Category Thoughts

What Is My Work About?

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Our first two sessions since we’ve been back have made me think – a lot.

This week’s session was about our artistic identity and how to answer the question – what is your work about?

It’s a difficult question to answer. I don’t want to be pigeonholed and I don’t want to be pinned down, which is why I deleted the contents of the ‘About’ page on this blog because it didn’t relate to me anymore, and I’ve been struggling since to think of what to say. I couldn’t think of a way to encapsulate how I see my practice and my work.

But this session has helped me in finding a way forward.

Jonathan showed us a quote by Robert Henri:

‘The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.’

It resonates with me as I interpret it as meaning that art comes out of a way of being, and that artists should focus on the process rather than the making of a product.

We considered the 6 prompts: idea, material, process, context, identity, and mood.

My responses:

Identity:

A woman who feels like she’s on the back nine of life who has been trying to find herself by reflecting on all that has been, is and will be. After Fatemeh mentioned the Iranian philosopher who said that his identity was a lover and his job was to love, I think I’ll change mine to a living maker who lives and makes.

Context:

My lived experience

Process:

Drawing, painting, photography, video, printing, sewing, paper-making, mark-making, playing, whatever feels right in the moment.

Material:

ink, pencil, paint, fabric, paper, canvas, paper, thread, charcoal, pastel, whatever feels right in the moment

Mood:

Exploratory, experimental, fluid, reflective

Idea:

The reiteration of shaping what I make and in turn being shaped by what I make.

A possible short answer: My work is an exploration of becoming; how I shape what I make and how it shapes me in return. I work fluidly across a range of materials and processes from print and drawing to video and photography allowing each piece of work to evolve naturally through experimentation. My work is rooted in my lived experience both past and present, reflecting on an ongoing shifting sense of self.

I like the reference to fluidity, it reminds me of my earlier thoughts and videos about flow and flux. It needs further work, but will do for the time being.

Space

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I’ve been thinking about life afterwards.

I need a space of my own, a place where it takes positive effort to find me. I have such a space and at the beginning of the course I said that I would sort it out, in the third post on this blog, embarrassing, but not surprising – That Sunday Feeling…

That is what I will do. In fact, I have recently started trying to sort out the stuff which currently inhabits the space – a collection of this and that from our past and our parents’ past. I came across some of my old exercise books from school, covered in pages from Smash Hits magazine, which my mother would buy me on Fridays, which was shopping day, together with a yoghurt and a chocolate bar. I also had several pieces of fruit that were to last me the week, and which sat in the fruit bowl on the dining table, slowly decomposing.

My daughter couldn’t get over how neat my handwriting was. My handwriting is a standing joke in our family – I should have been a doctor, apparently. What I noticed was the frequency with which it changed – experiments in mark-making.

Neatness was something which was commented on and leaving space for your work to breathe wasn’t encouraged.

My sister had obviously got her hands on them when she was a child living out her dreams of becoming a teacher. She even gave me a lower mark than the teacher. But I’m glad to see that I had my priorities right at that age: I liked drawing, pop music, going to parties and discos, and also boys.

I suspect that I will discover a wealth of material to prompt further work.

My Best

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‘…the sane human being is satisfied that the best he/she can do at any given moment is the best he/she can do at any given moment…’ Art & Fear.

A question I’ve been asking myself recently is whether I have done my best over the last two years. Yes, I think I have. Yes, I could have spent more time making, but even if I had, I don’t think that I would be in any different position than I am now. What I have done has been enough to enable me to see that I have discovered my way of thinking, seeing and making. There are things that I had hoped to explore within the structure of the course, such as my childhood in my grandmother’s village, but circumstances have not allowed me the time to do so. No matter – it is a project for the future, something to look forward to.

I never used to have this attitude. I always had to do my absolute best, I had to fix everything and in my head I was the only person who could do it. I decided to become a parent and so I would be the best mother that I could be. Fortunately, (or maybe not), I was able to give up work and stay at home, devote all my time and energy to my new job. I tried all sorts of things from puréeing superfoods to baby Beethoven dvds and playing educationally stimulating cds in the car which used to drive me round the bend. I kept up to date with all the new advice being dished out by ‘professionals’ as to how to be a good parent.

I wish that I’d seen this:

You’re Not the Architect of your Children

And I put my hands up to having been a helicoptering mother who carried out her own 360 appraisals as to how well she was doing as a mother by looking at the success of her daughter – how well is she doing at school, how many friends does she have etc.? I’m not entirely sure how it all came about – maybe because I was brought up with the belief that if a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well. I stopped being that parent years ago, but I wish that I’d done it sooner.

Some might say that having given up work, I was somehow validating myself through my daughter and there might be a small element of truth in that but, with hindsight, I can now see it for what it really was – a coping mechanism – a practical way to try and deal with a situation which was emotionally overwhelming. And that’s what I do when I feel that way – I try to exert some control. If you were to ask me what the most momentous events in my life have been, my answer would probably be having a child and experiencing the possibility of losing her, and the death of my parents. In both instances I felt overwhelmed, by responsibility, fear, vulnerability and grief. Not having fully processed those feelings of overwhelm has affected how I have related and responded to circumstances since.

