Show and Listen 1

27th November Show and Listen at NTU

I really enjoyed this event, it was really refreshing to be able to talk freely with other students and academic staff about the works that were presented.

I presented two pieces as a diptych, one being an example of my previous practice and the second a new piece I had been developing in the weeks before the event.

 This photo is a recreation of how I presented the work, I wanted to keep the images in close proximity to make clear that their was a definite relationship between the two images. I also felt like they would need to be read from left to right, I wasn't entirely sure why I felt this was important but it felt that by placing them in this order there would be feeling of chronology. as the circle is the older work and the second much newer, but very closely linked.

 A closer photo of the first piece

This drawing was made about a year before the start of the MA and is a fairly typical exampole of my previous practice, it follows the usual parameters of an initial mark, that is then followed by another in close proximity, followed by another that relates to the others in proximity, the marks do not touch, and are seperated as much as possible. the circle is predetermined and relates to the scale and size of the paper, it works as the border of the system and no marks are allowed to leave the circle. The marks are made with the same pen and the paper is mass produced artist sketchbook paper made by Daler and Rowney. ( I have started to refer to these drawings as Causal Mark Making Systems, Causal Drawing Systems, etc)

This Second Piece is a culmination of a series of sketches that I had been developing since questioning the physical and emotional restraints that I had applied to make the previous works. This is in some respects the piece of work that really started to bring clarity to what my MA project is now about, (The Actual and Implied Physicality of Mark Making and its Impact on the Dynamics of Causal Systems.) 

The simple concept of this drawing and its sketches was to break the rules and parameters of drawings like the other work in the diptych. For example, I have clearly removed the circle perimeter, The marks are allowed to touch, cross and interact. The proximity of each marks to its neighbours are blurred and in their layering the emerging shapes that begin to appear in the other drawing become more pronounced. Where in my previous practice I would restrain myself physically by keep the marks seperate in this piece I was freer on my movements, my physical experience was more instinctive and in this my emotional experience was free from having to concentrate on just the single mark.  

These are my notes made from the recording of the thirty minute listening, I was very excited by what was spoken about and it felt that first of all the older work was successful, I hadn't really experienced people talking about these works before, and one of my key concerns is that through the simplicity, ambiguity and physical process of the work would be enough to engage the audience into an inquisitive dialogue. Which I feel it did.

Secondly The relationship between the two works was quite smooth, it seemed that there was no question that they were related to each other, I thought that there might be some question of why they were together, or placed in such close proximity but it didnt seem to be questioned, instead there was a really interesting point raised about the material relationship, The newer work was assumed to be an older work due to the paper it was drawn on to, this was really exciting, I like the idea of that questionable origin or archival quality, The playing with of materials as a means of misdirection or misleading has a nice feel to it, though Im not sure why. 

This question of age was also raised when referring to the placement of the drawings, by placing the older piece on the left hand side and the newer but suggestively older on the right seemed to cause a tension, in that the natural reaction was to read them from left to right, I wander if this is a natural thing to do with any viewing of art, Obviously this is a related to reading in that we read from left to right but is this an ethnographic feature, in Asia many countries read from right to left, certainly in Japan. I need to look at this further. I wander if I start my mark making systems in the same way? and by using these systems do people automatically look at the them in a specific way?

Another issue that was raised was the lack of a title, it was suggested that it was a shame that there wasn't a title, which for me raises an interesting question,  what is the function of the title? I choose to not use a title to see what happened, and Im glad I did, though there is an impractical element to not having a title, it is interesting to consider what happens when there isn't a title. There seemed to be a sense that the audience was a bit lost without it but in that state they began to discuss and question freely, I find that titling a work has issues, in that, whatever is used immediately grounds the art work in a specific state. The potential for free exploration immediately becomes limited. 

Some of the themes that came up were Process, Duration, Time, Control, Material, Handmade, Scopohilia, Moment, Immediacy, Scopic Theory, Information limitations, Physical Knowledge engaging intellectual knowledge.

Its very exciting that my work is starting to achieve some of what I have set out to do, but it is also very exciting that there is so much more to explore!