Notes Page 13

Studio Space Conversations:

A really helpful, thought provoking seminar with Majella on the subject of studios.  What five things are most important in an ideal studio?
Is there a 'post studio' culture that renders studio practice redundant?
Is the studio the context/environment for the work to be seen, so the space becomes the artwork?

I sat with a group of studio painters and drawers and printmakers.  I actually have not had a studio for a few years and am fairly nomadic in this.  If I'm honest, one of the main deciding factors in going for this MA was the studio space available (and that my space actually does tick all five requirements for me).
I suppose I have temporarily adopted a 'post studio practice'.  Situating myself in fields, galleries, launderettes, hostels and residencies.  What happens now I have a base for a year and how is this going to influence my work? It's a different process, planning performative happenings to making pieces. The walks are feeding into the work and there is a gap between the perceptions of the walks and the resulting responses: an area to investigate.  I am making some quick drawings on the walks and in their vitality they contrast with the investigations happening in the studio.

Notes page 12....more print

Drypoint and Photo Polymer

The drypoint process is satisfying in that it is autographic.  I made a drawing from a drawing of a walk (a remembered response to a walk).
The next step might be to get direct marks from the walks. Rubbings, tracings, casts etc. rather than impressions from memory.  The prints I made were interesting to a point but didn't provoke.  Not critical. 
Photo Polymer lines, details and tones produced are incredible and to capture resonances of the walks with this is a beautiful way to mark make but I don't feel like I'm challenging things. 

It might be more fruitful to explore further what happens when there is a distance between the drawing and the image so I can understand what characterises an immediate drawing in order to expand the conversation about what remains of the experience.

Notes Page 11

Daily responses to the everyday walks.

Notes page 10. Why Print?

 Photo intaglio is a lengthy but exciting process.
I knew I wanted to use an autographic technique and I knew I wanted it to talk of illusion.  I also wanted to mess about with the flat plane and tone and how to break down the difference in creating tone in this process compared to drypoint for instance. I knew I wanted to work on something observational.  Not so conceptual or expressive.  I wanted to make an image.  I drew this image with graphite.  The use of tone was instinctive and I 'felt my way'.  With drypoint or similar I have to think about inventing tone with the marks available. It takes planning.




It is still.  Not in flight.  It's flat. Not folded.

My plate was so subtle I thought it wouldn't catch any ink.

I got carried away with the incidental marks.  Finger prints from latex gloves?







The rag used to clean the edges of the plate became equally intruiging.






More so than the print.

Notes Page 9

Lygia Clark

Notes from seminar 1st November Kim Charnley

Caminhando is Portuguese for Walking 

I selected this piece because it talks about a lot of themes in my own work.  I discovered it by being given a mobus strip at a workshop on Practice as Research to demonstrate (phenomenologically!) how we can learn/expand/investigate/feel/think…. Just about everything by creating a mobus strip and then cutting into it - again and again (a lived experience).

Clark calls the act a propostition which makes me think of expansive openendedness, it gives things a future, a potential.  The democratic nature of participatory proposition is interesting as is the access and the accompanying instructions. 

Walking is one method I’m using to research.  

She said this:

The first time I cut the caminhando I lived out a ritual. Which was very significant in itself.  And I wished for this same action to be lived out with the greatest possible intensity by the future participants: it is necessary for it to be purely gratuitous and for you not to try to know - while you are cutting - what you are going to cut and what you have already cut.

If I use a mobius strip for this experience it is because it breaks with our space conditioning, the concepts of right - left, averse-reverse etc.  It makes us to live the experience of limitless time and continuous space.

The walking only started to make sense to me once when I was travelling by train and I felt each fragment of the landscape as a wholeness in time,  a totality.

I think we are now the proponents and , through the proposition, there must be a thought and when the spectator expresses this proposition he is actually putting together the characteristics of the work of art at all times.

The object is no longer there to express any concept whatsoever but so that the spectator can reach more responsibility for his own self.

Is there an eventual product?  Is this cultural capital.   

It amuses me to note that I misspelt the title Caminohando.  Inserting mistakenly Camino  -the spanish word for path  -creeping in to the Portuguese Caminhando.  And blending it with hand.

Walking Hand or Hand of the Path (drawing walk or walking drawing - drawking!)

 art objects as separate to the person who makes them interests me, Clark reconnects them.

She is also described as dwelling in not only  the poetic and cognitive issues of the individual but also the collective   She thought deeply about lines, folds, time so discovering her was a confirmation that my enquiry is valid.  I was folding aeroplanes out of paper and losing faith.  What was the point? 

Then I found Lygia Clark and she returned my self belief.

Notes page 8

Field Analogy

Notes from Kim's seminar:

1.11.17    What is a research field?

Field became an analogy for me:  

Field: it has boundaries, perimeters, fences. (these can be trespassed over if necessary)

Focus and relevance: Too wide or fenceless and the digging is not deep enough.

Ideas and philosophies - strain of crop

Similar thinkers with similar problems with commonalities - crop/inahbitants

Different disciplines/ideas create difference and more questions - alien crop (however this can cross fertilise and create more strains) .

Create a map of the research field - topographically but also geologically, the soil and the surface.

Robert Fairbrother, who digs........

Notes Page 7 - Collage

An old piece based on being in and wandering around a place called High Cross House. It's a collage.  It prompted me to try some collage with the maps to marry the marks with the folding with the plotting because it feels disconnected at the moment.  

It was an epiphany and I got overexcited on realising Guy Debord employed collage(Memoirs 1959) and now I could understand why. It felt like I was in the right company, huge confirmation I was resolving things. 

From my journal:

Collage seems to be the best and most appropriate solution to my issue of drawing walking.

It assembles and contains all the disparate but connected elements.  It is more than the sum of its whole.  Formally this process is about disrupting linear thinking.  It is literally a lateral coexistence of disparate elements. Culturally is speaks of communication, of interconnectedness, a material metaphor of the networked world. And possibly a way to encapsulate the simultaneous experiential elements of walking. I'm thinking it could also possibly be the bridge for the argument between conceptual and expressive modes.