’I fancy a gin and tonic’
I said no. Alcohol and morphine. Why? One of my biggest regrets. I used to dislike it, but now it’s my go-to drink. A constant reminder of when I should have been a daughter, not a carer?
A late night conversation which embodies the isolation and hopelessness of it all.
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.
In yesterday’s session we looked at ‘thick description’ as opposed to ‘thin description’. Thick description gives extra information, creates a mental image, and prompts questions. Thick description is using language to expand understanding and allows us to recognise what we bring to it, emphasising that we are the makers of our work and we are bound into it. For me, this echoes material engagement theory: as humans we make things and are, in turn, made by the things we make.
We were given a few minutes to describe what was in front of us – the part that no-one ever gets to see on our Zoom sessions. I use my daughter’s bedroom whilst she’s at uni. I wrote down:
A sea blue wall displaying the board wrapped with small, glowing lights – a showcase of scraps of paper arranged haphazardly with multi-coloured pins, some images, some reminders of future tasks. Numerous containers with an assortment of writing materials; pens and pencils standing to attention, ready for action. The white desk with its marks of ink and nail varnish – traces of past actions of my daughter. It makes me feel connected. I sit where she sat. I feel her presence.
As I was writing it, I suddenly felt emotional – I don’t know where it came from – maybe because I was thinking in a sentimental way, and that became a release valve for the stress and tiredness that I’ve been feeling. Or maybe, despite my bravado, I just really miss her.
We went on to think about our own contact zones, and how we are influenced or changed by the contact, and how it impacts our work and the reason we make it. This discussion generated a whole host of different ideas. For me, it is about how they make me feel; I am influenced by contact zones that generate an interest, prod me and provoke a response from me, and I often put myself in zones which make me feel uncomfortable and challenge me, that take me out of my comfort contact zone. I am not sure that if my contact zones made me feel completely at peace and in equilibrium, with nothing to respond to or process, I would even feel the need to make art.
For a post-mortem.
Well, I’ve submitted my research paper.
How do I feel about it? I’m pleased with how it turned out and I found it to be a rewarding experience – it has certainly made me think a lot more, and has been incisively relevant for my work.
This morning was a bit stressful as the broadband was playing up and I had some last minute changes to make and quite a few references to double check. It didn’t help that I was constantly switching between laptop and iPad because my laptop is so old that it turns out that it no longer supports the latest browsers. As a result, it was submitted a few minutes past the deadline, which has really disappointed me. Even more so, that when I’d taken a break and had another look, I saw a few incomplete references and other errors in the paper. Word blindness.
Previously, I have completed work with time enough left to review at my leisure, and so I’m wondering what went wrong this time. I certainly planned to have it completed with time to spare, and it’s not like I haven’t had since the Spring to do it.
On reflection:
This really does sound like a roll call of excuses, but at the end of the day, what’s done is done, and all I can do is try not to repeat the same mistakes in the future.
Now for the video and blog curation…
The self is in a constant state of becoming, and each time we reflect, we create iterations of ourselves, crystallised in time; shadow selves. ‘Wayfinding’ – my first reduction linocut – evidences the processual nature of its making, with each layer being a trace of what was once, but is no longer, fixed in time and unalterable. It embodies how the act of making and the evolving self are intertwined, the self being both mapped and remade.
It’s been a steep learning curve, with highs and plummeting lows. I have learnt a lot from the experience – the physical process of the making of the prints, with its inherent breaks from activity, and the potential and restrictions of the materials themselves which have challenged me, requiring me to find solutions to the problems I have encountered along the way.
I liked the contemplative feeling of cutting the lino and the nature of rolling out the ink, observing its texture on the brayer akin to suede, listening to the sound of the brayer and ink sizzling, and the relief (or crushing disappointment) when pulling the print. I feel that the experience has enriched me and that hopefully I will continue to become a better printmaker – I don’t say that I have become a better printmaker because aside from possibly being factually incorrect, that indicates that my becoming has stopped – I want to be in the process of continuing transformation. The prints themselves evidence my learning and development in all their imperfection.
In his paper Making Hands and Tools – Steps to a Process Archaeology of the Mind (2021), Malafouris argues that ‘thinking is thinging’, in that we think with and through things, not simply about them, and that human becoming refers to the process of ongoing transformation that characterizes the human condition as indeterminate and incomplete, or else always about to become. As we engage creatively with the world, the new things we make shape our developmental pathways and our ways of being in the world and, as such, human intelligence is handmade.
’Hands and tools can be moved but they are not moving; it is the brain that moves the hand to move the tool. Taken together hands and tools can be seen as interactive processes. They co-constitute each other’s life by means of thinging. It is now the tool that moves the hand to move the brain because the brain is already attuned to the hand and the hand is aware and responsive to the tool. In one sense, the hand acts as for the tool, in another sense the tool acts on behalf of the hand or other tools…The agency of the hand derives from the tool and the agency of the tool derives from the hand.’
