Category Thoughts

Pushing Paper

Kate McCalmont-Woods Leave a comment

I bought ‘Pushing Paper’ in the hope that I would find its contents enlightening, but primarily because I felt drawn to the cover. The image is ‘Some Interference’ (2006) by Richard Deacon, which he made during his residency at the Oxford Centre for the Study of Gene Function. According to the book, Deacon was initially trying to represent multiple surfaces on a flat plane – the paper splitting into interconnected layers. As things developed, he realised that what he was drawing was difficult to clarify.

Something about it really appeals to me. It reminds me of the doodle type drawings I’ve been doing (On Your Marks… & Lines). Aside from Etch-A-Sketch and Spirograph, this process entertained me for hours as a child. I would draw a random enclosed shape with overlapping lines which created segments to be coloured in. It takes me right back to my childhood. Maybe that’s why I’m drawn to it. Maybe it’s because it embodies its simple process as well as having a temporal dimension – the act of drawing each individual straight line. I like the darker line which is formed around the edges of the shapes where the lines have crossed.

Well, whatever the reason, I picked up the nearest pen, a leaky biro, and had a go.

It was a very satisying exercise, despite the blobs and smears. The ‘me’ at the beginning of this course would have discarded it. Instead, the blobs and smears are all part of the process, caused by the movement of the ruler and my hand, a moment hesitating too long in one spot. Nevertheless, I’d like to repeat the exercise with a proper pen, maybe a variety of pens of different thicknesses. In the meantime, I experimented in Procreate.

Liminality

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I felt a connection with this week’s visiting artist, Johanna Love. She remediates photographs and videos of car journeys.

I often make videos of car journeys, recreating those of my childhood when I sat in the back seat watching the passing landscape. My latest one was In A Flash.

The year before last, on the taxi ride from the airport to the centre of Vienna, the flat landscape gradually gave way to a looming mass of industrial buildings belching gases into the atmosphere: the scene took my breath away – it felt so out of place, intimidating, shocking. The area is called Schwechat, and is home to one of Europe’s largest inland refineries owned by OMV. In Spring last year it began producing green hydrogen, currently at a rate of up to 1,500 metric tonnes per year making an annual saving in CO2 emissions of 15,000 metric tonnes. I was back in Vienna a couple of months ago and I managed to video it from the City Airport Train.

https://youtu.be/6ZZ6BF5HOic?si=U0AiQS7Nfva_U3LI

I applied a neon filter to the first section to reflect my initial reaction of disbelief, slowly moving through monotone to reality. I particularly like the moments of transition, the overlay and monotone effect on the trees and the chimney stacks. Screenshots reveal moments when the image is neither one thing or another; moments of transience and liminality.

I’m intrigued by those moments. They inherently represent change, the process and becoming: they are what was once, what is now and what is to become. Becoming is fundamentally a state of liminality.

Something Different

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The process of making the 3 minute video was interesting. I don’t like listening to myself. It sounds different to how I hear myself in my head. As we’re going to have to make another video in the near future – this time 5 minutes’ worth – I think I need to get over it.

So, here’s my first video post. I’m, not sure why, but the YouTube embed isn’t working for me at the moment.

https://youtu.be/2NtklqYTOEg?si=g9yrNvKjqhDXpKGy

A Moment

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So, we’ve received our feedback and grade for Unit 2.

The feedback, the most important bit, is incredibly helpful, and has lots of questions for me to continue to think about. Once I’ve finished ruminating, I will discuss it in more detail. In general terms it mirrored my feelings that I have made significant progress over the past few months. I think this was the reason why I felt the way I did when I saw that I had been given the same grade as for Unit 1. I felt disappointed. I told myself that the grade itself doesn’t matter; what matters is the process, not the result. I should be happy with the knowledge that I have made progress, and developed within the process. That is, after all, my mantra: I choose the process, not the result.

So why is there still a part of me that cares about the grade? I spent quite a while talking to myself, trying to resolve it, and in the end the answer I reached is this: whilst I am all about the process, it does not mean that the result does not matter at all, it is just that I care more about the process.

Since Ambivalence, I have reflected further, and I think that it is either a case of wanting the product to reflect the process (which I didn’t think the grade did), or that there will always be a part of me that is invested in the product; I just need to learn to live with it and allow it to be heard, but not to dominate as it has done in the past.

And so, I listened to it, and asked what else I could have done. A typo. All’s well that ends well.

Ambivalence

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In A Test of Memory I question my paradoxical nature.

Is it an undesirable trait because it displays a lack of consistency and predictability? Does it make me an unknown quantity, fickle, unreliable, or even hypocritical? And specifically, in terms of the art world, how does this relate to the need to establish a defined and consistent style for commercial success and gallery representation, in creating a brand? I asked Perplexity AI what it thought.

In a nutshell, it’s not the paradox which is the issue but being unable to accept it. Embracing paradox is linked with greater creativity, psychological growth and is a realistic way of understanding selfhood in a complex world. It is the basis of dialectical thinking: two truths which seem to conflict but which both accurately describe you or your situation e.g. being independent but needing connection.

