Finally beginning to find out what excites me. Layers upon layers of thinking, drawing and combining the two. I think I had tried to pigeonhole myself and compare my work to the previous years. it's still intrinsically apart of me and my practice but I want to change the approach and I know I have done that. Beforehand my approach would be to get as much down as possible with no real thought and then go crazy with colours and throw in my imagination - which sometimes got the best of me. My practice is a lot more grounded and relaxed now, there's no cloud looming over my head that is forcing me to articulate my work in a multitude of ways. Articulation has been a process I've been battling with this semester too, but through the grounded and rules of drawing module I've allowed for my thoughts and reasons to become clearer.
I did think I would catch myself up or the rug would be pulled from underneath but I've embraced the change and challenge. Through no fault of my own I had conditioned myself and now I can acknowledge my practice has changed and it has developed. the mental work proves so.
By being more perceptive of my surroundings and acknowledging my eye sight as a barrier for drawing and seeing it has nurtured my practice greatly. Tracing paper has been a continuum in my practice and I know why, it's like another lens for me to see between. I often think of Ingrid Calames work and her approach to tracing the world and what that means for her and why tracing paper excites myself. There's something ephemeral about it, it's transparency, milkyness and frosty nature invites a place for grounding. it reminds me of when i have blurry eyes or rain gets on my glasses, tracing paper holds that same surface. A barrier but also a view into my world.
Getting out of my studio has been a habit I desperately needed to break, it had me trapped. After my tutorial with Jaci Donachie I felt a much needed push to remove myself from my studio and try different areas and explore. Taking baby steps to find out if my work translates into different environments, which I think it will. I have a few ideas up my sleeves for over Christmas time and between now and assessment. I'd like to document a busy street, a bus journey, a conversation, making dinner, making love, a party and more sounds. these are just the first things that pop into my head but I think there's a real intimacy in all of these and the link between intimacy and drawing is something I'm fond of. Referring back to my visual diary, these ideas are an extension of that.
Sculpture and my sculptures. Been thinking about ways to introduce my sculptural work and the avenue I want/plan to take them down. Of course, adhering more to my drawing practice to allow for the development of my sculptural work. I can get carried away at times when bringing drawings into tangible installations. I feel a switch from colourful drawings to more stripped back and intimate drawings with minimal colour, less noise, noise as in bright "look at me" colours - they've been getting to me as of late. I love sculpture and the marriage of drawing and sculpture, I want to draw on wood and carve into it. make metal sculptures and obsess over textures. To talk about obsessing, I would have to mention Katie Bells', Julia Steiner and Nidhal Chamekhs work. I watched Bells artist talk recently and fell back in love with her work, her idea of the sculptures and installation being actors and a stage for something to take place on. The sculptures waiting for their cue. I found this narrative inviting and lingering in my mind. it's also how I see my own sculptures, the lightbulb went on when I heard her mention the cue. My sculptures are suspended in time, waiting for their moment, plucked from a script and playing out their tasks and duties. I should write a play about them, a drawing of the script. continue to elaborate on whats already there or isn't.
Painting by Beatrice Meoni and Drawing by Julia Steiner
Keep going back and looking at these pieces. love the sense of movement and energy within them. the hints of something.
Artist Talk by Katie Bell , 2020
Nidhal Chamekh studio visit
Found out about Nidhal Chamekh after my tutorial with Tania back in October, she recommended I look at his work and the article above was a great introduction. Really love his use of layering and combination of realism and more stylised drawing. It feels like it shouldn't work - but it does and thats what I enjoy about it. Also, everytime I look at his work I feel like I discover something new, all the little details allow for new discoveries to unfold. Narratives play a huge role in Chamekhs work especially with historical and political narratives taking reign within his work. It's still something i'm trying out, including my own narratives into my work, it's a gradual process. I think in the very near future there will be a narrative or multiple.
Intertwining my thoughts into drawings and sculpture. My journal at home, keeping my thoughts at bay.
