Working on a lot of new ideas at the moment - I have an idea of producing a very long and large narrative of about 100 pages - words interlaced with imagery - probably almost a graphic novel though I would rather bring it out as a scroll as it would then flow downwards rather than page by page - though perhaps that's a symptom of blogging... it's made me enjoy creating work which flows downwards like it's being read rather than being seen all at once.
I have the layout and the idea of it in my head and it looks perfect - which is worrying because that means I've already set myself a very idealistic aesthetic which could be unachievable - though perhaps I'd achieve something different. It will be a lot of hard work and I've set it to 100 pages because there's a lot of disjointed ground to cover and also felt that there is nothing wrong with giving myself a large project which would finally try to set in stone and define exactly what it is I've been trying to do all these years.
All my work has led on from previous work and grows organically from one to the next incorporating and permutating the past into future making a uncontrolled mass of myself... which has become bad because it's become so dense and involved that everything is in there now so I feel like I'm in some kind of black hole of my own swirling incoherent mess. So it's time to bring it all together into something cohesive - understandable and personal. For an outside viewer my work probably doesn't drag you right into me but more rather into a texture and a pattern of a nothing and it's perhaps time to find out where the real me is amongst all of that and be one hundred percent open... for a long while I've been thinking about infinity and trying to find a tangibly finite sanctuary within that and the only thing that I keep arriving back at in all my searching is myself - I am the tangible object. I should allow myself to express fully everything it is that I feel and not allow my artwork to just be strange imagery with shades of myself peering out never coming to the fore fully due to fears of being ridiculed. The following images all use text in a minimal way though perhaps unsuccessfully and all display my tendency to always express something private but never actually reveal anything.
Above is an image I made in 2008 - like a lot of my work I've included fragments of my notebooks full of my feelings and automatic writing - of which I was always quite diligent in keeping. There are no full discernible sentences in this picture. The words are used in a disjointed way to convey some sense of being lost or stuck in ebbs of geometry and endlessness. Like our thought processes stream into the barriers or columns to support the world we've built.
As with this one too - though to a different effect, this time the words are falling or rising from the architecture which they conform to but also strive to escape from - this was obviously a time in which I very much desired to escape from the world... 2008... the year I talked endlessly about becoming a hermit or going away and starting a cult just because anything would be better than working for Barclays Bank or whatever terrible job positions were due to me in future.
This last one you'll what could almost be statement "Then assumption leads your motiv(e)" is describing how we fill in the gaps in our knowledge with misinformation - particularly when evaluating other people. This is then followed up with three more half sentences which don't give you the entire message but allow you to try to draw more assumptions from the not being able to see the full content... this is what we are doing when we try to read one another. Even if we are given the time to explain ourselves the way we want to it can get distorted and misinterpreted... which is sad and one of the reasons I hate putting myself out into the open... I think that now that I'm used to it though, and that I'm old enough not to care what people think (sometimes), it is likely time to do this - and it'll hopefully look really really good and not be "pretentious" or annoying at all... though I'm sure there will be plenty who may see it that way - though I'll try not to be scared of you and just get on with it. I plan to do this at the same time as producing individual pieces of artwork too - though perhaps as usual all my ideas will inform and misinform their surrounding ideas and motivations - probably with a lot of assumption too.
Really like what you say about this last one; and not sure why it would be seen as pretentious at all! The idea of making it a scroll is pretty cool. Have you thought about a horizontal one? They're lovely since although they're still linear obviously (L to R or R to L) it's easier to cast your eye over the whole thing at once. Maybe more cinematic than blog-like?
ReplyDeleteooo thanks very much... I think when people say something is pretentious it's often because they just don't like it - one person's pretentiousness is another person's David Lynch, or whatever other cultural figure you wish to label with the p word. It's almost a very lazy criticism but it's one that's very difficult to argue against. Also why does it necessarily have to be a bad thing?
ReplyDeleteYeah...play them at their own game! Maybe nod and say: "Isn't it really quite pretentious to try and use the word "pretentious" when you don't really know what you mean by that?" ;-)
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