Week Forty-Three | White Out
I feel like I want to do another MA after this to actually get to learning to paint how I want to. The past two years have been paradigm shifting in deconstructing everything I thought I knew about my practice and now I sit on the floor with the dismantled pieces of my creativity all around me and I can’t help but feel daunted by the task of putting it all back together.
Roz said today in DCS that it’s not about throwing the baby out with the bathwater, which was insightful as I tend to do that. Throw everything out and start again. It’s about evolving into a better version of the artist I was.
The Unit Two feedback has been so helpful and it’s taking me ages to wade through it and I am savouring it and licking my fingers indulgently with every implication and nuance. I am amazed by the insights and wisdom in the feedback and wish only we had such perspective and feedback available on a semi regular basis but I suppose that’s why the MA extended so we have time to go the slow, scenic route.
It felt so good to be in the studio today, whiting out all the crap paintings I had been working on before the RP and the ‘ahaaa’ moment I had in the Autumn, despite all the insomnia, feeling unwell and general to-much-ness of absolutely everything. It was a growth moment, albeit in my head rather than in the work and now comes the heady task of actually putting that learning to good use.
The most striking element of the feedback was the return to the idea of Ancestor Worship and my own grief and loss. This is where it all began - I am not sure if the Rachel Jones reference was a nudge towards my colonial past but if it was I am not interested, this is not where I want to go. I am still confused by that bit and I might ask Jonthan. It is throwing up ideas of my past, the indigo, faded textiles, Chinese porcelaine and how I seem to have visually put my mother’s death into Chinese vases and indigo boro hangings. This is where my grief resides and that was the moment I was at when I finished the RCA course. I then went off down a landscape route as all of this ‘ancestor worship’ seemed rooted in a place, which it still very much is, but in a much less literal way.
I now want to take those elements and return to them, buried in the ground, drawn on paper, as food offerings, as paintings, as paper lace, as fungal colonies, as a technicolour dream-coat. They are all relevant although they seem so disconnected at the moment.