Week Thirty-Six | Ground Drawings

I am starting to work with the idea of Ground Drawings, regarding the idea of the ground as a membrane between the above and the below. Like the Boneyards, I feel this is a logical stage in my understanding of the Earth I stand on, like the above video shown to us by Jonathan in the first year. This has stayed with me as an expression of something I have long known: that much of art is about repetitive understanding of a thing, like John Berger said, the climbing into the thing that gives us an artistic and personal basis for understanding. I feel more and more that this is the work I am doing on the MA, hundreds of drawings on paper of the Earth, above it, below it, inside it. Trying to understand its mechanisms and what makes it do what it does. I have long felt unsatisfied with the idea of looking at the Earth, it seems so arbitrary and probably what caused my painting to have become tight and self conscious. Perhaps the final piece in the puzzle will be to bring it all to life, to create something that speaks to belonging and loss, the self and other that I crave in my work.