I'm a vehicle for my work, a sponge soaking up the marks and data and filtering it through my drawings. Collecting images and thoughts for my presentation in the lead up to assessments. Contour of line is my rule and I use it to observe my surroundings. I'm interested in that intersection of line and writing. Cy Twombly springs to mind and Britta Huttenlocher who I discovered recently. Transferring my data into a language. Something that has been a product of these past few weeks, the emergence of new rules and grounding myself. Read another essay by Ernst van Alphen on " Looking at Drawing: theoretical distinctions and their usefulness" from the Writing on Drawing book. The writing by Roland Barthes within the essay struck me, in particular with Cy Twombly's work and how he discusses Twombly. Barthes alludes to the essence of Twomblys work and the use of the hand. Writing conducted by the hand, the action of writing and Barthes idea of 'left-handedness' which ,eliminates any association with technique. I thought about this phrase and how i've removed certain rules which are a form of technique, which in turn has resulted in a new drawing approach. layers and fluidity. I'm creating maps of destinations which aren't real. plucking from surroundings that moment someone passes by, sounds in the background, the breeze of air and the peripheral sight of seeing something just that tiny bit that can result in something.
Within the essay I learn more about my own approach when applying the knowledge that Alphen and Barthes had presented. The "intransitive activity" of drawing and how drawing was seen in the surrealist and conceptual movements. Surrealist artists gave way to automatism and allowed the hand to rein free when creating drawings which saw in the 1960s, conceptualism harboured drawing as a weapon against the dominance of the eye. (Alphen, pg 61) This phrase " Dominance of the eye" is something I've been playing around with, the allusiveness of whats not there and what actually is. The data filtering in. The outline of what was or is to be. my works been taking on the shape of maps and the imagined space, folded away and waiting to be unravelled. Drawing on tracing paper in particular hints to that allusiveness, as i mentioned in my presentation it's like another lens to see. It might distort the vision kind of like my actual lenses, it distorts it for the better but when marks or smudges appear my vision is disrupted. That's the connection between tracing paper and imprint, I'm seeing the marks around me as extensions of my vision.
This has taken me a long time to figure out and connect the dots. They alway were there but for some reason I couldn't find them. Through the rules of drawing module it has enabled myself to unpick and re-mould my rules into a hybrid of old and new, yin and yang. The layers, line and texture all wed together. My work was more erratic before I began the MFA and now through the grounding and rules of drawing modules it has become more situated and mellowed. It is more spontaneous and free now but not erratic in the sense of my drawings being all over the place and having different subjects and no cohesion. It's something i've been thinking about after Alistair Maclennans' talk is the speed of my work and movement. Which co-insides with Jacquelines recommendation of Carolee Schneeman. I found his insight and our discussion very compelling as he spoke as if he knew our work personally and really understood what we were all trying to achieve or what we were up to at that moment in time.
paleography and the movement of the wrist. maps and me.
these are things i have been thinking about lately, maps in particular. I made a connection in my work, they look like maps - a different world. They link and intertwine and the lines look like contour lines from an ordnance survey map , starting to think that the bigger marks are like keys to a location that you'd see on a map. Also, enjoy the way when paper is folded and can be unravelled like a map. Drawing on both sides too to add more depth to the surface, going back to sculpture and thinking of using my drawings as a tool for just that. However, I do enjoy this new avenue I've taken - i can feel it staying for a longer time. It's the way the drawings look on tracing paper specifically and when they're wrapped up that i enjoy, like the glimpse into something , the glimpse of a world to be explored. Going back and forth with how to display and present the work for assessment and i like the idea of other people unravelling it and seeing it unfold bit by bit. Also love the imprint of my drawings on one another when they've been folded. Imprint has been a key aspect to my work this semester, this idea of documenting and orientating with other lenses - other lenses being my glasses. alongside this barrier that's my vision has amalgamated into this body of work I have now. A visual diary that you can be in or imagine yourself in.
