Something Old, Something New

I am aware that by using old school and group photographs, and my aged mum singing, the final project seems to become about the past and some comment on memory. Of course that is true in a way, but that is not the main intention. I don't know if I could simply locate and state what the intention is concisely, but it is not all about the past, not any more than that each moment of the present sinks in to the past even before we have experienced it.

In order to loosen up the associations, I will be trialling some more contemporary school photographs alongside my old collection, just to see what happens. The old photos I have are a complete entity or idea from which this whole project grew, and so I don't want to just stick in new ones for the sake of variety. However, some things you need to see and do as an artist, as imagining will only get so far. New ideas will spring, or I may well find more up to date references irrelevant or wrong in some way. I have a feeling to try it though.

Similarly with the music.

http://eleanormacfarlane.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/towards-final-project-sound.html

I haven't worked on the music more as yet - I will when the video is all complete, but I am thinking it through. An old lady singing. Yes I will be layering it and so on, but I feel it also another slightly unintentional signal that the work is all about the past. Again, yes of course it is in a way, but all the elements of the piece, the old photos, the Found Paintings, my mum singing, these are very much about the now, in my life, and wider, about the relationship between layers of the past and the now.

Another current theme of my life is my son Magnus who is 17 and planning to be sound producer/engineer. For some years, the soundtrack to our house is often rap and grime, thumpy bass and very contemporary sounds and rhythm. Magnus has a unique way of putting disparate voices and music together, and making them work. I have taken up a throwaway suggestion by my husband Jon about getting Magnus to set my mum's singing to some sort of rap accompaniment. It's so unlikely, but it plays in my mind so I can almost hear and imagine it already.

I cleaned up the little sound clip of my mum as best I could, and have given it to Magnus to do a better job. I don't mind delegating such tasks if I know about it already - I think every decision made in an artists' work should be their own. And I have commissioned him to sample it, make it into a rap, mix it, whatever it is he does. I don't know as yet if I will incorporate what he does in the final work, but I want to listen to it. I want such a thing to influence me - it has influenced me already.

This piece is about the now - several times overlap at once. My son and his complex, tech-based music, my mother, his grandmother, and her childhood memories of decades ago that emerge the more all the decades since disappear.

It reminds me of the major rehang they have done at Tate Britain:

http://eleanormacfarlane.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/500-years-of-british-art.html

I've been there a few times now, and still enjoy the discoveries. Instead of arranging by movement, they have hung the work by actual decades, so old and young artists are contemporaneous, as they are in real life, but not usually in galleries or the cataloguing in art history.

Old and new, large and small cycles, fading and renewing, all these slices of time exist in one moment. Things of the now have their cycles of legacy, and everything we think of the past, we see through the lens of the current.

I always wanted to make work which was rather timeless and could not be easily dated - despite using digital video which is technology of a certain time. That aside, I wanted and still want to make work which was not pinned upon current issues. I was at University when the Twin Towers came down. I was surprised and a bit shocked when walking through the studios in the weeks after to see that rather a lot of students began painting images of that. I just couldn't understand why someone would want to make such obvious work. There were no new images or insights. It was one of the experiences which made me realise that I did not want to make work like that, and that although such incidents affect me just as much as anyone else, I wanted my work to be more abstract, analogous and perhaps internal or psychological.

It's not possible to, and it's not my intention, to erase references and clues to placing work in time. It's funny, it's what we do all the time when looking at other artists' work, relating them to the issues of their age, as if artists were nothing more than abstract newspaper contributors.

14th July 2014

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Now that embedded is completed and I am rereading and finishing off blogs, it's a chance to reflect upon my original intentions, aims and aspirations for the final project, and indeed the MA. The old and the new co-exist in Embedded, with new and old technology, new and old imagery, even new and old framing and display features. I feel my work may well refer to the past in this project with the archive imagery, but what is paramount about the work  and what I realise Embedded is about: We all have a relationship to the past and to time.

11th November 2014