This course has given me the time and space to come to that realisation and to begin to process. One might argue that all I needed was a break from everyday life or therapy, but there is something intrinsic within this course and the making process that has brought me the clarity I needed – the process within which I felt able to relinquish control; to experiment and to accept where the process led me, to lean into the uncertainty and not to resist it.

Ideas

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Often as I’m scrolling through Instagram I’ll save posts which interest me, that create effects or demonstrate processes which I want to try out. I get inspiration from a whole range of sources and often this includes other people’s thoughts, writings or art work. I suppose this goes back to Will Gompertz’s view that there is no such thing as an original idea (Part One: Think Like An Artist), but even so where I know that I have been directly influenced by someone I do acknowledge it – Do Ho Suh, Shiota, Rebecca…

But then what about situations where the influence is subconscious? I was listening to the radio on the way home the other day and an author was being interviewed about one of his novels. The interviewer asked whether it had been written as an homage to a film made by one of his favourite directors and which shared a very similar plot line. The author’s response was awkward. He acknowledged that he knew of the film and thought highly of it, but that he hadn’t written the novel as a direct homage, although he had possibly been indirectly influenced by it. I wondered afterwards why the exchange had seemed, to me at least, a tad uncomfortable.

When considering an issue it is often helpful to turn the tables, so, what would I do if someone took an idea of mine and made it their own? I suppose that I should feel flattered but I’d probably feel irritated. Would I feel any better if my influence was acknowledged? Most definitely. But why is this? Shouldn’t I just accept that once it is out there it is anyone’s, part of Brian Eno’s scenius? After all, there is no property in an idea as an abstract form.

Something to ponder.

The End

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This week’s session centred on the Unit 3 assessment and the end of year show.

It was interesting listening to others talking about their planned pieces and how they could be displayed within the space. I can’t deny that I had a small flicker of panic that I don’t have a singular large finale piece in mind. But on the whole I felt quite calm and relaxed about it. Fingers crossed, I will hopefully have my book which is A5 in size. I would also like to show a larger piece but I think that is yet to come. For the time being, I’m feeling confident that something will emerge from my ongoing experimentation over the coming weeks. I just need to be mindful of elements that might be time dependent such as drying etc.

Josh then said it out loud. He acknowledged the end of the course. We then had a moment reflecting on how we feel about it. Eleana commented that she had asked herself whether she would want to repeat the experience (yes) and Rebecca mentioned that she is dealing with it by having plans and making work which go beyond its end date. Personally, I wouldn’t want to repeat it. There was a time when I wondered whether I could apply again, but on reflection I wouldn’t want to go back to the beginning – I have made so much progress. What I would like is for it to continue because I like the structure and I like the people, but that’s not possible, although we can always stay in touch with each other and use the structure and the way of working which we have developed within the course to carry us forward.

I feel that I now have the tools to continue to develop as an artist beyond the end of the course. The problem is time. My fear is that once the structure has gone I will slip into old ways, of allowing the everyday things and the needs of others to suck up my time. At the moment, others accept that I spend periods of time making because there is a reason – the course. But when it is gone I need to find a way to ensure that I keep that time for myself and that others respect it. I think carrying on the blog will be fundamental to this. One can’t really post about the making of work without making it. I also need to think about my future goals and how I might achieve them.

The Accidental and the Incidental

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I wanted to make some marks – layers of marks – and so I took some A2 paper and used charcoal, pastel, an eraser and a pen.

It wasn’t meant to be anything. I thought that I might use it as a base for something else. I had been wanting to have another go at overprinting the linocut image from Never Say Never. In that post I comment that the shapes look like crouching figures – in retrospect they are foetal-like. The subject of microchimerism has come back to my mind recently and I thought that the idea of making the ink more transparent with each print could touch on that. Also, the marks underneath would also become increasingly visible. I gave it a go but I made a hash of the ratio of ink to extender, and I couldn’t find the new tube of extender so I just added some white which, of course, made the print totally opaque, which wasn’t the original intention.

I left it for a while and got on with other tasks relating to the book and when I revisited it I thought about umbilical cords (something I have referenced previously in Sisters). I thought I might use some of the red thread that I had for my paper experiments to sew some kind of twisting cords which then made me think of using black stitching to delineate between the three shapes. I used a blanket stitch on the second shape as I’d seen at her Tate Modern exhibition that Tracey Emin had used it on her blankets to give a less defined line.

I’m really chuffed. I was thinking as I was sewing that maybe I should have planned where I was going to go, but then decided that, no, I liked the spontaneity of it all. Would I have done anything differently? No. How did I feel as I was making it? I felt pleasure, at all stages. I enjoyed the making of it and I like how it turned out. In fact, over the last few months (Summer Exhibition aside) I have really enjoyed making. That’s not to say that I haven’t enjoyed the process of making before then – I have, particularly the experimenting and and the wandering, it’s just that recently I have felt contented, as if some things have fallen into place. I particularly enjoyed the experiments with lino cuttings and packaging, and I’m really happy with the video that I made.