According to Kierkegaard, the self is essentially a tension between different poles and the process of becoming is learning to live with the contradiction rather than to abolish it. In fact, problems arise when the paradox turns into a chronic self-contradiction that seems unresolvable, which is often tied to perfectionism or all-or-nothing thinking. It creates a state of ambivalence. As long as I genuinely value and am honest about my paradoxical nature, then I am not a hypocrite or lacking in integrity. I need to accept both parts of myself and embrace the tension the paradox creates; to ‘develop the container large enough to hold it’.

In terms of the art world, whilst a paradoxical nature is an asset for making art, it is not for selling it. It does not fulfil the desire for consistency, recognition and stability. So, what is the answer?

  • Distinguish between practice (paradox) and brand (the curated external interface). Curate consistently eg strategise the release of work; lead with one voice whilst nurturing the other.
  • Be like Gerhard Richter, developing separate and opposing lines of enquiry which never merge – be distinctly one thing, then the other, do not mix them and become a muddy average.
  • Have a consistent conceptual narrative – make the paradox the subject matter itself
  • The Trojan Horse is an extension of the first bullet point: pick a lane and develop it and once you have a foothold introduce the other, pivoting under the guise of evolution.
  • Most importantly, don’t suppress the shadow side, and keep feeding it.

That all makes sense. So, how do I feel about it all now? A bit better, I think…

Reflecting on Reflecting

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It has been a busy few weeks: the print sale, Research Paper, blog curation and 3-minute video.

Making the video was quite challenging. I started by selecting all of the images that I wanted to include and then I decided what to say. It was far too long. So I decided to change tack and think about what I wanted to say and then choose the images which best demonstrated the narrative. It was a good exercise in distilling everything down into a short space of time; of focussing the mind on what is important.

After such a spate of activity I would usually reward myself with a bit of a rest, but funnily enough I don’t feel like that – I feel energised, and with a sense of purpose. In my Unit 1 Feedback I was advised that I would broaden in scope and then narrow back down, and I think that this last unit has brought about some clarity for me, not necessarily in terms of the breadth of my practice but in terms of its future development. I’m feeling positive and I’m looking forward to tying up some loose ends and producing work which encompasses what I have discovered so far and which is not necessarily finished, but more resolved than it has been up until now.

Loose Ends

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I find the curating of the blog to be a rewarding process – I can identify all the ideas I’ve had, and things I was going to do, and which have been left by the wayside as I’ve gone off in another direction. I’m collecting up all the stragglers, and here they are:

I’ve been thinking about whether I should amend my Study Statement. I don’t think I will. My objective is to find my artistic voice. I am still doing that – I will find it in the process of making. Some of the elements of the statement, such as the specified topic areas and work plan aren’t really relevant anymore, as I have gone off piste, preferring the freedom. That has happened because of who I am becoming, not because the Statement is no longer relevant or needs redirecting.

La Cabina

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It’s interesting how certain sensory and emotional experiences from your childhood stick with you even later on in life. I remember the smell of Camay soap in the bathroom, 4711 eau de cologne and my father’s Old Spice.

I also remember seeing lots of posters in the 70s of people, usually women, disappearing down lavatories. There is always that moment of hesitation…

I was always trying to stay up late. This was usually accomplished by offering to brush my mother’s hair. Of course, what I didn’t bargain for is the reason why there’s a watershed when it comes to TV viewing. There was Danny Kaye in ‘Five Pennies’ whose daughter ended up in an iron lung because she got polio, although I’m sure my parents told me it was because she had too many late nights hanging out in jazz clubs with her father, and didn’t get enough sleep.

But the film which has haunted me all these years is a Spanish 30 minute film – ‘La Cabina’ which was made in 1972, but must have been shown on the BBC sometime later because I think I must have seen it when I was about 8 years old. Funnily enough, it seems that a lot of people saw it ‘accidentally’ when they were of a similar age. There is very little dialogue which makes it even more disturbing. A man goes into a telephone box and can’t get out. Passersby try and help him but fail, as do the fire brigade. He’s hoisted onto the back of a lorry and taken away, and at one point he sees another man in a phone box on the back of a lorry. He ends up in a huge underground warehouse where he’s offloaded amidst hundreds of phone boxes with decaying bodies, some of which have ended their suffering by using the phone cable.

It won an International Emmy award. I wonder whether it should get an award for messing up a generation of children, along with ‘Tales of the Unexpected’ and the ‘Twilight Zone’.

Image from http://www.imdb.com

What’s In A Name?

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I used Perplexity AI as an aid to narrow down areas of research for my research paper. A strange choice of name bearing in mind that to everyday people ‘perplexity’ means to be bewildered or in a state of confusion. But in tech-talk it is a measurement of how well a probability model predicts a sample. Even so, I’m still not convinced that it’s the best brand name for a product which is supposed to inform, and this is perhaps best explained by the reason it was chosen for the start-up: the domain name was affordable.

It was an interesting experience, which at times left me feeling frustrated, despite its excessive flattery. On a number of occasions, it told me what it thought I wanted to hear by making up sources and references. When I challenged it, it eventually owned up, apologised profusely and complimented me on my academic rigour. Such hallucinations are common place, apparently, as well as its inability to answer a question the same way twice.