SNU. ASU2. You might wonder why i keep slipping in diary entries into my blog. I am noting them down because i have a mind to make a small book or pamphlet of them at some point, to have on record this moment in time and how it was for me. I see that this is what artists all over are doing. Its an obvious impulse how creative people manage disruption is to meet it with hands open. The virus is what it is. The governments response is what it is. We have little say about the external circumstances we find ourselves in but we do have control over our internal response. One of my other external circumstances is this hand in. It has to be done. It is frustrating because my heart wants to paint and draw but what i have to do is tap tap on a keyboard. Writing out what i had hoped would be seen. And then after i've done this i will likely have to write it out again to save my tutors the bother of reading it all tho i will hand it all in.
But that is as it is. The covid19 diary is a side project but it is also connected because it is happening now and everything is tied to this virus. Our befores and our afters presuming we have an after and don't die. I'm using the royal we i guess we are all in this together but also we are not. Another thread i have come back to over and over again the notion of being in someone else's shoes. It is the capacity to see this that seems to be the crux of the problem with man as a species. We do know it. Babies will cry if another baby cries, empathy seems to be mostly innate but somewhere along the lines it stops to a greater or lesser extent. It ties in with the collaborative project about how homeless people are seen/witnessed/judged. It ties in with the way that i have begun to illustrate the stations of the cross. It ties in with my childhood and my relationship with Jon. Is it just too much effort in a world on sensation overload, is it a thing that we drop to survive, looking away because looking asks us to feel what we would feel if we were in their situation. I had printed some little caterpillar boots because boots and shoes are a bit of a leitmotif for me. The boots were the subject of work i made for a multi-generational series of workshops in 2017. And are the beginning of my masters project which is suspended until lockdown is done. The silver shoes are a memory, another part of my childhood, and i've put up an image because i was hoping to work with them but the lack of time mean they are just part of the picture, the packet of seeds not sprinkled or planted. They connect to the red dolls shoe and the boots and where that story will go is not known and likely will drop to the bottom of the stream to be picked up sometime later along the line.
Showing posts with label Objects. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Objects. Show all posts
Wednesday, 29 April 2020
Monday, 27 April 2020
SNU. ASU2. This is where my SNU and ASU2 projects begin to physically bridge. This old work used as objects takes me into the story of Jesus' journey to the cross simply because one of the models is Mary and child. If Jesus' story is used as an allegorical tale then there is not really so much space between my personal history, the Jesus story or anyone else's story. The cross is the life you carry on your back and it is a lighter or heavier burden dependent on those you meet, the way that you came to that cross, and how long you have felt its weight on your shoulders.
The models are human forms too, and perhaps that is also pertinent. The need to see outside of oneself to understand that our needs do not stand alone, they do not stand alone, and covid19 is giving us chance to see that, to understand that we as people do not stand alone, and we as a species do not stand alone. I have always baulked at the notion that man holds dominion over this earth that supposedly Adam was given in the garden of Eden, i feel that man has abused that gift. Again covid19 is letting us know that man does not have dominion.
In older paintings of the crucifixion there is often a skull placed at the base of the cross, this is Adams skull and represents the banishment of Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden. Jesus' death is meant to assuage the sins of the fathers and thereby allow passage back to the garden of Eden. Is there something we can learn from this whether we are christian or not (i am not). I'd add in here too the suffering of the two women left to grieve, his mother and his companion, their suffering should not be brushed aside. Their grief. Their pain. I wonder if the dead also suffer after death or if it is only the living, i guess i won't know till i die myself.
But here, the point where the SNU and ASU2 meet is with these models, the originals slightly bigger and the 3d models with scaffolding and base left intact. The hold between the two projects and perhaps any two living entities is understanding and compassion.
The models are human forms too, and perhaps that is also pertinent. The need to see outside of oneself to understand that our needs do not stand alone, they do not stand alone, and covid19 is giving us chance to see that, to understand that we as people do not stand alone, and we as a species do not stand alone. I have always baulked at the notion that man holds dominion over this earth that supposedly Adam was given in the garden of Eden, i feel that man has abused that gift. Again covid19 is letting us know that man does not have dominion.
