Week Forty-Six | Hungry Frogs

A phrase that keeps popping up is hungry edges. I am still grappling with edges in my drawings and discussions with JK in my first tutorial show I’ve been thinking about this - with limited progress - for quite a long time.

I am drawing a lot, much less in the way I used to but perhaps thinking about drawing in new ways. I have bought a load of tracing paper, as I had a rather literal, adjacent-thought when pondering my Study Statement’s use of the word ‘trace’ and the idea of layering drawings. So tracing paper. I have also been wondering if see-through paper has potential for some sort of animation or movement…

At yoga I had a thought about using frog tape to stick old drawings together in new ways to see what that threw up. I had some books at home from the Sketchbook tutorials I have been running and had a go during our Thursday discussions. I think this may have legs and I am imagining drawings layered and stuck onto one another as a meditation layers and interconnectivity.

I quite like seeing them all together like a patchwork - I have had ideas of memorial quilts in the past so maybe that’s the first thing I notice. It’s a very remedial exercise, but as I learnt from JK on the frottage idea, sometimes these ‘art schooly’ techniques are there because they do generate ideas. So I am going with it.

I am imagining fragments, memories, bits of places. A way of disrupting the older ‘landscape’ way of thinking about place into a more interconnective network of bits reaching out all over the place.

I will have a go with the tracing paper - I notice these are more about the frog tape than the drawings so I think scale is important. The small scale of the sketchbook is too limited and a whole wall of larger drawings seems better. I have piles of old drawings and paintings I can experiment with so that will be my focus for this week. It echos with earlier blog posts about writing a ruined book and very ongoing thoughts about a long narrative like my post about the Bayeux Tapestry.

I have lots of coloured washi tape around but I rather like the ugly yellow frog tape. It keeps me from being too aesthetic in my decisions and stops me worrying about harmonious arrangements. They’re a bit awful and that’s good for me. I notice an interest in the ones that appear to be hanging from a tape rod or pinned down in the middle. These speak to a hanging of some sort, which may be the next stage to develop.