Strangely enough, in contrast to the photograph, this blog has become far too clinical and I am not sure I intended this. I wanted this internet space to be an area where I can reflect upon what I am doing and give some insight into my working processes. I think the work presented shows a definite trajectory, but have ended up published as finished pieces. However, a blog format suits my practice better than any other inter-web medium. I didn't want an over/under designed website, I wanted a diary. I have also realised that I rarely write about my work now.
Back to the impending degree show. My space is filled with work that is yet to be realised. A-lot of it feels old and stale. But still, its sitting there, waiting to be finished in someway. I have one piece that I know I want to be included.
Again it's difficult to get focused. Getting suggestions from other people sometimes helps, but quite often if a comment is poorly judged I just get annoyed.
The majority of problems seem to be arising from where my drawing practice is situated in relation to the vertical plane of representation. As you can tell from the previous post - a script? my drawing pulls directly from writing/notation. Both begin life on the horizontal, the plane of writing. So how can I rectify this through the curation of my show?
With the large charcoal drawing tid (2008), I've started to display it sliding off the wall, stuck in an uneasy place between the two planes. I've only just named this piece, which comes in a series of three 4m scrolls. However, displaying these drawings means the beautiful charcoal eddies seen on the paper slip and disappear, a problem I can't do anything about.
Tid - means time or tide in Anglo Saxon. The double meaning somehow helps to quantify something which has remained elusive since Plato wrote the Timaeus thousands of years ago. Plato describes the place, which time and space co-habit as the chora. Chora can be defined as the site of inscription, a place of temporality, a place of becoming. Julia Kristeva talks of chora in Revolution in Poetic Language, in relationship to the becoming of linguistic systems. Kristeva somehow sees chora as the beginning process of the formation of language. I think Kristeva's definition is where I can situate the creation of tid.
Another piece I am working on in response to this is a series of books which will contain layers of charcoal trapped between the pages. The pages themselves will contain holes in which the charcoal can hopefully pass through. The pages will be non-specific, merely scrap paper or at least paper of no real economic value. I'm thinking sugar paper at the moment. The following photographs show two prototypes that I am going to try out this week. It's hard to tell from the mock ups presented, but hopefully you get a rough idea.
I thought the books would give the viewer a better comprehension of how tid was produced and the inherent problems associated with its display. The temporality of charcoal marks and charcoal remnants. Maybe a potential title is phrase book for tid.
The material qualities of charcoal as an inscribing tool will manifest as the viewer opens and closes the pages, the charcoal slips away, drops down, never to form the same vocabulary again.
When the process starts again, the framework is the same, the pages and the holes, but everytime a new dialogue is born of the material. The charcoal will act as an archaic force in a tightly measured grammatical system perhaps, if relating back to language systems.