In older paintings of the crucifixion there is often a skull placed at the base of the cross, this is Adams skull and represents the banishment of Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden. Jesus' death is meant to assuage the sins of the fathers and thereby allow passage back to the garden of Eden. Is there something we can learn from this whether we are christian or not (i am not). I'd add in here too the suffering of the two women left to grieve, his mother and his companion, their suffering should not be brushed aside. Their grief. Their pain. I wonder if the dead also suffer after death or if it is only the living, i guess i won't know till i die myself.
But here, the point where the SNU and ASU2 meet is with these models, the originals slightly bigger and the 3d models with scaffolding and base left intact. The hold between the two projects and perhaps any two living entities is understanding and compassion.
Sunday, 26 April 2020
SNU. Back to the nitty gritty and practical. Because my photographs were provoking deep and difficult emotions and i was struggling to keep my mind steady i decided to take a side step to making moulds out of objects. Remembering how to make plaster moulds was part of the brief i had set myself anyway and i wanted to find a way to make a mould of a paint tube so that i could compare the end product with the 3d printed painted tube and i'd hoped to make a slush wax paint tube that could be a bronze in the end. I also wanted to find out what kind of object worked in a silicone mould and then how the materials that could be cast in the moulds acted within the moulds. Similarly with plaster moulds. Also i was aware that i needed to press on with work for my ASU2 module but that my path to the work i wanted to make for that required me to build up a body of knowledge in preparation. That body formed part of my SNU practice.
So to start i took in pebbles, shells, a square stone (that i had/have several ideas for), a paint tube (not my granny's cool LINO ink one), a single doll's shoe (red, with cinderella written small on the the heel-sole as part of the design), and a red aeroplane from a stencil kit that i had as a child. The links to my childhood are obvious with the latter two objects but they also link to flight, and foot prints, and walking in somebody else's shoes ergo empathy, sympathy and compassion, and fairy tales, and journeys, and work i have made previously.
Work i have made previously also got picked as a thread that connected my SNU to ASU2. My creative process is a kind of mapping of ideas, a piece of work that comes out of the map acts as way marker and may be returned to as whim or pull moves me. My creative story threads are rarely completed they just get to a place where a stop can be taken.
It was part of my wanting to know what the 3d print could and couldn't do that led me to take in two models i'd made at different, much earlier points in my life, to see if they could be printed. One i had made at school, at about age 13, it is two figures kneeling one with an arm around the other. It was just before i gave up art at school. There are points in our lives when we make decisions that lead our lives one way or another and there is no way of knowing how things would have gone if a different decision had been made. I gave this model to my granny for christmas that year, i was proud of it, its a grown child's art i could be embarrassed about now but it said something i needed to say. My grandparents had it in their sitting room for years and it gave me a boost to see it when we visited Later after both my grandparents had died and their house was cleared i went up into their loft space for one last time. There on a window sill in the otherwise empty room was my model. I picked it up and took it home. It would have been rubble when the new owners knocked the house down to make space for their new home. The other model was a madonna, a mother and child, made in my early twenties when i was a young single mum. It is part of a set of three models, Gabriel, Joseph, and Mary with baby Jesus. It got knocked off the piano and broke in half at some point but you know what you value by whether you keep and or fix it when it gets broken. Again the broken things links ASU2 and SNU but at this point the theme is just emerging so it may become clearer later in the write up.
The two 3d models came out well from the printer but because i love to see the process i had asked if the scaffolding and base could be left rather than removed. This was because print size means more or less scaffolding and the shape of a thing dictates the need for scaffolding. I found this fascinating because the scaffolding changed the objects. Also because the models were made from figures the scaffolding seemed to relate to social fabric, support systems, the way the earth holds us, how much we ask of the earth. It is also part of a build up of the invisible framework of knowledge that is what my SNU project has been about building. With the printmaking what makes a good image using ready made images to help my eyes learn to discern, why 3d how do i build a thing that rests steady on a surface, height is a factor, also the reach from the centre as much as the reach from our own centre, physical, emotional or mental, changes our balance and may create a need to reach out for help or support.
At this point i went back to the counsellor i knew from my BA because sometimes leaning in towards safety can save a lot of trouble. I knew i was struggling but also that with the right support i would be able to define what part of my struggle belonged to me and what did not, to see my errors but also to let others carry their errors. This is more related to my ASU2 theme but all work is part of the movement that forms the sequence. Perhaps i am thinking too much for a short MA module but for me the emotional back story is an important part of the making process.
