Clicking Clacking Self Justification

A few little pictures I put together over the last two weeks - partly as an exercise of passing time but also as a means for developing the use of text within my artwork and to see if I can develop ideas in that direction a little more - I have so much writing but none of it makes much sense - it tends to just collide into itself in a contradictory fashion and negates everything it's attempting to convey... it does lend itself better to a visual image as the subject of my artwork is invariably very much all about falling into meaningful meaninglessness only for concrete normality to get in the way and allow for some kind of collection of repetitive tangible objects and people.

Capacity Avenues Unlock

My existence does feel like a story being told very slowly... what happens when the end credits get called?... does my perception simply drop and unfold as if I'm being screwed up into a ball and thrown into some blank dead space bin?  A place of no stimulation as the audience of one walks away from my blank screen of nobody.

Worryingly I think it's probably safe to say that existence is exactly as we perceive it and that I'm not the only one going through this - and you are all a lot more than subsidiary mannequins and plot cyphers to my own story line.  The above picture is like what I'd imagine living as everyone and everything would be like - though it is depicted on quite a small scale.

Process Void Method

In contrast this image is actually entirely about the trap of being myself and also the creative methods in which I employ and find to be ever so important.  There's a prospect or hope within me to one day be able to produce artwork full time without some day job to support me... that's sometimes a frightening prospect as the motivation to produce work sometimes dwindles through the sheer repetitive nature of cutting and sticking and having to think of new ways of doing it - which is funny because the image above is quite badly put together and it depicts a lost primitive head in it's centre in the middle of it's own loss at to what it's trying to produce.  It's an image where nothing gels with itself.  I do think that the intention is lost in the very essence of what it's trying to convey and it does in the end just look like a bit of rubbish picture.

Turning Machine Clogs

This image is about succumbing to life and accepting the reality of everything bad and everything good and also the veering moods of my own mind as it turns over circumstance and self appraisal and analysis... life circles, spirals and then dies to become something else if only just a pile of sludge and grit and decay... but at the heart of it are cycles and repetitions that will outlast everyone - unless it needs something to observe it in order to exist... 

Perhaps I'm not making an awful lot of sense, do I just write on here my thoughts and ideas hoping they are going to lead to some kind of epiphany where all lines converge away from the cycles and to a finite point of knowing?  Or am I just filling in spaces hoping that these words will be enough to justify what I produce, who I am and why I am doing this?  If that requires justification then I may as well continue to try as I've not quite managed it so far... though maybe one day I'll get there and all my life and thoughts will just click and clack into place with a clicking and clacking of spinning puzzle pieces fitting together fluidly.  All of this preferably on a very nice table in a house of my very own.

Interpretation, assumption, misinformation

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.