a goldfish. A pet, a thoroughbred that never lasted long. The promise of going with school friends to meet a group from the local boy school at the end of the day. The time I was sick on a Ferris wheel. It was always a symbol of fun and promise but I rarely truly enjoyed the rides.

A Different Day, with a Heron:

I like what Annette said about a sunset being objectively beautiful but that art is something else.

I loved the mindfulness of the practice. I like the idea of getting into oneself, the environment, a shared consciousness with those around us. It’s a shared experience and yet individual. I like the idea of trying some of the ‘exercises’ we did at the beginning before painting to see how this affects the work.

It allowed an interesting forum for self-reflection. There was a point when holding a position at which I felt self-conscious.

I felt we were getting back in touch with our primal senses and responses, getting grounded. There was an absence of logic.

Would I have behaved in the same way if I had been the only one in the room. Probably not as the machine changes depending on how many parts are present, the more people, the more variables. There was a relief in being part of a bigger body.

At some points I noticed I would think of doing an action and someone would exercise it. I imagine this was to do with us being in a shared environment with a shared energy and similar stimulus.

The energy varied throughout the practice but felt fairly neutral. I think it climaxed as people were moving faster and making more noise.

The practice bought up some interesting notions about language. We communicate with so much more than just words and yet we place so much importance on language. Perhaps technology has exacerbated this. Technology provides a useful form of communication but can be a barrier to reading people beyond language.

I found there were elements of comedy in the practice that were enjoyable. There were moments that felt a little surreal and I found myself smiling.

It bought up interesting questions about east and western philosophies, Brecht, the conscious and unconscious. Questions of in and out, ying and yang.

Within the context of painting, I thought about the part that senses played. Whether drawn to someone else’s painting primarily through the senses or allowing oneself to work primarily through senses. Painting as a form of performance, just responding to the environment. What limitations would I set in such a context? Colour palette? Materials? Paradoxically perhaps, there seems to be a control in actively choosing to let go. Observational drawing is never just visual, it is also a response to an environment, activating senses, emotions.

The practice provided a platform to evaluate social/cultural constructs, consider the presence of the artist, the authentic moment and the vulnerability of a moment.

Collis’s work takes utilitarian and overlooked every day objects and subverts the viewers expectations by making the “paint splatters” on a chair out of precious stones for example. Influenced by artists such as Robert Morris, who focus on materials, and those who explore mimesis, such as Jeff Koons, her work is inherently craft based, and has an element of humour, imploring viewers to reevaluate their preconceptions. The term “Baroque Minimalism” has been used to describe her work.

“Typically works involve momentous amounts of often hidden labour to create an object that may easily go unnoticed, but is replete with value, be it material or conceptual. Much of Collis’ work can go un-noticed and this visual gamble results in a possible conceptual pay-off that rewards concerted investigation by the viewer.” – I love the idea of rewarding those who engage with what is around them with the satisfaction of an ‘aha’ moment, solving a riddle.

To me, there is something wabi-sabi about her work in the sense that she is asking her audience to find beauty in the everyday. Her use of precious, valuable materials for things that would usually be considered ‘damaged’ also reminds me of kintsugi.

https://www.artsy.net/artist/susan-collis

Quote taken from http://www.seventeengallery.com/artists/susan-collis/

Susanna Castledon explores the notion of the moving and stationary in her work about the Airplane Boneyard. She describes the experience as an”conceptual and physical experience”. The subject matter is something that was once mobile and now stationary. Her use of frottage is by nature a physical act of movement to capture a stationary image.

Castledon takes 1:1 scale rubbings by taking paper that she has grasped and sanded in her studio and then placing the sheets in order to take a frottage with sand paper.

On Frottage:

Castledon postulates that frottage provides a more intimate connection through the power of touch.

“Recording objects through the tactile process of frottage can evoke an affective tension between the artist, the subject, and the environment in which the exchange took place”.

“For me, the indexical nature of frottage grounds the creative practice in a particular place, on a surface, where for a moment in time the object stays still.”

“It is a slow but inherently active process performed on a stationary aircraft that, through the low process of frottage, intimately records an object that is usually untouchable”

“The sense of touch is inextricably linked to the process of frottage”. In her work “there is a level of perception that privileges the hand over the eye, the unseen over the seen”.

“In making a frottage, the sense of sight is overridden by the sensation of touch.”

On the experience of working in Landscape and Environment:

She talks of how an environment impacts the work. How the changing environment changed the way she worked, her body, her materials and therefore the work she produced. The environment affected her mark making.

She writes “Through their respective journeying, Wylie and Ingold adopter phenomological approaches to sensory and perceptual experiences, often via the notions of affect and precept. Affect and precept, as Wylie (2005) states, are “a charged background of affective capacities and tensions acting as a catalyst for corporeal practice and performance”.”