Starting the SNU module i was working with two threads, perhaps i could say they were coming in at 90 degrees, right angles; North travelling South to the centre, printmaking, image-making, work in 2d, and East travelling West again coming to centre, my life story with Jon as a part of it guiding the thread but not dictating its line. The ASU2 and the SNU mould making and 3d work could perhaps be South going North and The Stations of the Cross, or any story that isn't mine, West to East. I don't really know if i am making myself clear with this flat compass graphic but my point is that all the work is tied together, coming to me or out of me but not as a linear torch beam but more as a round or sphere.
If this is a research write up maybe that is probably too baggy an idea to put forward. But how does a person whose work is driven both by feeling and making write a research report without putting the felt process in as well as the manufacture ? Later my tutor pointed me towards phenomenology and i looked up a little about this but got stopped in my tracks by the virus which broke my ability to focus on anything mentally demanding for weeks. It is something to come back to as my ability to concentrate returns.
The next posts will be pictures of the silicon moulds and the objects and the 3d printed objects.
So to start i took in pebbles, shells, a square stone (that i had/have several ideas for), a paint tube (not my granny's cool LINO ink one), a single doll's shoe (red, with cinderella written small on the the heel-sole as part of the design), and a red aeroplane from a stencil kit that i had as a child. The links to my childhood are obvious with the latter two objects but they also link to flight, and foot prints, and walking in somebody else's shoes ergo empathy, sympathy and compassion, and fairy tales, and journeys, and work i have made previously.
Work i have made previously also got picked as a thread that connected my SNU to ASU2. My creative process is a kind of mapping of ideas, a piece of work that comes out of the map acts as way marker and may be returned to as whim or pull moves me. My creative story threads are rarely completed they just get to a place where a stop can be taken.
It was part of my wanting to know what the 3d print could and couldn't do that led me to take in two models i'd made at different, much earlier points in my life, to see if they could be printed. One i had made at school, at about age 13, it is two figures kneeling one with an arm around the other. It was just before i gave up art at school. There are points in our lives when we make decisions that lead our lives one way or another and there is no way of knowing how things would have gone if a different decision had been made. I gave this model to my granny for christmas that year, i was proud of it, its a grown child's art i could be embarrassed about now but it said something i needed to say. My grandparents had it in their sitting room for years and it gave me a boost to see it when we visited Later after both my grandparents had died and their house was cleared i went up into their loft space for one last time. There on a window sill in the otherwise empty room was my model. I picked it up and took it home. It would have been rubble when the new owners knocked the house down to make space for their new home. The other model was a madonna, a mother and child, made in my early twenties when i was a young single mum. It is part of a set of three models, Gabriel, Joseph, and Mary with baby Jesus. It got knocked off the piano and broke in half at some point but you know what you value by whether you keep and or fix it when it gets broken. Again the broken things links ASU2 and SNU but at this point the theme is just emerging so it may become clearer later in the write up.
The two 3d models came out well from the printer but because i love to see the process i had asked if the scaffolding and base could be left rather than removed. This was because print size means more or less scaffolding and the shape of a thing dictates the need for scaffolding. I found this fascinating because the scaffolding changed the objects. Also because the models were made from figures the scaffolding seemed to relate to social fabric, support systems, the way the earth holds us, how much we ask of the earth. It is also part of a build up of the invisible framework of knowledge that is what my SNU project has been about building. With the printmaking what makes a good image using ready made images to help my eyes learn to discern, why 3d how do i build a thing that rests steady on a surface, height is a factor, also the reach from the centre as much as the reach from our own centre, physical, emotional or mental, changes our balance and may create a need to reach out for help or support.
At this point i went back to the counsellor i knew from my BA because sometimes leaning in towards safety can save a lot of trouble. I knew i was struggling but also that with the right support i would be able to define what part of my struggle belonged to me and what did not, to see my errors but also to let others carry their errors. This is more related to my ASU2 theme but all work is part of the movement that forms the sequence. Perhaps i am thinking too much for a short MA module but for me the emotional back story is an important part of the making process.
