Initial Questionnaire

Visual Enquiry and Research Methods. Initial Questionnaire. February 2011.

Reflecting on Theory and Practice.

Generating and selecting ideas.

• How do you go about selecting and developing your initial images/ideas?

Sometimes I will save up time when I will deliberately think through ideas and decide what is next, e.g., a journey or a block of time that I know I will have to myself. I have become quite disciplined over time in writing down ideas and not losing them.

• What criteria do you use to select or reject them?

I have an archive of ideas to work through themes and notes, list of works I would like to make. However, the most “live” list is the archive in my head. There is often an idea that pushes itself to the front, whose time feels right. So rather than working through a list of ideas, I try to incorporate as many layers of work into current thinking as possible.

• Are your ideas usually substantial enough to sustain a piece of work? If not how do you modify them?

I feel a transient idea usually has substance, if only I can capture the initial intent. I may have to plough through a lot of work and material to refine it, remove all the excess from the work’s intention, and make it as subtle and precise as it needs to be. I modify my idea by really focusing upon it, and uncovering all the layers of meaning and depth I can access. It feels like being truthful and doing what has to be done. I always trust my initial imagination, the fleeting glimpse of what I want to produce, and I concentrate to refer to that as I am making.

• What do you do when you get stuck?

When I get stuck I multitask. I start over. I do something else towards the piece from another angle. I leave it for a bit, if possible, and continue with something else. I have a bath or go for a walk to think it through, given the chance. I recognize that the solution exists and it is for me to find. A couple of times I have stayed in bed all day to think it through, and not got up until the solution was clear. Usually, household and family routines take over, and I leave the problem on the backburner of my mind until I know I will get a chance to work at it.

• Are there ideas you would like to explore but don’t know how to start?

I feel I still have plenty of ideas to explore. I still want to tackle conceptual ideas of framing. I’ve always felt it was resources and space holding me back, but actually the current Vessels bottles project is feeding more ideas into that – framing photographs stills so that they move in a low-tech illusionary way. I want to go further and further into the ideas I am fascinated with – the flow of time and its apparent direction, the suggestion of presence and life through spare shadow or reflection, light, magnetism, and the psychological analogies of these.

Contextual research

     

What are your influences? 

I truly cannot separate visual arts from novels, music, ideas in science, knowledge of life. I think all arts, ideas, sciences, are analogies for life. The list is truly long, and changes retrospectively as I look back, and as I make connections between them all. The liberal arts.

• How does your work draw on these?

My work draws on scientific theories, art theory books, insights from novels, inspirations from symphonies, and what is said of them, what is understood by them. I am looking for universal truths, insights about the human condition. I am looking to reflect my own psychology and philosophies.

• How do you choose the resources to research and to support your work, where do you find them?

Research is gaining breadth of vision in a novel, hearing again a piece of music and hearing new aspects, walking through a museum upon layers of human cultural endeavour. I also go to current exhibitions and look online to contemporary practice. Everything I comes across I aim to relate to my own experience or memories or thoughts. I also wish to avoid a narrow view of current curatorial practice, and keep my references not too specialized.

• How do you position your practice in a contemporary context?

I feel quite aware of contemporary practice, although the mechanisms still seem quite mysterious. I admit I find much curatorial style and writing rather repellent, relying on an intellectual zeitgeist rather than the art experience. I find I am not so issue-led as much contemporary practice – I do not wish to respond to multiculturalism, inclusion, funding, banking, environmental issues and so on, but to plough deeper depths at a human scale.

• What difficulties do you having in accessing resources?

Although it is sometimes frustrating, I have always been determined that resources will not determine work. It may shape it and influence it in many ways, but being resourceful is the tool of creativity. The access to resources is just the size of the page and the type of paint you have, it does not determine the quality of the art or the artistic integrity. In other words, make it so anyway. Equally, I do look at artists with seemingly unlimited funding and wonder about that – it is another world to have your ideas made up in a grand scale. I still want to do everything myself. It seems the point of being an artist – to make the artistic decisions at every stage, to come up with your own solutions and evolve the work according to what you are – but filling the turbine hall is another issue.

Evaluation

• What is your framework for making judgments about the work of others?

How to define whether I get it or not, and what there is to get. I suppose I look for agreements or anomalies within the work. In art, the production and process match the content, and this is either followed through, or played with. I always look for a thing to be thought through fully. If everything has been considered and decided by the artist, it will be successful, whether I agree with is or like it or not.

• How can you tell if images or objects, yours and others are successful or not?

Sometimes I wonder. I have been baffled at times. Although I do not mean to preclude a light touch or an artist working at speed, there is something integrated and totally thought through about art success. Although viewers will always bring more and new aspects and connotations to a work that was in its intention, the successful artist knows what a piece is, just about all it implies, owns that, and also owns the fact that there are some elements you can do nothing about, e.g., hanging decisions outside artist’s control, or an unfamiliar reference. Work that relies too much upon the essay or written explanations is not fully successful. I believe there should be a way in for the viewer to get the piece without explanations, although more may certainly be illuminating.

