I’ve been playing with making monotypes, nothing in particular, just experimenting with mark-making, water and masks, metallic pencils, thread.
Or maybe this way round?
I’ve noticed that I’m starting to resist the better composition for something that’s counter-intuitive – something that makes me feel uncomfortable.
As I sit here looking out of the window in need of a good clean, my husband is cutting the overgrown grass. The glass table has turned opaque with dust and the dog is giving off an overly ripe odour (well, at least I think it’s the dog).
And this is how I know that the way I have been working, particularly recently, is not sustainable. The ‘it’s for my course’ has been both a blessing and a curse. It has validated me spending time making art but on the other hand, as usual, I have gone all in and seen it as a permission to be totally selfish and to allow my head to be somewhere else for most of the time and, to be fair, I did warn them that this would be the case. There have been times when I’ve been so caught up in the intensity of making that I’ve emerged at the other end feeling like I’ve binge-watched a box set or had one too many chunky Kit Kats. I’ve needed a break after such episodes, which probably explains why my rhythm of making is not consistent but in sporadic bursts.
Everything in moderation – isn’t that the key? Well, perhaps not necessarily in moderation, but certainly with more attention on life in general. It’s getting to the stage where I’m finding it difficult to hold more than one thought in my head at a time – road taxing the car and whether I should try cyanotyping on tracing paper. I used to think that I should allow myself to be submerged in the making process for as long as I need to, at the expense of whatever else was going on; to seize the inspiration and run with it. But that’s not the way forward. Once this course is over I won’t be able to say that ‘it’s for my course’.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently and I have recognised that I need a little structure, nothing too rigid but with enough strength to support my practice in how, when and where I make. For the first part of this course I went full on into experimenting to try and rid myself of the product driven perfectionist self. This approach worked as I immersed myself in the process not worrying about results but simply making and responding, although I realise that I can never be truly free from that side of myself. It felt so liberating, but having broken out there was so much out there for me to try and I suddenly felt the urge to try everything. But I don’t do well with overwhelm – even the process of deciding on a research question overwhelmed and subsequently paralysed me. In the past I have reacted to overwhelm by going to the extreme of trying to take control. In retrospect, I now see that didn’t work either, so there must be a half-way house.
Because of the contentment that I felt when I started making the line drawings at the beginning of the last term, I now realise that whilst I my practice is still very firmly rooted in the experimental and the process, I do need some soft structure to keep my perfectionist goal-driven self, quiet. This soft structure in how I make takes the form of repetitive mark-making, using the same patterns and motifs such as the contour lines, my father’s silhouette, automatic line drawings etc. Just recently I’ve also found that working on more than one thing at once has also been beneficial. When I get fed up of formatting the blog for the book, I go and do something else and whilst that is drying I move on to another. I also think that the concept of soft structure will also enable me to make work which is capable of fulfilling a brief as opposed to being solely the result of experimentation, which has been a concern of mine in looking towards the future.
In terms of where I make, I am in the process of sorting out an outbuilding where I will be working. I have been sorting it out for the last two years, but up until now I haven’t really needed it. I need it now to create a separate physical space to work where it will be more difficult for everyday life to encroach. Getting a studio somewhere would probably be the cleanest solution, but then what about those days when I’m not really in the mood? At least this way I’ve only a short walk.
As for when I make, the making the most of the moment approach will have to change because of its impact on everyday life. I need to decide how much of my time is to be spent on my practice and when. Making a rigid timetable won’t work – my work plan to my Study Statement proves that. Maybe a general aim to spend x hours a week, or a number of half days. I think that’s something which will emerge in practice. So, from now on, as an experiment, I will spend my mornings during the week on art making and course related activities. After lunch I will then concentrate on everyday tasks and once they have been completed, I’m free to return to art. Obviously, I’ll have to fit in other activities so there will have to be some adjustments.
The irony of having to separate my everyday life from my art practice which is grounded in everyday life, doesn’t escape me.
I’ve learnt my lesson from the 3-minute video. I set about the 5-minute video by writing down what I wanted to say first and then selecting images with reference to the voice over. There was some adjusting in between with tweaks to the audio. The difficulty was getting the structure right so that there was minimal repetition of thoughts and ideas. But 5 minutes of my dulcet tones! Something had to change.
So I restructured it in the form of an interview, using Speechify to alter my voice to a middle aged man called Benjamin. There was no particular reason for this choice other than his voice was the least irritating and also I wanted a male voice so there is a clear difference between the two.
I’ve learnt and developed even more in the process of making it.
For some very light entertainment I’ve been watching ‘This Is Not a Murder Mystery’ a quirky fictionalisation of the gathering of Surrealists at Edward James’ West Sussex pile, West Dean. Whilst he was a champion and friend of the Surrealists and owned the largest collection of Surrealist art, this particular gathering at which several murders take place is a work of make believe, with Magritte waking up next to the first murder victim in a mise-en-scène exactly like his painting The Lovers which up until that point had not been seen by anyone.
Les Amants, 1928
I was trying to put togther the transcript for my 5-minute video earlier and I was thinking that I would like to make some work with me in it, me now, rather than videos from years ago. I managed to get over my reticence at using my voice and so I think it’s time that I bite the bullet. It seemed to me that being obscured in some way rather like in The Lovers might be the answer, a veil of sorts which could also represent am element of feeling disconnected. Because I’ve been looking at my work and my blog recently, the idea of time passing has been in the forefront of my mind, and I really dislike the sound of clocks, a constant reminder, particularly the one my husband has which belonged to his parents – it ticks so quickly it makes me feel anxious.
