Easter Break

So much has shifted since Christmas and I am exploding with ideas. It’s important I take a good break to reflect and recharge but I do want to note down observations and ideas as I go through the Easter break. My second stock take post is as follows:

Drawing

• I am knee deep in drawing and try as I may I can’t seem to go back. Which is good.

• What is drawing and what is the justification for drawing

• A manifesto for drawing

• What am I drawing?

Memory

• Memory and sequence. As part of the feedback the idea of ‘blunt cut’ versus continuous narrative in memory formation and recall are of interest to me. Ideas around spaces between memories and drawings occur to me.

• Memory and grief - embellishment of grief stricken memories, imagination and superimposed narratives. Exaggerated memory. Relationship of autobiographical memory and imagination around the future. Imagining the past and remembering the future? Purposeful or involuntary acts of forgetting. Politicised memory and collective social amnesia.

• Memory as a passage from inner life into outer experience.

• Memory-politics nexus.

Artists’ Books

• Book formats. After the LR Artists Book workshop and visit to Shepherd’s in London I am feeling more motivated around the idea of unusual book formats for my drawings, most specifically hanging books

  • Japanese book binding techniques

  • Clip board hanging

  • Hybrid book and textile weaving combo

  • Transparent book formats with punched and embossed drawings

• Paper

  • How to make paper

  • What is paper

  • Does it have to come from trees

  • Compost heap paper

  • As a book making material

  • As a 3D material in itself

Print making

• Print Making feels increasingly relevant after the tour of the analogue print making studio at UAL. Monoprinting feels uniquely placed to record memory as a direct, evidential sequence to experience

• Qualities of belonging and loss, hazy and translucent. Qualities of the diaphanous and impenetrable are next for me to explore

Materiality

• Nail drawings and punching as evidence of loss

• Paper lace and organic edging

• Provenance of materials - how does the composition of paint or charcoal change its function? From the feedback, what is paint made of and how are memories embedded in it? https://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/people/academic/OMCCA29

• Sustainability of my practice - coal industry, charcoal, paint, polymer. Gamblin paint made from pollution https://www.jacksonsart.com/blog/2018/04/17/toxic-art-turning-pollution-into-paint/

• An honest review of which materials make sense and which I will have to part ways with

Compost heaps

• The idea of the compost heap sort of landed in my lap due to all the pulling down of hedges and trees in the garden and the wet weather making it fairly miserable and impracticable to work in the forest

• The more I think about it the more sense it makes

• Understand what a compost heap is and why we do it

• How big can they be?

• Drawing a compost heap - I have started and I would really like to carry on

  • How I draw the compost heap?

  • Must it be my own compost heap? Why?

• What else can I do with a compost heap?

  • Make paper and charcoal out of it

  • Sculpture

  • Installation

• Variations on compost heaps such as wormeries

Research paper

• Context felt weak in my Study Statement and this will be the opportunity to rectify the issue

• Context around what

• Reviewing my Study Statement, my new trajectories and triangulating these with the world of research around me

• Mapping out key areas for consideration

  • Grief

  • Memory

  • Compost heaps, garden ecology, recology