He asserts that hands and tools are made for action, in action. So my hand is made for action and without that action it is not a hand. I pick up the carving tool which is made for action and without my hand it is not a tool. My hand moves the tool to carve the lino and the tool responds to my hand at the same time as my hand responds to the tool. The lino responds to the tool as well as my hand, and in turn my hand and the tool respond to the lino. The lino is not lino without the tool and my hand to carve into it. My hand and the tool are not a hand and a tool without the lino to carve into, and so on. As my brain is in tune with my hand, then so is the carving tool, the lino, the brayer, the ink, and the paper, and, as such, they all influence my developmental pathways and my way of being (or should it be becoming?) in the world.
On reflection, I’m not sure that I enjoyed the process that much. The restrictions of a deadline, the specifics of size and number, the fact that it was being made with a view to being sold, all contributed to a feeling of unease and pressure. I much prefer experimenting with no expectation, focussing on the process, and not the product.
In last week’s session we thought about ideas.
Where do my ideas come from?
From my lived experience; my past, my present, my interactions with the world and the people in it, a moment in time, what I read, hear, see, feel, smell and taste.
What do they look like?
A network or web where they interconnect, or wait to be connected.
What kind of a web is it?
A spider’s web. Some ideas are fleeting and wispy and drift away, whilst others are more robust and have some form.
Other’s ideas are like seeds which grow over time (akin to Bateson’s ecology of the mind in which, like organisms, ideas grow and flourish whilst others become extinct) which need to be cared for and nurtured, or a breeze or mist, pre-existing ideas waiting to be received.
Maybe the source of the idea depends on what interests you at any point in time. I’m interested in my experience of living in the world, and so I don’t think that my ideas pre-exist because they are bespoke to my unique lived experience. Often they are triggered by something, a reaction to something, and so they don’t often come to me out of the blue. They are a combination of everything and anything, but at their very basic I believe that they are a matter of neuroscience; the complex neural interactions between knowledge, memory, emotions, and experience, all being broken down and continuously recombined in infinitesimal permutations, consciously and subconsciously in dreams, flow states, and acts of automatism.
Just because they are bespoke to me doesn’t necessarily mean that they are original. Gompertz doesn’t think that originality in a completely pure form actually exists and that all ideas are additional links in an existing chain (Part One: Think Like An Artist). There are numerous quotes from creatives who have built on the ideas of others: Newton and the shoulders of giants; Jobs and stealing great ideas; Twain who said that all ideas are secondhand, consciously or unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.
We then considered Brian Eno’s concept of the ‘scenius’ (a creative co-operative of intelligence) and the articulation of the ideas of the scenius by an individual who is then held up by society as being a genius. On reflection, I think that he is right to the extent that the genius is just the tip of the scenius iceberg, but that both should be equally celebrated, and the attribution of the idea should be shared. It’s not enough to have an idea – it needs to be acted upon and often this involves elements of risk, courage and persistence.
Undoubtedly, collective recognition encourages greater sharing of ideas and increased creativity. In this respect, the existence of a scientific scenius goes some way to explaining why two different people can come up with same idea at the same time eg Bell and Gray, who both came up with same idea of the telephone. But, the idea didn’t come from nowhere – the circumstances at the time were demanding a solution to an existing problem, and the latest scientific developments and knowledge in the field, which were needed to devise the solution, were already widely known and shared amongst the scientific community, to the extent that Gray and Bell had detailed knowledge of each other’s work. So really, it was just a matter of time before someone came up with it. Maybe to that extent, it could be said that the idea was in the ether waiting to be received by someone who was attuned and had the requisite knowledge to implement it.
I’ve decided that I would like to make physical prints for the Editions Sale, if possible, and I have resolved to do a linocut, on the basis that I don’t have an etching press at home, and I probably won’t be able to make it in to CSM this month. I also want it to be something which is relevant to, and an extension of, my recent work.
I’ve not much experience of linocutting, but this is a good opportunity to try and improve my skills. I’ve been experimenting with some of the mapping imagery that I’ve been exploring over the last few months.
Originally I thought about the line drawing I did and how form can emerge from lines. I used my father’s silhouette from Solitude to experiment.
The lines are all over the place as I did them freehand (how does Bridget Riley manage?) and there were a few errors. In the top half I experimented with rounded curves, whilst in the bottom half the lines are flatter.
I tried drawing out how it might work but in the end I decided that it would just be too difficult, and gave up.
I then looked at the contouring and the automatic drawing that I have incorporated into some of my recent work. I used a group of three figures, composition yet to be decided, and red and blue as the colour choice for the time being. I created multiple layers in Procreate which then allowed me to play around with possible combinations.
I like the red and blue contoured background with the figures standing in front of the straight white lines (last two images), maybe using gold leaf or even metallic ink (which would be cheaper) to add some additional interest. I’ve also put the darker figure in the background so that it gives the feeling of being in the shadows, even though, technically, lighter figures are supposed to recede, which in this case they don’t seem to because of the background.
