Working Processes

Asynchronous Seminar June 2012

What is the focus of you working process(es)?

How do you work with the balance between ideas, making, techniques, and aiming for completed work versus open-ended exploration?

Recent conversations with Emma has led me to realise just how very ideas-led my work is. Often these ideas are things I mull over for a long time, perhaps years, and so I can never run out of ideas, as you simply add more layers of years.

Concurrent with that is a certain fascination and drive to make things, which certainly goes in phases - according to time and resources, I used to make alot of textile objects, and larger sculptural objects when I had the space at art school, and so on.

Another drive is the techniques, and seeing a glimmer of possibility of how to make something - giving myself a conundrum or challenge.

For me the crucial moment is when these things collide or converge - I get an idea of how I can convey a stream of thought, basically by making an object do something, or by capturing certain images in a certain way.

I fell then like I have given myself a puzzle of a mission to work through all these elements, to distil them and produce something which has matched my imagination, informed all along with what happens, and the twists and turns of making.

The final phase for is is when I take the elements I have produced, and make them take a leap or create a life of its own. This is my difference between openended and completed work. It is completed when, eg, I take two layers of moving image and place them together - what they create, although I have anticipated the result as much as possible, is the new thing. Or when it is the audience who activates it.

So, ideas, so that I can fully explore my ideas, and so that the audience can journey into that through their own ideas.


12th June 2012 

We were discussing what effect we would like or aim our audience to have when looking at our work. In truth, although I could say they have an experience, perhaps of time flowing a little differently, or an oblique or abstract view I present, I would say that I hope the audience doesn't really know what effect the work has. I hope to bring them to their own experience, and they experience something abstract. By being extremely personal and subjective, and by fully realising my own individual imagination, I hope to come to a more universal place or experience.

I make work, moving image, frame by frame, allowing, including or excluding all elements, to make it all my view and choice. I feel less considered work is just footage, and anyone could take it. I've never wanted to make work that just anyone could take more or less accidentally. What would be the point of that?? I want to make it mine, to relate to it, and it becomes my reflexive set of images for that aspect of life or thought.

I think of Moving Image, and all artwork I do, as a big complex abstract painting, which, as soon as marks are made, have complex layers of equations to resolve. The artist uses many layers of thought to find the finished work - intellect, discovery, instinct, a developed aesthetic repertoire, considerations of materials and limitations, and so on. There may be many solutions, but there is one right one, one manifestation of all the elements which brings it all together in the artist's mind.

Images from oilstick paintings I did some years ago.

3rd July 2012