So I finally got around to making some new artwork - there is some massive boundary between the creative process itself and the actual finalised product in terms of my own evaluation of the work - during the process it's either the most pointless waste of time or the absolute pinnacle of genius... where I break new ground and every element of the artwork is displaying my soul set on fire ready to burn the entire world.... then I go to sleep and observe the finished product again in the morning and it reduces itself into being a repeat of what I've done every single time before - only with different aspects highlighted and other aspects downgraded. So my mind is layered with visual feedback loops - repetitive behaviours and tics. Like a composition of rearranging and gradually changing shapes. Like the theory of eternal return these elements will eventually over time drift back into the same shapes and patterns.
The image on your right is last nights image which for the moment is entitled "Living forms tunnels". It was made on 3 pages of A3 and then these were placed next to each other - I've decided I'm going to avoid working purely in normal shaped paper sized rectangles and combine pages into longer strips. I think that form of composition suits me better - and it allows one to fill it with a narrative, however abstract. I'm making a series of works - not sure what I should title the whole collection when it's done, but I'm sure it'll be similar to the way I usually title things: with a thesaurus finding combinations of the same meanings that sound best next to one another... usually a combination of three words (Verb, verb, noun or Noun, Verb, Noun) - this collection will be a fairly varied group of intuitive explanations for various internal and external processes - some of which can only really be said to be hypothetical, such as the death process and the God process - and some of which, like the work produced last night, are based entirely on subjective experience.
This work is detailing living through Forms and being processed through boxes where our emotions are contained and limited in reaction to social pressure (SCHOOL). How key facts of our lives are indexed, inscribed and imprinted through our memories so the only tangible fact of us is our dates of birth, names, and other details we spend our lifetimes writing down over and over again for the benefit of identification and processing (Date of Birth, Name, Address etc). Perhaps a very immature and adolescent view perhaps. So many people are embarrassed by their teenage angst for various reasons - though sometimes I suspect I was onto something before the world held up a dirty mirror which penetrated past the most oily of my blistering skin.
You'll see below the individual pages of the completed work.
Fascinating insight into your processes! Thanks for sharing this. Your comment on individuals being reduced to an indexable dataset is ever more relevant in the online environment, isn't it? But the pictures here show that there is far more to us than the 1s and 0s letting me look at them on my computer. :-)
ReplyDeleteIt's all rather strange really - I never quite get a grip on what everything is all about but then maybe life isn't meant to be gripped... I do sometimes feel like a pinball bouncing off random objects - there are positives in this and positives in recognising your surrounding cerebral environment and I feel as if I'm becoming a better and more versatile pinball than I was before I realised I was a pinball. But then does it seem like I believe in predetermination? Because I don't - except when I do.
ReplyDeleteWell anyway the indexable dataset is very much an online thing though what's good about the internet is that you can actually pretend to be a completely different person entirely - though you can do that in real life too...