So I’m sorted, apart from the fact that it will need to be a reduction linocut, something which I haven’t done before, put off by the suspicion that my brain doesn’t work in a reductive way, but there’s nothing like a challenge. Maybe I need a Plan B, just in case.
For the last couple of weeks we’ve been continuing to explore Turner in my painting class. The subject is water and stormy weather. As before, we’ve been applying thin layers of paint and sansador with a rag, and then applying several layers of glazing.
We started with a couple of small studies.
I used a limited palette of mineral colours – ultramarine blue, cadmium yellow light, burnt umber, alizarin crimson and titanium white. I’m not keen on it, it jars with me, in fact, I really don’t like it, but it meets the brief.
I much prefer this one – to me, it’s less figurative, although as soon as you put in a horizontal it automatically reads as a seascape. A post-Turner palette of cerulean blue, Prussian blue, phthalocyanine turquoise, cadmium free yellow, winsor violet and titanium white.
Then starting with an acrylic ground of a yellow grey, applied thickly and roughly so that definite brushstrokes are visible, I used the same limited palette of mineral pigments as in the first study.
It all started to become a bit twee, for want of a better word, so I blurred the horizon, and tried to break it all up, knocked it back and accentuated the sweeping brushstrokes in the ground using an ultramarine glaze. I feel better about it, but in retrospect maybe I should have done away with the horizon completely, as Turner tended to do, or maybe the horizon allows it some space? I think I need to put it away and reflect on it at a later date.
I’m conflicted; over the last year, I have found that I have been moving away from figurative work, particularly in terms of art that I like to look at, perhaps in an attempt to free myself. I’ve always taken the view that I attend these weekly classes because I like to explore different directions, and that there is no point just turning up and making what I want to make each week regardless. I try my best to complete the task, but I’m finding it increasingly difficult. Maybe this is a lesson for the future – of not always being able to make the work which I want to make.
Yesterday’s session turned out to be quite timely for me.
We watched a video of William Kentridge’s Tide Table and part of an interview with him. He likes working with charcoal because it can be erased very easily, and speed of thinking is equal to the speed of drawing. This reminded me of paint being liquid thought (Elkins, J What Paint Is). Kentridge describes his work as being on a trajectory – a path followed, which finds structure and subject through being made.
Amongst other things, we considered what advantage exists in using material that changes easily, and what the advantages are of working in a fast or slow way? We discussed how working quickly can be more intuitive and stops the conscious mind from overthinking. In this respect, some expressed the opinion that work made in a short period of time does not have as much value as work which takes longer to make.
This is a concept that I have been grappling with for some time, in an attempt to shake it off (Dialogue I; Dialogue IV – I’m So Over It; We’re So Excited; Am I Bovvered?). It seems to me to be illogical, because I wouldn’t think that a book which took a year to write is of greater value than a book which only took a month. Maybe one author was in a flow state and it all came easily, whilst the other had to struggle, but theoretically they are of equal value.
What determines art’s worth? The time spent on it, the skill involved, the size, the materials used? Would a small piece using 24 carat gold leaf encrusted with diamonds which took me 5 minutes to make using quite complex skills be worth the same as something I took days to produce using a child’s wax crayon and a piece of scrap paper, but into which I poured all of my emotional being? I’m trying to bring myself over to the point of view that none of it matters; what matters is that I made it because I thought it worth making, and that it connects with me. But it’s very difficult to shift the mindset.
In my posts, which I refer to above, I was considering value in terms of rejection and how that might impact how I felt. I have the opposite scenario at the moment; I saw one of Rebecca’s blog posts about an exhibition she had been to, and I was intrigued by the technique used by the artist. I thought that I would quite like to try it out, and so I did. I made ‘Siblings’. It took me about 45 minutes or less to make. It didn’t take much skill to make – to be fair it could have been made by a primary school child with appropriate supervision while using the craft knife – but it represents and embodies something deeply emotional to me and it was very much about the process. As it turned out, I wasn’t disappointed with the end result and so I decided, on a whim, to enter it into the ING Discerning Eye Open Call, for which the deadline was the following day. It has been selected. You would think that I would be over the moon. I pretend to be to the outside world, but inside I still can’t help feeling that it’s unworthy because of the limited time it took to make.
She went back to uni today. She was looking forward to getting back to some normality and having independence again. The house seems empty – don’t get me wrong, I’m not one to suffer from empty nest, but there is a presence missing, along with all her stuff that seemed to have found its way into every single room of the house. The creation station that she had set up in the sitting room is no longer there – watching tv whilst she painted by numbers to try and occupy herself and at the same time rehabilitate her hand. And then the quilt, which she didn’t manage to finish before she left; she was disappointed because she wanted to have something to show for what she saw as having been a wasted summer. Never mind – she’ll complete it over the next few weeks, and it will serve as a reminder of ‘that summer’, imbued with fear, frustration, pain, resilience and hope.
It never ceases to amaze me how, in the act of making, memories and emotions are stored within the object, like a creative time capsule.
Kate McCalmont-Woods 