Week Seven | Life’s Rich Tapestry

Feeling more motivated again. Adjusted my attitude and expectations for this MA and moving forward with a new project.

In the 2021 CASS course with the RCA I began a 10m painting on canvas with automated marks in indigo. The project set out well and I felt excited by the prospect but due to the very tight timescales I wasn’t able to fully develop the idea and after the course had finished I felt like I had lost momentum. I tore the strip apart to make smaller works but they felt appropriated and uninspired. A year on, I feel ready to revisit the idea of a long piece.

Project definition

• 1.5x10m drawing on paper has been ordered and I am contemplating now how to begin

• Visiting the Bayeux Tapestry at Reading Museum to note responses to the 70m medieval record of the events leading up to the Norman Conquest. The British, Victorian replica is on view and this will be my first port of call

• I am trying to actively avoid anticipating what this is or how it would be presented but rather explore how the drawing may be useful to my practice.

• I am imagining a drawing that expresses the experience of anticipatory grief around mass extinction and climate catastrophe.

• The Bayeux Tapestry is a retrospective account of events whereas I am concerned with an anticipatory account of events

• Writing - Ruination and Resignation blog essay

• Exploration of a perverse beauty around decay and devastation

• Exploration of the idea that extinction is instinctive - instinction?

• Inevitability and objection - politics of change

• Materiality - fire and ice

  • Drawing with charcoal - burning, pyrotechnology, ash speaks to devastation

  • Ice - freezing and drowning

  • Paper - politically charged uncertain of relevance

• Mark making

• How does this relate to the alternate dimension project

• https://www.readingmuseum.org.uk/collections/britains-bayeux-tapestry

A section of the British Bayeux Tapestry replica at Reading Museum.

A section of the British Bayeux Tapestry replica at Reading Museum.

This roll of drawing paper measuring 1.5x10m is my starting point.