Starting the SNU module i was working with two threads, perhaps i could say they were coming in at 90 degrees, right angles; North travelling South to the centre, printmaking, image-making, work in 2d, and East travelling West again coming to centre, my life story with Jon as a part of it guiding the thread but not dictating its line. The ASU2 and the SNU mould making and 3d work could perhaps be South going North and The Stations of the Cross, or any story that isn't mine, West to East. I don't really know if i am making myself clear with this flat compass graphic but my point is that all the work is tied together, coming to me or out of me but not as a linear torch beam but more as a round or sphere.
If this is a research write up maybe that is probably too baggy an idea to put forward. But how does a person whose work is driven both by feeling and making write a research report without putting the felt process in as well as the manufacture ? Later my tutor pointed me towards phenomenology and i looked up a little about this but got stopped in my tracks by the virus which broke my ability to focus on anything mentally demanding for weeks. It is something to come back to as my ability to concentrate returns.
The next posts will be pictures of the silicon moulds and the objects and the 3d printed objects.
Sunday, 19 April 2020
Sunday, 15 March 2020
Ok ... keep going. Its been a week of grief and tears but like walking in the rain its no good stopping. The pain of losing someone you love doesn't seem to get easier. Sorrow this week has manifested as a great dark weight in the centre of my chest that hurts with an insistence that cannot be denied. One step in front of another. I can hear voices saying stop making a fuss, what a fuss, silly fuss, stupid woman, let go. But also kinder voices including Jon's. I think it was him nagging me to ask for the letters. He knew what they were of course, that it was important that they came back to me. That sounds a bit mad but the dead do seem to hang about. I used to sometimes appeal to my granny for counsel, my mother's mother, who was fierce and not to be crossed but fair. And i feel my great aunt Leska as a benign presence in the background. I have one of her rosaries, red plastic beads and a metal cross made of some cheap light metal. I also have a little painting of a nun that came to me after she died. They are not things of value to anyone but me. Its how it is with things that belong to people who take up heart space. The pecuniary worth is of less matter than the moment or person that an object represents. Objects carry secrets. A thing picked up by two on a walk may be of no consequence to anyone else but could well be a port-key to another time and place for either of those two. It is how the letters i received have been this week. I haven't looked at them all but some of them take me back to his living room seeing them on the mantelpiece below which stood the two chinese figures that had come from his parents' house when his mother died. Some i can remember being attached to his fridge with magnets along with other things. Of course it means i've been occupying his house in my mind. Remembering the feel of how it was when we were together there. The stairs, the porch, the living room and kitchen, the bedrooms and bathroom and the views from all the windows and his beautiful garden, the smell of fennel on my hands, bees on the flowers and dragon flies and tadpoles, gold finches on teasels, the plants we bought together.
Enough. Enough already. Nostalgia is an addictive drug. Its a trip. It is but it isn't. I can return to a place, feel what i felt there, but it is out of body material. One of the things that Jon's death made me very aware of is that that which physically touches me has a worth that is different to that which is distant, historical or geographical. I can go back to my grandparents houses or my childhood home or any number of other places in my mind and they are real places but it is not real in the way that my body returning is real. My grandparents house was knocked down and rebuilt when they died. And Jon's house is just a 1980's end terrace housing estate house now. The place it was when it was his house and my home from home is in me. I wonder if the walls remember me and him but houses have so many occupants, our ghosts may be there, but they are also here and elsewhere. It's strange how even the living have ghosts.
And ghosts reside within our bodies too. Ghosts of our past selves and those whose lives have touched us for better or worse. The mediocre tend to not be remembered so well only the very good and very bad. This blog is surely not reflective journal writing but it will be handed in with all the others when hand in comes. Because my work is always born out of felt experience. It is where it stems from.
This week past we were asked to make a Pecha Kucha presentation, 20 slides 20 seconds talk per slide. I can't say i was looking forward to it, but i could see the point. I was less prepared than i would have liked but time just skids past and so it felt like an achievement just turning up and having a crack at it. And tho' i was dreading it, good things about being asked to do it, were seeing other people's presentations and being inspired, going back over the term's work and realising how much i had done and putting it together as a story, and being given feedback. My class mates seemed to like it more than my tutor who wanted more information about my process. 20 seconds isn't really long enough to explain the difference between a two part mould and a three part mould or why i needed to make both or any of the other things i learned from making those moulds and filling them with wax and setting the cast objects on cups with sprue and risers and if i'd gone into detail about that i'd have had to miss out other stuff so i went with my heart and made the story the process that i spoke about.
