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| Pages from the artist's journal |
I am an avid journal keeper. Working from my
journal establishes the first points of removal within the translative process.
My journals are the beginnings of a system of notation, an extrapolation
derived from embodied experience. This experience is always direct, immediate
and frequently observational, for example sitting out on the wharf and walking
at Cape Bruny. My journals are points of
departure from the actual, a tool of extraction, but they are also a point of arrival,
they begin to construct my thinking. They establish their own organizational
structure, a combination of text based information, alongside and interspersed
with visual thinking such as doodles, drawings, diagrams and found images.
Through their collection of ideas, references and musings they become complex,
multi-layered repositories.
These documents are a compilation of my
thinking, the many pathways, dead ends, loose ends and speculative ponderings
of the search. They travel with me, embodying the investigative process,
marking the enquiry, but not defining nor containing it. Sure, they have edges,
boundaries, front and back covers, but these are just parameters, edges to push
against, to test and question. Thoughts frequently escape their pages. Making
their way out into the world, to occupy real space and time. Some even return
to be captured and contained, specimen-like within the pages once again,
becoming the trace of a given trajectory.
These trajectories are often repeated,
overlapped, retraced and over-written. The drawing process being one of continual
addition and reduction. Of a push and pull, of extraction and projection. This
process abounds with errors - erring and blurring. Fortunately drawing ably allows for and demonstrates errors of judgement. The
thing that most excites me about drawing, as someone who both looks at and
makes drawings, is that the history of their making is evident in the finished
product. The history of a drawing’s making is one of decisions, lots of them. A drawing is a palimpsest,
a writing and over-writing of ideas, decisions and thinking. Through the
drawing I am re-inscribing its and simultaneously my own place in the world.
Ghosting, erasure, spaces, shape. Searching through repeated error, erring,
blurring. Like walking through a site, choosing paths, direction and negotiating
terrain. Human fallibility is innately evident in
drawing and it is this room for error and evidence of it that I am most
interested in, the points where anchors drag, buoys drift and the compass
spins.
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| Pages from the artist's journal |
My practice also frequently involves the use of field sites. Within this project field sites are considered in terms of their conditioning influence on the work and how they might allow for or deny an indefinite rendering of the unknown. Most recently I have been utilizing the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies exhibition space as a working studio. This space has become an expanded version of my journal.
The
drawings in the IMAS space have emerged from the journal sketches. They evolve
over the course of their making, from more highly rendered representations to simplified
shape, blocks of tone and varying areas of mark. There is a disparity of scale between the journal
and the wall-based drawings. This speaks of the translation of the mark, the
hand versus the arm/body. Marks are stand in descriptors, not only of the
subject of reference but also of me, of my engagement with the subject and the
process of attempting to translate and negotiate experience via the drawing
process. The drawings are a series of indicative motifs of the embodied
experience of being in the world, one that is wonky, uncomfortable, satisfying
and confusing all at once.
My
strategies for making come from a desire to speak of these ideas through both
process and materiality. Paper, drafting film and tracing paper have varying
degrees of opacity. They can be layered, collaged and overlapped to obscure,
reveal and clarify. Graphite is a medium of first plans, propositional ideas
and impermanence. Being granted your pen license in primary school was a big
deal. Pen and ink is much more substantial and authoritative, but also much
less accommodating of error. It is difficult to hide uncertainty and
mis-direction within the line of a black pen. Thinking is evident in the line,
one that wanders and strays. The attempt is for the work, through these
wanderings to begin to morph. To be
mid-transformation, to teeter on the edge, seemingly recognizable, while also
uncertain. Uncertain as to exact points of reference, wavering, hovering,
evolving.
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| Cape Bruny Lighthouse |
Thinking
about the use of field sites in the project it became apparent that like
physical field sites out in the real world, the studio and exhibition space are
equally enacted within the making of the work. All of these spaces determine
and condition. They are working sites, subject to and reflective of, contexts,
systems of knowledge, conventions and traditions. Each of these spaces becomes
a causal environment and experience is rendered through the volatility of its
specific characteristics and contexts. Differing attitudes and perspectives to
the environment are based upon differing purposes for encounter and degrees of
control.
Thinking
through the exhibition space, the restrictions as to what is and isn’t possible
are similar to the restrictions of working in any given site. There are always
limitations as to what you can carry, the weather, the equipment at hand, your
own expertise and experience, concentration, interests and distractions.
Working with constraints reveals possibilities in the work and strengthens it
via imposed parameters, edges to push against, boundaries to question.
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| Working studio in the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies exhibition space, UTAS |
Working
in the IMAS space has its own set of influencing extrinsic agents. A studio
within an institution that has social, physical and political agendas subjects
the work and myself as the artist to unknown variables. The space opens up a
range of new potential networks, audiences, dialogues and exchanges. Being
present in the space and utilizing it as a ‘work in progress,’ opens up
conversations about, and a focus upon process rather than outcome. Rigour
within the questioning and enquiry drives towards an unknown outcome, embracing
changeability and possibility. The journey is what drives the outcome, rather
than the outcome driving the journey.
