26. Responses, musings, sausages and paintings

It’s been a while.

The work created over the last there years was zipped up,  put away for a while – to suffocate (or breathe?) in its own threads. Needing time to rest. To be seen with fresh eyes and ideas. To unravel. What I didn’t want to happen is for these pieces to become foreign or forgotten. Just to hibernate and not be bleached by the sun.

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And so came a battle of momentum, a flirt with writing (submission of a short story), a jittery obsession with vinyl records – perhaps a pursuit for authenticity/quality, tactile motion, visible tracks; visible lines…Contemplation of ideas…Lots of reading – including Mann’s Magic Mountain …

The body as a curse / the tie that binds the mind and the physical body, to nature as ‘a debasement  and curse.’…’beasts of the Milky Way’ … ‘Inner and outer lost their foundation’ … ‘Cosmic monsters of flesh and bone…formed from the solar system.’ … ‘City of cells’… Life s ‘only an infection – disease of matter.’ …

This piece (my first digital drawing)…

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Mechanical cosmos

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Words I never knew, before reading: Story of Your Life by Ted Chaing…

Semasiographic writing = writing with signs

Semagram = corresponding to a written word in human languages

Logogram = graphs representing a spoken word or phrase.

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Life follows an unknown rhythm.

Life as instrument that can be tuned to understand the rhythm.

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‘It seems to me that before a man tries to express anything to the world he must recognise in himself an individual, a new one, very different from the others.’ (Robert Henri, The Art Spirit)

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Experiments with text:

an element of dream something fluid indeed, here in one room quite dissolved, fragmentary cages scattered in a spiral detached from us.

The image in other nests which for instance migrate in an empty shell. Metamorphosis of their kind should have been credited with such powers.

Underlined words in this short sentence. While reading their own nests the heart of a dream.

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Monday 13th August:

Head is caving in. Sun is in and out. Rain is down and out.

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First idea for Malmesbury show (The Past Is a Foreign Country) – A response to old work…

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Inhale your old self

Cut it up and let it go

(Grizzly Bear, lyrics from Cut-Out)

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After much musing –  final idea for exhibition…

Beyond the Trajectory, Pencil, graphite and pen on paper. 2017

Text for exhibition:

The light that swallowed a world –

You are indeed a long time dying. Once again I try to make sense of this moment – discover some truth in this incriminating artifact. I know it is beyond us. It is beyond temporal boundaries. It is within those divergent edges. Unbound transient shifting like memory. To achieve some focus you must avert your vision – like looking at a star. I recall you once told me in a dream: ‘it’s all in the stars’. As I reconsider to reconfigure within this digital pixilation I find the focus – almost by accident. Moving under the action of given forces. A copy of a copy…Dismantled transformed into marks the trajectories become clear. Lines that meet just short of infinity. Abstracting magnifying the optical phenomena. The rails the wheels become liquid metal. Time matter dissolves as the light swallows the world.

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Quote from Tom McCarthy’s novel Satin Island:

When oil spills Earth opens its archives…That it takes the form of vinyl when it hardens is no chance occurrence; what those men in body suits on beaches should be doing is not brushing it away but lowering a needle to its furrows and replaying it all, and amplifying it all the while to boot..up and up…’

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Inspired by music, waking past the meadow; listening to Moin…

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Vegetation takeover…

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‘Artists should accept the flow as it comes.’ (Cy Twombly)

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Prague is a very theatrical city. It has many aspects. Sprawling underground networks – Do they all link up? – Olfactory senses are pummeled: from candy to sewer, cinnamon to sausages. There is beauty amongst the madness; space within the labyrinth.

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Existence between two lifeless infinities.

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According to John Latham, everything in nature, from objects to mental images and cosmological phenomena, can be explained in terms of ‘event structure’…’repeated departures from a state of nothingness, whose resulting patterns form the fabric of reality.’

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‘Matter is merely mind deadened by the development of habit.’ (Pierce)

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‘Giant whispers in colour’ ( A great quote describing Rothko’s paintings in the documentary film: Rothko Rooms)

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There is a man I see most mornings whilst taking the kids to school. He is walking his kids too, in the opposite direction – to the other school. We smile at each other, sometimes manage a mumbled ‘hello’. After having dropped the kids off I often see him again on our returns. Like me, he is wearing headphones. Once again we acknowledge one another, nothing more. Today I had this thought: perhaps as we pass each other, our music is the same and completely in sync. of course, we shall never know.

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In preparation for the Jam Factory exhibition I decide to create another piece – An amalgamation of sorts, combining the spaces/floor plans mapped out from a couple of David Lynch’s films…All made with graphite and pencil on fabric…

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The need to paint has infiltrated my system, much like the killer virus. I feel the need to replenish my palette. Allow meanings to come through process.

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First painting for some time…