I think that it comes down to the accidental and the incidental; the unexpected that happens in the process and the small things I notice within the process which then lead to something else.

After Everything Else

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Rebecca recommended a series of short videos on YouTube about elderly artists living in New York made by Joshua Charow.

In one of them, the artist, John Willenbecker, comments that he thinks that he could be a really great artist if he didn’t care about anything else except his work. He quotes Ad Reinhardt as saying that ‘one paints when there is nothing else to do. After everything is done, has been taken care of, one can take up the brush. After all the human social needs, pressures are accounted for. Only then can we be free to work.’

Try being a female artist with a family, I thought to myself.

April

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April is a strange month. On the one hand lighter nights, Spring, and so many birthdays, including my daughter’s. On the other, my mother’s birthday and the third anniversary of her death. It’s not surprising that she’s been on my mind.

My thoughts have turned back to microchimerism. I’ve mentioned this before, mainly in the context of siblings in The Invasive Sibling. In that post I also refer to the mother’s cells travelling into the baby via the two-way street that is the umbilical chord, something that I didn’t really think about any further at the time. I was doomscrolling on Instagram earlier, and came across a post which was about this very thing. It took me aback in the moment, and its profundity made me suddenly feel really emotional.

In general terms, it’s a difficult one to get my head around – the mother is inside the child, which in turn is inside the mother.

Regrets

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I’ve spent the last few days chained to my laptop copying and pasting most of my 195 blog posts (now plus one!) into a word document. Am I regretting my decision to make a book out of my blog? No, because it feels like it’s ticking a big box somewhere inside of me – it’s keeping my chimp happy – I’m making something that evidences the last two years. It will leave me free to experiment with something else.

That said, I have already reminded myself that I have never made a book before and so the process is very much an experiment, and that I should have no expectations as to the result.

I have formulated a plan though. The book is going to be in A5 format as that avoids the need to deal with things like columns. I’m going to print it in a series of booklets – signatures – of 5 sheets of A4 which equates to 20 pages. These will then be stitched together – I’m currently thinking no more than 10 in a single volume and then covered with a hardback cover. I am thinking that I may use some canvas that I have knocking around which I could paint, draw, print and stitch onto. Alternatively, I could try sheer fabric, cotton or linen. I’ll need to experiment. Even the end papers could be pieces in themselves.

I have already formatted and printed off a couple of signatures. It’s definitely going to run to more than a single volume, so I think that I’ll format and print off the first 10 signatures and make a single book just to see how it goes, rather than spending time formatting and printing out all of the blog.

Thus far the process has revealed a couple of things. Firstly, I need to be mindful that future posts will have to be included, so it may be an idea to limit posts going forward – but who am I kidding? Secondly, in carrying out the exercise I have relived the past two years and it has been helpful to note ideas that I have had along the way and which I could develop in the future, as well as discovering some draft posts which I didn’t publish, perhaps because I wasn’t quite ready. This is an example of part of one which was on the subject of perfectionism:

‘But old habits die hard and when my mother became ill I couldn’t process it on an emotional level and so I became the best carer that I could be, which now I regret because at times it meant that I wasn’t the best daughter that I could have been. To this day I can’t understand why, when she said she fancied a gin and tonic, I told her that she couldn’t have it because she was taking morphine. She was dying, what did it matter? It is one of my biggest regrets. And when she didn’t eat one of the many offerings I had made for her, it was because I was a failure, because I wasn’t able to find that one thing that she would want to eat.

I had the same thought this evening as Monty, the dog, only had a few little bits of meat which he had been quite happily eating yesterday. What am I doing wrong? What is it that he wants that I’m not offering him?

And, of course, the answer is nothing. I can only do what I can do in the circumstances. If he was hungry he would eat. If my mother had been hungry she would have eaten. Even if they did eat, it’s not really enough to make any significant difference. I’m not responsible for them not eating. There is nothing that I can do on a practical level anymore to avoid having to deal with the inevitable outcome. ‘

Reflecting II

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I suppose that it’s only natural to pause and reflect on the fact that there are only 10 weeks left: 10 more Tuesday sessions with everyone, 1 more tutorial. Maybe it’s because I’m feeling as if time is slipping through my fingers like sand, that it seems like a blink of an eye since we started, temporally that is because I know that I have undergone enormous change in the interim. When I think back to the session in which we had to introduce ourselves and our work, I find it difficult to reconcile myself to the person I was back then. I now see, think and make differently.

I feel sad.

But all good things must come to an end. I’m trying to subdue that part of me that is panicking that I haven’t made the most out of the last 2 years. But I know that I have; what I’m feeling is the knowledge that there is so much more that I want to try and to experiment with, and that this is not the end, but the next step. So mingled with the melancholy is a flicker of excitement at what the future may bring.