Which brings me to paleography, which I learnt about from the writing on drawing book when Roland Barthes discusses Twombly's work. I fell down a rabbit hole and began learning about handwriting and how people from different social statuses were given a distinct way to write something and how clergy men and other people of importance felt writing was too below them that they'd have someone else do it for them. bizarre.
kinetic energy and motion have become more important in my work over the past few weeks as the marks are replicas or hints of that flux. I do think I started off a bit brash and unaware of where I wanted to go with the drawings at large but over time I have fine tuned my approach and allowed the rules I set myself of no colour, immediate response and no time for second guessing to take rein of my practice. Alongside these rules I tried to abandon line, as a starting point for my drawing and try to work within the piece. But it felt almost silly to prevent myself from doing what I enjoy, I like line and like what it offers me. So I kept with it and I did however, try starting a drawing without line and working within which I did enjoy too. I think though, at my current stage it is marrying line with textures and marks and taking that forward, not soo much filling or outlining the drawings or subjects.
Attended the Drawing Discussion - "From Ice and Water, Drawing in precarious environments" - by Emma Stibbon, Sarah Casey, Tania Kovats.
The discussion was really fascinating and hearing from Tania, Emma and Sarah was a delight! I enjoyed the way everyone spoke about their work and it's relation to the environmental aspects they were intrigued by. In particular, in the way Sarah Casey talks about glaciers being passages and traces of time and Tania in the way she talked about water sculpting the landscapes around us. These are phrases that have been stuck in my head for the past few days now. I enjoyed the discussion not only for the environmental aspect but for the window it gave into each artists respective practice. I loved hearing about artefacts from thousands of years ago being found in the ice like presents and how ephemeral drawings can be and what they allude to or discover.
Sarah Casey talked about drawing being a proxy for touch, and I began thinking about what that means in terms of my own practice. Touching a drawing, sculpting it on the page, unravelling something into something else. Which, brought me back to thinking about this essay by Richard Talbot in the "Writing on Drawing" book, where he talks about "Three Dimensional thinking" and how he can rationalise what is happening in space through drawing. Talbot talks of the spatial model which is a model based on experience, which alludes to how our drawing takes shape based off of personal or cultural connections. In regards to my own practice, this has nurtured my understanding of why I often think 'three dimensionally' in the idea of wanting to or seeing my drawing as sculptures or potentially installations. It's the yearning for taking it to the next phase, a material one, which is not always the case but when a shape or line clicks it's time for it to become an object.
Lingering back on layers and life drawing, Paula Rego remains in my head, mainly for the way she paints and draws subjects, making her own world in doing so. I would like to create or stage my own environment which is then used to paint from, thinking back to Katie Bells talk too about arranging still lifes' to paint from, which then lead to sculptures. The spatial model has been altered. This semester sort of slipped by me in terms of planning this idea, it could be for life drawing or for an exercise to get us thinking more spatially. It'd be fun to see everyones take on it and let everyone create their own environment to draw from which could lead to something else.
Taking my work off of paper has been something I want to explore more in the future. I've been trying it out lately with some drawings in the studio, especially after one of our classes on Wednesday with Alex where we wrote prompts and put them in a pile for everyone to choose. I got motion, to observe, up and down and to make a 'good drawing'. It felt like a eureka moment when I got these, like a sign to act on something. Motion stood out to me the most as my drawings usually don't rely on full body motion or movement, only with the movement of the hand and wrists. So I decided to give it a shot, moving with the charcoal, attacking the paper and letting it guide me.
which resulted in the drawing above, I actually had fun with it and the process, thinking back to Alistair Maclennan's talk about processes and letting yourself be led, it felt good to tackle a different approach. The drawing reminds me of Julie Mehretu a little with the lines and sparks across the paper, something that came out instinctively not so much out of influence. I was slightly timid on the walls however, this is something I aim to be less conscious of - only in my studio of course.. Drawing on different surfaces reminds me of frescoes and how they're sort of cemented into the wall like a window.
I came across these two artists, Aster Muro and Olivia Irvine who both make frescoes and really fell in love with their practices. Especially in the presentation of their work. Muro's panels are really stunning and I enjoy the aspect of different elements of a piece coming together to form one singular body. Really love the way Irvine drawings look on the plaster, something so intimate and captivating about seeing the piece before it's sculpted into colours and forms.
Thinking of applying my own drawings into similar approaches, something baking in my head for the following semesters.