Looking back to go forward

A few months ago I had the most interesting week with OutsideIn learning to create and deliver creative workshops online.

It required me to think incredibly hard about how other people understand me, how I can help them feel, how unknowingly I make them feel and think and how I can reach others and share space online with them. I’m excited to do more.

I was lucky enough to to share this experience with other artists in a giving and comfortable atmosphere. I felt their support revitalising my practice. And I don’t know where this will lead me but, unlike I have felt for a while, I feel confident that it will be somewhere interesting and worthwhile. In the short term a few other commitments will take up my time, but a direction for 2022 has formed.

I’m relieved about this, as, although time has been passing by quickly and there have been several projects that I’ve been glad to be involved in, which have been great to do, but they haven't stretched my visual art practice.

Within my wish to go onwards to create new work is a hankering to return to past ideas and re-examine them. I think this might be commonplace in coming out of a fine art degree where experimenting is everything - a sort of steaming ahead to the next new idea and not properly exploring each one carefully.  And, I confess, I've was expecting to keep going at degree pace and have became alarmed when it didn't pan out that way. Taking a pause and advantage of some professional development opportunities has given me a chance to take stock.

One of these things in stock has literally been sitting on my mantelpiece staring at me for the last twelve years. This:

It doesn't have a name other than blurbox. It's a sort of painting-sculpture/message in a bottle with a surface made of cracked theatrical wax which is nice to touch. I made it during the summer 2009 (?) before my final year which I ditched for various reasons and then ended up finishing eight years later.  I think I was putting to bed a state of mind or a memory - casting it into a holding state in cracked wax. I certainly couldn't see it clearly at the time.

That was when my practice was more inwardly focussed, but now I'm thinking of the blurring this technique produces to cast another metaphor, of a lack of understanding between species; that barrier that exists between earth beings who share existence but don't ever appear to be synchronised with each other. Cross-species understanding seems to hang on the brink, metabolised mainly by fear and rarely mutual understanding. How wonderful would it be to traverse that divide.

 Phenotype_Patterns_Gall_Insulation

I’m also looking back at the work I did about Knopper oak gall wasps and their crazy predatory gall shape and thinking of a sculpture that tracks that relationship - the oak tree, living wood, manipulated bark and the glossy wasp inside the no-longer-oak-baby-nut-shell. The wasp is parasitical yet entirely dependent on the oak which simply expands to accomodate its demands. Stories on how to adapt a species architype and become part plant bears thinking about in these climate-changing times.

And, due to having had a chance for an almost forgotten work to be shared - Seeds Grown in Stolen Ground - in Alix Villanueva & Tim Seeley's The Garden Zine - I find that I'd like to revisit this work too. Perhaps prompted by the loss of that project, but I think mostly I'm inspired by retelling its story, and that might count towards re-formalising the work.

I'm also being urged from a few directions to write more and explore different forms of communication. So I'm looking into that. But first, there is an entertaining commission to create and finalise and I will share more about that in another post.