Week Eight | Art as an Act of Kindness

23 Nov

In the last session Jonathan challenged us to consider strategies of being in an age of climate catastrophe. The session was rigorous and interesting and I found myself thinking once more of Art as an Act of Kindness. I am not interested in activism in terms of aggressive campaigning or opinion domination but rather as a private strategy around making art as a way to process the collective grief many of us share in anticipation of anthropocentric planetary demise.

I am now reading Ben Okri’s ‘Tiger Work’ following Jonathan’s sharing of Okri’s work here and here. Okri calls for artists and writers to create with urgency, as though these are our final days. Which they very well might be.

I see Art as an Act of Kindness within myself and mark making as my own language for self kindness. Drawing for me is the most direct and raw expression of this self care and I have written in the Drawing Room recently about the relationship between drawing and human becoming - not the other way round, we are human already but possibly not fully ‘become’. Fortified with triaxular shoulder motion and opposable thumbs, we draw, we manipulate the drawing implement, we create an entirely uniquely choreographed motion specific to that unique body and autographs are formed. In doing so we learn by perception that we are already there, we already exist and do not require anything more to be complete - the traces we leave on this earth confirm to us that we have lived a life. Drawing as an act of kindness is a phrase that has been washing over me like the gentle tidal lapping of warm, evening waves in my mind. Not quite understood but gladly welcome, I feel more and more that we draw as an act of kindness to ourselves, as we are with every mark ‘becoming’ - becoming ourselves, becoming in life and simply becoming. These slippery, conceptually challenging ideas seem to have taken my hand and mildly lead me through a thick forest of surrender, sometimes it makes sense and sometimes it sounds like lots of silly words to justify simply ‘dirtying the paper delicately’, to quote John Ruskin.

These ideas are formulating the idea of a large scale trace drawing: I have a 1.5m x 10m roll of fabriano paper rolled up in my studio, tight and white and bright with anticipation, ready to meet the dirty process of being drawn upon. It may fail - all my previous attempts at big, long ‘trace’ banners have - but I feel excited about the trying. I feel a desire to create a narrative of marks that are larger than myself and my recent trip to the Bayeux Tapestry convinces me that there is precedent, not that precedent is required it just drives the imperative forward. The dimensions aren’t important, only that they are bigger than me. I have begun a test run in a concertina sketchbook where I am kindly allowing myself to ‘become’ through deliberate, individual and self-confirming traces.

Aesthetics of ruination is my next essay and the subject of my inspiration for this week.

Homework for this week is to create a presentation on something that inspires us. Ruination is my interest currently - crumbling walls and Japanese boro relative to planetary disintegration as a parallel. I am reminded of the wall photography that was my lifeline during covid living in Nördlingen, walled in literally and figuratively.