I’ve also been wanting to have a go at stop animation. I know that I could have just taken a video and used apps such as Capcut to create the effect, but I wouldn’t really be experiencing the process, so 153 photos later…
Whilst it was time consuming, the act of exporting, rotating and uploading the photos was repetitive and was strangely enjoyable for that reason. There are quite few things I would do differently if I did it again, the sheer fabric has creases in it which really I should have run an iron over before starting but I was so excited to get started. Having said that, I do quite like the diagonal that it creates. Also it was difficult to see the image on the phone screen because of the double layer of fabric and there are a few areas which could have done with being straightened out. Having said that I’m really pleased with the outcome, I enjoyed the process of making it and learnt a lot and even managed to tackle it in a logical way, dealing with just one photo at a time and not rushing it, which is unusual for me, although some of my impatience is obvious in the video, as already mentioned. In particular I really like the effect of double layering the sheer fabric which creates a contour-like effect.
Enough said.
As I was editing the video of the ink in the water I decided to see what it would look like speeded up. It had a whole different feel to it, less calming, more violent, and so I experimented with adding some audio. I’m pleased with the result. I can trace it back its roots – the doodling, the contour lines, the attempt at suminagashi that went wrong and the inspiration that came from that, of observing ink in water, the ink and the fish tank and the curiosity to experiment with effects that I have developed since I’ve been making videos over the last few months. It’s so satisfying to see how it all connects, although I can probably say the same about most of the work that I’ve been making recently.
In many ways this video is as mesmerising as the 5 minute one of the ink moving slowly through the water. After I had increased the speed it reduced from 5 minutes to only 6 seconds, so I duplicated it over and over. The audio clip was slightly longer than the video clip and so the effect of duplication was to delay the audio on each subsequent repetition. This led to me thinking about when we know that something is coming we anticipate it and often it reduces its impact or sometimes, such as scary moments in films, even though we know it’s coming, it still makes us jump. I was then interested to see how many times it had to be repeated to get back to more or less the right place – it was 7 times (the maximum number of times that you can fold a normal piece of paper in half). My daughter didn’t notice the delay in the audio each time and so I gradually reduced the volume to draw attention to it.
The blackness and lines created by the ink remind me of Gnawing Grief in Klimt’s Frieze. The video reminds me of how grief feels – when it initially hit me it was like having the breath knocked out of my body by a monumental force, over and over, and it made me feel disconnected and out of sync with the world, which just seemed to carry on as if nothing had happened. This video is as close as I can encapsulates that feeling for the time being.
I’ve really enjoyed experimenting with ink in water. Next time I’ll try different sorts of inks and perhaps venture into some colour. It’s been a great learning experience well particularly in terms of working out how to apply layered effects in Capcut and also in learning how to load the video to Vimeo instead of YouTube – the quality wasn’t that great on the latter. I think that I’d like to get more proficient at video-making and editing as well as photography and editing tools such as Photoshop as I anticpate them being a significant part of my practice in the future.
Now for the ink:
There’s no audio because I don’t want to distract from the visual. I had meant to put in a drop of ink, but it was more like a splodge. Next time I’ll be less heavy handed. It was really exciting to watch the ink slowly flow in the water; it was mesmerising. I really like the way it creates layers and veils of lines, and all the different shapes and images which momentarily appear and then disappear – at the beginning the jellyfish which then grows a nose and transforms into a face.
The ink was in motion for about 10 minutes and when it stopped it just hung there in the water, as if it was frozen in time. It reminded me of stalactites and stalagmites. It was difficult to capture fully what I could see.
I’ve been looking forward to this with all the excitement of a small child.
I anticipated that it would involve a lot of preparation and clearing up afterwards, but it wasn’t that bad.
I filled the tank and started exploring dripping and pouring in water.
The audio to this video is part of a recording I made of Jonathan playing the thumb harp in the Crypt gallery during the Low Res.
I tried slowing down the playback speed to 0.1 which gives it a stop animation feel. It has the effect of mark-making which I find really interesting and perhaps something to bear in mind. Unfortunately the audio became rather unattractive so I removed it.
I was left speechless (unusually for me).
I was a bit surprised because usually he is a bit more open-minded, being someone who likes to experience art, to talk about art and to paint. Maybe it’s because it was the umpteenth time that I had disturbed him whilst he was doomscrolling on his phone. Look at this, I had said. I told him that I would name and shame him. I told him that I would tell all my course mates what he had said and ask them how I should have reacted. We had a titter.
I’d been pouring my morning kombucha. Those bubbles…
I’d been playing with the dog in the garden. Those shadows…
I had some leftover ink and made some monotypes with it – just swirls and wipes. The ink is oil based Cranfield Safe Wash and so I also employed a spray bottle of water.
After they had dried, I decided to add another layer, another process – I used thread. I played around with the burnt paper and threaded paper I made the other day.
My daughter walked in while I was doing the next one – oh, do different stitches she said. I’m not making an embroidery sampler I replied, but then I did end up experimenting with different stitches and combinations of colour. I much prefer the lines in which the stitches aren’t apparent – where it looks like a line made by thread.
I punctured the paper from the reverse to make raised bits to add texture – nothing new, I’ve seen a lot of it on Instagram.
And held up against the window:
I’m still thinking about Shiota’s threads.
And threads on top of threads.
Originally in this post, I wrote about an incident in my childhood in which my mother intentionally tried to disassociate herself from me by walking away when I was not feeling very well. I published the post but then deleted the passage. It felt unnecessary because this image is enough.
I’m interested in trying combinations of processes, like print over cyanotype. I used a piece of scrap cyanotype for this one and I like the effect – I’ll experiment some more.
Kate McCalmont-Woods 