Amelia, Sarah, Jennifer, Angela, Emma, Eleanor.
Eleanor MacFarlane Artist Statement / Eleanor Heartney Art and Today.
I recognise within my work strands from various chapter of Art and Today. I especially relate to both chapters Art and Time, and Art and the Quotidian Object. Although Heartney has done a brilliant job in summing up and defining artists’ work in a couple of sentences for ease of reading and understanding, such summary has led me to realise that I myself am not necessarily aiming for such clarity and definition, but seek to make work which, while having a directness, and qualities of clarity, oscillate between various practices and definitions.
I realise that I have read and understood the chapter and the word Quotidian as if it was the word and concept of Quiddity. I embrace my misunderstandings as extra insights. While Quotidian is the everyday, Quiddity is more about what an object is, or the essence or whatness of the object. If the Quotidian nature of water is water, rivers, rain, the Quiddity of water is that it is wet.
Currently I am working on a series of drawings. I am spending a strict hour a day on each one, drawing by intuition and abstract principles. I am enacting a structure of creativity where I expect these drawing to access the parts of my mind that think in a purely visual language. This is a new way of working for me in which I am attempting to transfer novel writing techniques to my visual work.
After sixty drawings I will make them into an hour long moving image work, finding the techniques and solutions suggested by the drawings, evolving the format to how I interpret the drawings. This work is at once a different experience of time, where many hours are layered into one, or perhaps contracted into one minute. I see this project as a delicious complex problem for me to solve, and hope to produce a piece which gives a sense of the paradox of reel and real time described by Heartney. However, my work has often moved outside of video or installation, and my desire to make objects which have an element of defocus, movement or reflection – my use of the Quotidian Object, is linked with my aims in moving image.
Sometimes my ideas will be purely within video, and sometimes I try to take them outside of moving image or projection, and embody them within an object, by using elements of that object as a vehicle. Again, I am not seeking clarity of definition other than resolution within each work.
Questions
1. I usually prefer to offer my interpretation of my work rather than an explanation. Do you think it’s preferable to withhold knowledge and techniques, or to bare all?
2. This artist statement is about current work and thinking – is this a good approach rather than overall practice statement? Usually I have a more overall statement.
3. So far I interpret these “uncensored” drawings as being nerve/nodule-like, as if they are reflecting restructuring thinking I have been doing recently in reappraising my work and approach, and taking on changes from the MA. I’d be really interested if there are any other interpretations.
Talked a bit about having things within videos, or outside, embodied as objects or projections - different ways of rendering the same quest of ideas.
I decided or figured out some years ago that I wanted to make work, that although it would be well represented in photos, was really worth coming to see, that it contained some experience that would only work by seeing. There is so much online, etc, we see so many images of exhibitions, that it is as if we have been there. I want to make work that only really comes together when seen - the defocused element, or the part that shifts media. Work that is more than a static image.
responses
Amelia - strong images, can imagine as moving images. They seem evolved.
Like cracks or ice - her perspective of the natural.
The time element - 60 - remains important - the link with time.
Like synapses.
Angela - the drawings offer ways to intervene in many different ways.
Record of chemical or mineral reaction.
Marks made by something other than the human hand.
Snapshots of process.
Sarah - Universal images, the subject linking with the process.
Like a timeline with punctuations, marking time.
Perhaps inflictions, lacerations, wounds inflicted on the page.
The idea that drawing is not the ultimate medium for these drawings...
Tangents from core thread.
Emma - the drawings extend and refine the methodology.
Like oil layers - meniscus. They feed off complexity,
Physical and plastic.
There is a literary and verbal equivalent - (other artists?)
Gerard Titus Carmel - draughtsman.
Retaining the ungraspable - the paradox.
Reflection
I really wish I could see transcripts of these conversations sometimes, because it's so hard to listen, talk and write down key phrases and words. Did quite well this time, but know that others were lost. I've had a tendency to grasp the gist of such conversations before - both a strength and a weakness - the process of the MA is to grasp things explicitly, to write and translate into clear language all those things I would internalise before.
However I think I was able to express my desire to make rather unexplainable work, or work that seeks to avoid particular definition. I may be after the same cluster of ideas, and I do aim for a certain simplicity and straightforwardness, but I certainly aim for the paradox.
Much to think over with the response to the drawings - the ideas of syntax, the musical, verbal, literary equivalents.
It's fascinating to discuss with the other students their work, and to have the opportunity to see different ways in or insights. I think we all learn as much from each other, when to ask questions, when to offer an interpretation or even suggestion. The seminar ranged from following our own instincts rather than tutors' suggestions, how titles can help work, whether emotions involved in making work necessarily translates at all into work, and what exactly is kitsch - perhaps a cliched object - you know it when you see it.
10th July 2012
Talked a bit about having things within videos, or outside, embodied as objects or projections - different ways of rendering the same quest of ideas.
I decided or figured out some years ago that I wanted to make work, that although it would be well represented in photos, was really worth coming to see, that it contained some experience that would only work by seeing. There is so much online, etc, we see so many images of exhibitions, that it is as if we have been there. I want to make work that only really comes together when seen - the defocused element, or the part that shifts media. Work that is more than a static image.
responses
Amelia - strong images, can imagine as moving images. They seem evolved.
Like cracks or ice - her perspective of the natural.
The time element - 60 - remains important - the link with time.
Like synapses.
Angela - the drawings offer ways to intervene in many different ways.
Record of chemical or mineral reaction.
Marks made by something other than the human hand.
Snapshots of process.
Sarah - Universal images, the subject linking with the process.
Like a timeline with punctuations, marking time.
Perhaps inflictions, lacerations, wounds inflicted on the page.
The idea that drawing is not the ultimate medium for these drawings...
Tangents from core thread.
Like oil layers - meniscus. They feed off complexity,
Physical and plastic.
There is a literary and verbal equivalent - (other artists?)
Gerard Titus Carmel - draughtsman.
Retaining the ungraspable - the paradox.
Reflection
I really wish I could see transcripts of these conversations sometimes, because it's so hard to listen, talk and write down key phrases and words. Did quite well this time, but know that others were lost. I've had a tendency to grasp the gist of such conversations before - both a strength and a weakness - the process of the MA is to grasp things explicitly, to write and translate into clear language all those things I would internalise before.
However I think I was able to express my desire to make rather unexplainable work, or work that seeks to avoid particular definition. I may be after the same cluster of ideas, and I do aim for a certain simplicity and straightforwardness, but I certainly aim for the paradox.
Much to think over with the response to the drawings - the ideas of syntax, the musical, verbal, literary equivalents.
It's fascinating to discuss with the other students their work, and to have the opportunity to see different ways in or insights. I think we all learn as much from each other, when to ask questions, when to offer an interpretation or even suggestion. The seminar ranged from following our own instincts rather than tutors' suggestions, how titles can help work, whether emotions involved in making work necessarily translates at all into work, and what exactly is kitsch - perhaps a cliched object - you know it when you see it.
10th July 2012
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