On Tue 10 DEC I went into College with the idea of working in the corridor (or how I call it: The Gallery) and potentially finish the whole project. I feel I am at a point where this project can end here: I am ready to finish it and put it out there for a critique. And then learn and move on.
Little did I know that while being there in the morning and chatting with Kim and then with Jamie, I had another couple of ideas I wanted to explore and to add to the piece.
Here are some pictures taken as part of the process:
I wasn’t even sure what I was making, where I was going, but I have decided consciously to trust my inspiration and my creative moment, that moment of creative folly, while not knowing… no, while not being able to express into words what it was all about. I had those cardboard boxes at home (which I collected in 2014 and which contained sugar bowls) and I decided to use them as boxes to contain my archived memories. I saved those boxes because I used to make memory boxes for clients during my therapeutic work (!). I also added some of the boxes I got from objects I bought from Amazon, and I used them as frames for other archival lists. Please, be advised that working at this project, that day, for me was like having bought one day all the essentials for the pantry, and then that day deciding what to cook, what I fancied, what I craved.
And I LOVE working like this. It is risky, it is not codifiable, but this is the way I can produce. I am also aware that, following from the metaphor, I did the whole shopping before: I had substantial contextual research, I studied other artists, I played with materials, I sketched and wrote and journaled before. But the whole concept was put together that day.
Anyway, little did I know that one of the boxes, unbeknown to me, still contained the plastic bags which wrapped the sugar bowls. And here is the magic (I am really fascinated by how my mind works): I used them as pouches to exhibit another system of archived material, I had no previous ideas of: I made a “list” of important men in my life (as partners, men I slept with) and I used white papers and cut it into size to show the importance of such men in my life, using a cataloguing system of codification, by using the three word world grid system (what3word) which indicates where we slept together for the first time. Also, since I “displayed” them as art pieces, I have added pencilled notifications of what the work is: one is a (classic) “oil on canvass”; another one “on loan”, another one “an installation”. Once the pieces found their place into the plastic bags, I then glued them on the cardboard which already was drawn on.
Here following are some pictures that my colleague Aimee Joyce took of the process:
So, on top of the pencilled drawing I did the previous week, I used wall paint testers I bought and paint on top to underline, stress, mark, change, re-address, highlight, re-structure, re-establish, develop and transform what was underneath. Basically, I was making sense of the / my chaos. If you remember when I was writing about the difference between me and Tacita Dean, my process, my thinking process, my archiving and making sense, my evolving, my acknowledging of the processes, my deciding what to keep and what to let go, that is my art.
More pictures:
I am really sorry in this post that 1. I cannot upload the video made while I am painting, which shows the “performance”, the creative act itself, which I think is as important as the final piece that can be seen; 2. There is no music in this post, but I am linking here a video of what I was listening which drawing and painting:
Feel free to listen!
There are some considerations I would like to make re. this piece, including an ethical issue I was confronted with, but I will leave those for the next post! While also trying to upload the video maybe from Instagram.