• How do you compare your work in relation to the work of others?

I suppose I compare it in terms of being recognizable. I love certain artists work, e.g. Susan Derges, Steve Pippin, and recognize their style, their personal arena much like a composer’s sound and the internal world they create. I want that. I want to create a body of work which is mine and recognizably so, according to my own internal aesthetic and meaningful rules.

• What is successful and not successful about your current work?

I always know a piece is successful if I have not ignored any shadows of doubt that I ought to explore. Sometimes that means just doing a lot of work, over and over until I get it right. I can’t skip corners, but sometimes you have to accept that the work is ready and that limitations of time and resources are real. Even if I look back after years and think I could make something better now, there is rightness and success to fulfilling a moment.

 

Materials and techniques etc. 

• How do you decide whether a material or technique is appropriate or not?

I don’t know how to answer this other than trial and error. Techniques suggest themselves to me by their intended resulting vision – I mean I can almost imagine how a thing will be, and what it will entail. I often have to teach myself new editing specialties in order to realize videos. I feel I have quite a wide palette of techniques available to me, and collections of objects and materials that are favourites – relationships with certain substances, glass, mirrors, cameras, books, metals, shadows, clouds, trees, stones, hands, the abstracted figure, horizons, cityscapes, windows – a few of my favourite recurring things.

• What limits your choice of materials and or techniques?

Probably at the moment lack of studio space more than anything, as l do not have good access to my collections of stuff. Of course, financial constraints lead choice, but I have always found a resourceful alternative. I would almost say it is part of my practice to add to my repertoire of techniques – I feel there is lot now I can do in moving image to facilitate my intentions efficiently.

• Are there any materials or techniques you would like to explore?

In making work there is always some awkward problems, some chaos or confusion. Otherwise it would be painting by numbers. Actually, I love these problems, mulling them over in my mind, knowing that there is a solution and all I have to do is keep on going, keep on trying out different solutions, and the direction will become clear. Those moments of resolutions are some of the happiest in life.

 

Communication and intention 

• What messages do you intend your work to convey? How do you do that?

I wish to deal with ideas of presence, and time. I wish people to think their own thoughts in my art, deep connecting thoughts, an internal journey, linking their experiences with that feeling of the universe within. I wish to show parallels and metaphors towards a philosophical bent. I do this by thinking very intently upon these issues while I am working, so that they are embedded, even subliminally. I do this by ruthlessly editing out anything superfluous to its intention, and by directing the viewer with a title and a paragraph about the work which I intend to be a way in.

• What is the intention of your work? How is that manifest in the work?

I intend the work to be a multilayered manifestation of an aspect of the human experience, perhaps of time seeming to flow in a different way, or the magnetic pull or repulsion between people. I wish to polish up the idea so that it is itself in essence when I show the work, an aesthetic layer that pulls the viewer in, to unlayer more if they choose.

• Who is the audience for your work?

Not necessarily just other artists. People. People who come to galleries and who are interested in culture and thinking. Also people who think they are outside contemporary art. Everyone has their reflective moments, and I would like to appeal in a variety of ways, simply, with a beautiful impact, with no end of layers to explore should the viewer go further.

• Who will critique your work?

Peers. I have an artist’s group and have shown work in a critical debate setting. I’d like to take more steps in this direction. It takes practice to be robust, but also to pre-empt certain criticism, making sure it has all been considered. Then the debate becomes about the ideas and moves on from whether it works or not.

• What might their criticism be?

What reverberates in my head is previous criticism – sleight of hand. Not being transparent about actual process and technique. Using digital video rather than film. Not being politically / issue driven. Not being angry. There will always be some new angle of criticism, but practice in this area helps artists to think on their feet. I have been floored a couple of times, because I hadn’t a “prepared” answer. I don’t mean that you have to have an answer ready for everything, but this kind of thinking needs practice to respond to productively – hopefully to make a positive.

Critical thinking 

• What have been the most and least valuable resources so far?

Everything bounces off people. Life. Experience. Wealth of classical music, novels I have read. Movies, museums, education. 

Most – wide cultural influences.  Conversations.

 Least – some of the required art reading at university – Art in Theory.

• What changes has your research made to your work?

Reading science books have opened up many more possibilities which I can connect with my own ideas. Old dictionary research has focused and polished my concepts.

• Have there been any been any negative effects of your contextual research?

I like to be very accurate, but not according to specific facts. The idea of empirical knowledge or foregone conclusions is the opposite of what I wish to explore. I need to be very specific and integral to my own thinking and logic to produce subjective knowledge. Any gaps in clarity can be difficult.

• What specific influences and ideas have made the most positive impact on your work?

I have always been very struck by composers, artist, etc, who have a particular recognisable voice, no matter what they do, e.g. Prokofiev, Stravinsky, artist Moholy-Nagy, novelist Joanne Harris. I have though this idea of creating work which speaks to many but is a distinct voice, the point of being an artist, the point of being alive.

1st March 2011