I am not sure if it was this week or last week that we had a lecture in which it was suggested we go back to our manifestos and remember why we started out MA. It's good sometimes to go back to why. I've been disaffected this term. I did have a hiccup a month or so back but the disaffection has hung about for too long. I need to remember how lucky i am to be studying what a gift it is that i'm giving myself. I am too uptight at the moment, irritable and not nice to be with. It could be my projects' subject matter both of which have been problematic. I am currently being nailed to the cross for my ASU 2 Stations of the Cross project which clearly is not great. And having spent the past couple of weeks focusing on my teenage self i seem to have picked up some of her post punk "fuck you" attitude. Not very helpful when trying to conform to learning outcomes. It could also be a desperate need to play make, to make for pure pleasure and it may be that i have to let go a little of trying and just let what needs to come come. It's been inspiring to be in the print workshops with the first year BA students working on etching plates. Being with so many people working on one project producing such different work reminds me that there are many ways to get to a place, be that place a finished etching plate, the top of a mountain or the end of a long rainy walk with a heavy pack or heavy heart.
Enough. Enough already. Nostalgia is an addictive drug. Its a trip. It is but it isn't. I can return to a place, feel what i felt there, but it is out of body material. One of the things that Jon's death made me very aware of is that that which physically touches me has a worth that is different to that which is distant, historical or geographical. I can go back to my grandparents houses or my childhood home or any number of other places in my mind and they are real places but it is not real in the way that my body returning is real. My grandparents house was knocked down and rebuilt when they died. And Jon's house is just a 1980's end terrace housing estate house now. The place it was when it was his house and my home from home is in me. I wonder if the walls remember me and him but houses have so many occupants, our ghosts may be there, but they are also here and elsewhere. It's strange how even the living have ghosts.
And ghosts reside within our bodies too. Ghosts of our past selves and those whose lives have touched us for better or worse. The mediocre tend to not be remembered so well only the very good and very bad. This blog is surely not reflective journal writing but it will be handed in with all the others when hand in comes. Because my work is always born out of felt experience. It is where it stems from.
This week past we were asked to make a Pecha Kucha presentation, 20 slides 20 seconds talk per slide. I can't say i was looking forward to it, but i could see the point. I was less prepared than i would have liked but time just skids past and so it felt like an achievement just turning up and having a crack at it. And tho' i was dreading it, good things about being asked to do it, were seeing other people's presentations and being inspired, going back over the term's work and realising how much i had done and putting it together as a story, and being given feedback. My class mates seemed to like it more than my tutor who wanted more information about my process. 20 seconds isn't really long enough to explain the difference between a two part mould and a three part mould or why i needed to make both or any of the other things i learned from making those moulds and filling them with wax and setting the cast objects on cups with sprue and risers and if i'd gone into detail about that i'd have had to miss out other stuff so i went with my heart and made the story the process that i spoke about.
I am not sure if it was this week or last week that we had a lecture in which it was suggested we go back to our manifestos and remember why we started out MA. It's good sometimes to go back to why. I've been disaffected this term. I did have a hiccup a month or so back but the disaffection has hung about for too long. I need to remember how lucky i am to be studying what a gift it is that i'm giving myself. I am too uptight at the moment, irritable and not nice to be with. It could be my projects' subject matter both of which have been problematic. I am currently being nailed to the cross for my ASU 2 Stations of the Cross project which clearly is not great. And having spent the past couple of weeks focusing on my teenage self i seem to have picked up some of her post punk "fuck you" attitude. Not very helpful when trying to conform to learning outcomes. It could also be a desperate need to play make, to make for pure pleasure and it may be that i have to let go a little of trying and just let what needs to come come. It's been inspiring to be in the print workshops with the first year BA students working on etching plates. Being with so many people working on one project producing such different work reminds me that there are many ways to get to a place, be that place a finished etching plate, the top of a mountain or the end of a long rainy walk with a heavy pack or heavy heart.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)