Unit One

My Study Statement’s Working Title is ‘Trace Narratives: Belonging and Loss in the Landscape’ and my work is evolving around creating traces of myself in places that meditate on feelings of personal and collective grief. In my work I hope to establish a practical and theoretical basis for creating continuous visual narratives that engage with belonging and loss and through critical reflections and imaginative experimentation.

Learning Outcome 1:
Formulate, describe and implement a challenging and self-directed programme of study, relating to your Study Statement.
(Assessment Criteria: Enquiry)

Inspiration - during a Thursday session in Term 1 we were encouraged to present some images that inspire our work. This has encouraged a long history of collecting photos of surfaces that I find inspiring and I have been adding to them for some years. These visual annotations of ruined surfaces, weathered walls and visually beautiful shadow play are useful source material as a starting point for creation of a visual language.

Art as an Act of Kindness - this is a blog post around what it means to be making art around the subject of climate change and how we may respond appropriately to the extent of the potential catastrophe we are facing and also appropriate to our own artistic approach. I have continued to explore reading around climate change and specifically artists working in the field in the post Indexical Drawings and researching what aspects of contemporary art and climate chaos interest me.

Reading and research - this list of secondary resources I discover as I go along helps me to retain information related to my field of study. It is also a way of remembering and recording exhibitions that may be relevant or keeping a record of any artist or article that has relevance. This link is separate to my bibliography, which includes only books and academic articles.

Life’s Rich Tapestry - this blog post shows my visit to Reading Museum in Term 1 to see the British replica of the Bayeux Tapestry. This shows my first attempts to explore continuous narratives and establish a basis for visual storytelling in this way.

Heads and Holes - Frank Auerbach Exhibition of ‘Charcoal Heads’ at the Courthauld Gallery. This exhibition of drawings has been extremely relevant to me for Auerbach’s richly layered drawings that feature erasure, so much so that he made repeated holes in the paper and had to patch them up as he went along.

Barbara Walker and the Turner Prize - I was not able to visit the show in person but I have been fascinated by Walker’s large scale in-situ drawings and her relationship with erasure, providing me with a precedent for large scale drawings that correlate trace making and identity politics for me to further develop.

Learning Outcome 2:
Implement appropriate working methods for building an independent and effective self-organisation that enables the critical engagement with practice-based research.
(Assessment Criteria: Process)

My research around process is roughly divided into three main areas: drawings and mark making or ‘traces’, practical research into the concept of ‘ruination’ and finally mining marks directly from the landscape using techniques such as frottage and erasure drawings, which I am working on for our interim show. I am also doing a number of drawing classes to expand my learning including an NEAC life drawing class and I have also undergone a Bookbinding course discussed here to expand possibilities within my practice.

Traces

Drawings | Traces - is a continuous, visual log of my drawings and traces. In a sense the visual blog format represents a sort of Trace Narrative in itself. The images are not curated just added chronologically as they are created although I do only add those drawings which to me feel resolved and so there is a curation process from that point of view. I am seeing an evolution of how I regard the act of drawing, as an act of kindness, as well as how I am editing my marks and traces to those, which best record the intangible senses of simultaneous belonging and loss.

Trace Narratives - this blog post shows my first attempts at creating a continuous narrative in the form of autographic mark making in a continuous, concertina sketchbook.

Erasure and the Turner Prize - the second half of this post was around authenticity in mark making and seeking honesty by mono-printing marks rather than drawing them.

Ruination

Ruination - this post explores the aesthetics and meaning of Ruination including process ideas for how to express ruination from sanding to painterly mark making.

Beauty and Ruination - this is a reflection on a limiting belief I have harboured around anti-beauty and a desire for things to be beautiful and the constant revisitation of the need and desire to listen to the inner voice not the outer.

Christmas Break - this short reflection is around tearing apart old vessel paintings and collages to explore deconstruction and ruination of old work.

Alternate Dimensions - quite early on in the MA I was looking into bleach and its quality of ruination and obliteration.

Writing a Ruined Book - describes how I have been attempting to resolve the idea of presentation of my ruined work in the form of a sort of hanging book idea.

In Gold we Trust - explores previous attempts at linking gold with ruination but that have failed. I am attempting in this post to revisit the idea in my process.

