Group crits can be really useful, but it's good to know what format they are going to take then you can prepare accordingly. My tutor emailed us all an excerpt from '7 days in the art world' that described a marathon group crit so I did approach the day with a feeling that I should have brought extra sandwiches - however, it wasn't nearly so intensive.
Firstly, I asked to have my crit in the format of a discussion rather than in 'fly-on-the-wall' mode. I wanted to have some other opinions on unresolved areas of my current work so I showed them sketchbooks and work in progress.
The main idea I have come away with is to work with the materiality of paper in it's form, to reshape it somehow, to explore it's properties as an object while retaining it's sense of surface: folding, wetting, the shapes and spaces left, and the touchable surfaces. They really liked being able to get their hands on my sketchbooks given that we don't get the opportunity to do that very often. I also enjoyed being able to share them. There is something around touch that I am interested in that somehow ties up with my hobby of partner dancing and the senses of physical connection that I use and enjoy there. That is a blog to come - perhaps after I finish the dissertation. My, how these blog ideas are growing.
I keep going back to the shape of my concertina sketchbook and its diarising potential. Also there was the idea of working on a roll - creating a drawing on a roll of paper and just rolling on forward when an area is finished. I'm also thinking of Bea Last's sculptural charcoal drawings. Trying to get to the edge of the paper's tolerance. I'm also very taken with Marian Piper's work which came up in my last tutorial with Cathy. They both tread a fine line between surface and object and their work both features repetition and layering
My working from original doodles made while waiting backstage at work was discussed. I kind of had a hard time trying to think of similar limbo that I have now - on pay, waiting for my turn and nothing else to fill the time but let events distill themselves on paper - it was very much a special time and place. I don't have any time now that isn't devoted to something else - there is always something to do - there's never time quite like that when I'm on someone else's pay and expected to do nothing. The only time that happened was while invigilating and we were told we could read or use phones - and I didn't feel I could zone out in the same way. It was hard to explain to everyone, and even myself that I don't have or allow myself those times. I have that sense of time passing increasingly quickly so I try to use every available second - so those enforced limbos are really valuable; of course I didn't let myself sit there then, I used the time to make something. So now I am faced with wanting to make that time, or what I learnt into something else, or to learn how to access what I did then in a different way. Is it really a case of getting myself locked up so I am free to make?
What else was there?
As I read back over what I've written I realise that I haven't, and we didn't, discuss what I'm drawing - that I am not bound up in what I'm drawing. I've been too concerned about that probably. Perhaps I'm moving into the realm of abstraction but that may move me away from those original limbo doodles and the insight they gave me. I'm going to have to think more clearly about what I gain in moving away from that, or if I dawdle on the edge of doing so. Certainly, the large ink and charcoal drawing currently on the wall is a dawdling. Nice word for it. Maybe a dancing dawdling. Maybe d(r)awdling on the edge is as far as I want to go?
So ideas I had over the weekend were to emboss objects into the paper - coins, chains. I feel that I very much want to stay producing surfaces, and not objectify. There is something around the continuance beyond the surface, and the illusion of space that really interests me, the window-like aperture of a frame or the edges of the drawing. The edges really interest me, but not at the cost of the content or the centre. The tension between the edge and the centre is continuing and can be altered by adding another piece of paper. One of the next things I'm going to do in the studio is play with the nebulous ink and chalk dust background and cut it up and repaste it and see what I get.
No comments:
Post a Comment