And “Morris (1995), in his essay “Some Notes on the Phenomonology of the Making” considered perception and it’s meaningful relation to the world, recognising our “bodies intimate awareness of weight and balance, up and down, motion and rest, and a general sense of the bodily limits of behaviour in relation to these awarenesses”. These awarenesses play out in the physical rhythm.”

She quotes Wylie further “configurations of motion and materiality – of light, colour, morphology and mood – from which distinctive senses of self and landscape and walker and ground, observer and observed, distil and refract” (Wylie 2005).

“As discussed earlier, the artistic interactions and encounters are not controlled solely by the artist, but are in fact moulded, affected, and influenced by the environment and atmosphere in which they are made”.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2373566X.2018.1500865

Having amused a tree surgeon by calling to ask if I would kill a tree if I put PVA glue on it, he responded saying it was pretty inoffensive stuff. I applied imitation gold leaf to the cracks in bark on a tree. I wanted to draw attention to nature, for it to encourage us to reevaluate what is broken, what is beautiful within a framework of wabi sabi. It felt very meditative. Felt a bit Banksy. In retrospect it was quite performative.

I tried applying it to a leaf that had fallen from a tree, a symbol of time passing, of autumn. I left the leaf in location. It almost felt ceremonial.

I tried applying gold leaf into the cracks of a pavement. A man made construction, it juxtaposed the tree. Perhaps it invited humour to something mundane. Something unexpected.

I saw a piece of rubbish, a sweet rapper that almost looked like my imitation gold which made me wonder whether I was littering.

I like the idea of the impermanence of the art. As a water soluble glue it will wash away and so become a memory, an experience (save the photos). I like the idea that people will walk past it it, see it and wonder what the f*** is that, maybe be bemused, maybe amused. Their thoughts hijacked for a moment.

Goldsworthy sees land art as a form of nourishment, he needs the land. He wants to understand an energy within himself that he also sees in plants and land, shared, mutual. He describes a sense of energy working outside that’s different to studio. He’s interested in “growth, time, change and the idea of flow in nature”.

He’s primarily influenced by natural water, sea and rivers. Learns a lot about time from the river and tides.

He’s dislocated by travel, feels uprooted, a stranger. (Ingold’s idea of forced travel)

His works are largely temporary pieces, inspired by movement or energy in landscape. When the pieces are moved by the elements, he says it feels more like a moment in the cycle rather than destruction. “Total control can be the death of a work.”

There’s an intrinsic element of time when working in nature, particularly with tides. Sometimes his constructions feel like a race against time. A sense of the unknown when he works, not knowing how nature will react. Very process based. He experiences an intense disappointment when something stops working or collapses within the process. As he works, his understanding of the environment grows parallel to the work. One of the aims of his work is “to understand the stone”.

Stones line pathways and act as markers around the world, Goldsworthy sees the stones he uses as markers of his own journey. He sees a seed within a stone and therefore potential growth. To me there’s an element of irony in his work with stone since often his constructions are ephemeral but the material is so durable. I like the idea of using many pieces of fixed form to create something bigger.

In the context of a plant that becomes toxic when it’s sporing, he talks of beautiful landscapes having a darker side. The root of this plant is black where it has been growing in soil. He likens this change of colour to a fire that chars the earth, it is as a result of energy, of heat. He is fascinated by these processes/forces that occur within nature. “The real work is the change”.

Uses photography to describe his sculptures and to see his work from a fresh perspective.

A river is linear but ebbs and flows. It serves many things and creatures, it is not just water.

“I don’t think the land needs me at all but I do need it”, he talks of his work rooting him.

He feels the presence of other beings that have lived previously in a space and considers himself the next layer, like an archaeological strata.

Takes a work to the very edge of its collapse. Describes this as a “beautiful balance”. He primarily works intuitively. Perhaps its beauty is in its authenticity and the intrigue of it being on the verge of collapse. Tacita Dean has also referenced a sense of risk in working with nature. Perhaps his work, in its impermanence in nature, is also in the vein of Olafur Elliason’s observation that no one owns a rainbow.

When working with a waller it is a collaboration. He trusts the craft of the waller and directs the space and direction. The wall almost makes itself. The movement is dictated by the wall.

He is drawn to the colour red. A natural colour within him. The iron content that makes the stone it red, as with blood. He believes the colour is charged with a particular energy, such a violent colour. The red looks so out of place by the river, far removed and yet it comes from the river.

When working in a building he likes to use the whole wall. Using clay to reference a buildings origins but containing it. He uses people’s hair from the local hairdresser to bind the clay therefore his village becomes a part of the work. He says the red clay feels alive, has an energy, references volcanos.

He almost seems shamanistic, spiritual, pagan – “there’s a world beyond what words can define for me” his work “says a lot more”. I wonder about Christianity’s role in placing humanity above all other beings and the arts.

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/l/land-art

(Images from here)

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/andy-goldsworthys-ephemeral-works-artwork-that-is-a-testament-to-passing-time-a6694826.html%3famp