An Archive of Loss - revisiting all the many ideas and process ideas I have had around the idea of loss and how I express grief in the landscape and through poetry.

Marks from the Landscape

Sarsen - this post looks at ways to mine information directly from the landscape including frottage around the Sarsen rocks near where I live and observations from walks in the ancient landscapes and forests in Wiltshire. This area of enquiry feels the newest and requires the most further analysis. After the interim show this must be the focus.

Finally I am conscious that I have taken on a lot with the work I am doing and exhaustion is setting in, which is perhaps not sustainable. I am exploring areas of my Study Statement Work Plan to see if there are opportunities to work in a more helpful, efficient way. which does not necessarily mean more working but better scheduling, which I have begun to set out in the final paragraph of Indexical Drawing.

Learning Outcome 3:
Communicate a critical understanding of your developing practice.
(Assessment Criteria: Knowledge, Communication)

As I began the MA I was interested in Discernment as described in my first blog post and also in How to Fail I expressed frustration at having various themes running in parallel without much cohesive thinking. I am slowly beginning to not only discern but recognise that there are connections that still needed to be made and rather than dropping themes early on in the name of cohesive and clear thinking without fully allowing time for ideas to show themselves fully, it was more about deeper analysis of how those seemingly unconnected threads might have meaning and more nuanced inter-relationships. I am learning to rule in before I rule out. My Stock Take post was about these various threads and it is surprising to me now to see that all of the avenues remain relevant they just hadn’t found all of their connections yet. Equally on the subject of keeping an open mind, I am aware of how hard I find it to start with an open mind and I have a tendency to work in a too ‘outcome lead’ manner so in Sarsen I have tried hard to work with a mark making gathering process that feels obvious to me and remain open minded about where it might go. I am also opening my mind up to entirely new non-art materials for drawing such as light paper in this post Heads and Holes and also textile paper in the post Indexical Drawing where these new materials might open up possibilities for me that I am not yet able to imagine. The post Making a Ruined Book is confronting my desires to stay with traditional drawing and painting, framed and hung on a wall and rather considering new non established ways to present and develop my work in a format that I am figuring out as I go along.

Following discussions in the MA around climate change I began to research climate catastrophe more closely and Art as an Act of Kindness has begun to emerge as a meaningful strategy for me in making work in response to the Sixth Mass Extinction and theories around the Anthropocene and Art. My research described in Indexical Drawings has expanded my knowledge and awareness of Art and Climate Change and prompted specific lines of enquiry around some of the contemporary artists that most interest me. I am aware of the vast resources available on the subject and my Links and Resources and ever growing Bibliography are helping me to create a wide reaching and reflective context within which to create art that, at least in part, responds to the era in which I am making this work. Whilst this theoretical basis is hugely important and helpful so far, I am also conscious that I tend towards academically more ideas driven art and I am learning to balance a process lead approach with informed and selective reading to widen my awareness of my chosen field of study. An Archive of Loss revisits much of my previous research on Death and western attitudes to grief and loss, as begun in my RCA course in 2022.

Drawing has also started to dominate my process and I am evolving my understanding of what a ‘trace’ might be as distinct to a ‘drawing’ in this post and I have created a gallery of drawings so I can see all my traces chronologically from the beginning of the MA and more directly reflect on how my traces are evolving. I am also continuing with the landscape painting that I was busy with before the MA and I am frustrated that I seem to have two distinct areas of work - these more familiar paintings and my experimental work, which I describe in An Archive of Loss and in my Tutorial 2 with Jonathan. It is my long term aim to marry the various avenues of my work and whilst I cannot force it I am aware of it and gently drawing connections wherever I can.

I am conscious that I am still learning how to learn and in the lower part of Christmas Break I reviewed all of my notes on how to reflect to aid getting back into my work after a period of feeling stuck. The Unit Assessment has been useful in itself as a reminder not only to focus on the productivity of noting and documenting my practice but taking time to go back and read previous posts to see how my journey is developing. In addition to my work as part of the MA I run the Drawing Room which is a free community space for artists wanting to draw more and I send out monthly reflections, drawing prompts and inspiration as well as offer paid and free drawing sessions on Zoom to share ideas and draw together. This space helps me to learn the language of drawing and how to communicate with artists of all levels on my own drawing and the wider context.