Ambiguities in the work,
revelations in the errors.
One
of the questions that I am currently pondering is, ‘how do we learn to embrace
uncertainty, to recognize it as a strength, and as evidence of the rigour of
the search? I am striving for ambiguities in the work, to set up an atmosphere
of speculation, curiosity and wonder, these being key qualities of my
experience in the process of the search.
Error
and ‘to err’ comes from old French errer, ‘to wander’ and the Latin errare, ‘to stray’
(Oxford English dictionary online
2000). Most commonly we
associate negative outcomes with error. It is the undesired result of an
attempt to reach a desired goal or preconceived outcome. The process of
creative research is one of trial and error, fallibility is important. It is
what drives the constant testing of ideas, materials and processes. It is what
drives one to try and make sense of an idea through the translative process.
Being willing to push something far enough that there is danger of failure
attests to tenacity. So how do we make good errors and when can they be useful
and productive?
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| Drawing in progress in the IMAS space, graphite, gouache and trace on paper |
Conclusions...so far...
My work pre-supposes that the
limitations and tendencies towards error and fallibility provide greater opportunity
for in depth enquiry. Seeking out the gaps between, where systems begin to
falter and break down is where we are able to most rigorously question their
operation within greater contexts and hence how they shape and influence
experience. Through recognizing this influence and the gaps between
epistemological systems is where we are able to establish how the process of
understanding is in fact enacted via the attempt to make connections between
disparate and seemingly disconnected information i.e. the unknown.
I am choosing to borrow from the
descriptive and locative practices of navigation and cartography to explore the
instability of these systems and their attempt to deal with and contain the
unknown, the gaps between, the spaces of unknowing. Highlighting and playing
with the limitations of these systems, my aim is not to define the unknown,
like demarcating a territory, but rather I am attempting to question our
assumptions and faith in such frameworks. The unknown that I am describing is a
place where abstract and physical worlds collide. It is where the unknown
exists within physical reality and embodied experience, framed by the world of
the imagined, idealised and constructed.
Through
this project I am attempting to figure uncertainty and the unknown
purposefully, considering it as an agent through which to investigate the
process of embodied experience and the act of drawing as both a thinking and
doing tool. I
am proposing that the role of the unknown is to highlight what we don’t know within
a world of instant information. To celebrate the searching journey and the
possibility within that for greater understanding not defined by absolutes, rights
or wrongs or simple yes and no answers.
Curiosity
= activated by fluctuating frameworks and reference points
Potential
= possibility, openness to new ways of thinking and engagement
Truth
= openness to doubt and authenticity of experience, not absolutes
To speculate, question and interrogate
systems of knowing and their associated connections, disconnections and
limitations may be more versatile than relying upon absolutes. If we
acknowledge the vulnerability of these ways of knowing we are better placed to
utilise them, not as definitive points of reference, but more like buoys which
are floating and possibly drifting within the currents of a constantly moving body
of knowledge.
If we are to go further to consider the
artefact within practice-lead research as one of these buoys, or beacons of the
unknown, we can then set about investigating how we use these objects or sites
of enquiry to mark a point in time and moment of thinking; the flotsam and
jetsam of artistic endeavour, leaving a trace of a rigorous journey and search.
“The
quest for authenticity is not a quest for essences but for ambiguities.
Authenticity comes from a single faithfulness: that to the ambiguity of
experience.”(Dovey 1999, p. 41)
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| Drawing in progress, IMAS exhibition space, graphite, gouache, trace on paper |
References
Bachelard, G & Jolas, M 1994, The poetics of space, Beacon Press, Boston.
Dovey, K 1999, Framing places: mediating power in built form / Kim Dovey, Architext series, Routledge, London; New York.
Dubery, F & Willats, J 1983, Perspective and other drawing systems, Rev. edn, Herbert, London.
Eames, A 2008, 'Embedded Drawing', in S Garner (ed.), Writing on Drawing, Intellect Books, Bristol, pp. 125-139.
Foucault, M & Miskowiec, J 1986, 'Of Other Spaces', Diacritics, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 22-27.
Heidegger, M & Stambaugh, J 1996, Being and time a translation of Sein und Zeit, SUNY series in contemporary continental philosophy, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY.
Herbert, M (ed.) 2014, The Uncertainty Principle, Sternberg Press, Berlin.
Jay, M 1998, 'Scopic Regimes of Modernity', in H Foster (ed.), Vision and Visuality, Bay Press, Seattle.
Leslie, I 2014, Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It, Basic Books.
Maynard, P 2005, Drawing distinctions : the varieties of graphic expression, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y.
Journal musings ...
