Surveilling Place - Transcription

Since I didn't press record properly on one of my visits to the piece of land I’m currently studying I decided to visually map a recording of my prior visit. This is it below. 

I spoke a lot in the recording and it was impossible to resist transcribing directly. The closest I got to my original mark-making intention appears in the bottom right hand quadrant which is from when I was sitting on the bank of the brook watching midges in an air current above the water and listening to a pair of chiffchaffs sing their repeating song to each other - 'Chiff-Chaff' - as in their onomatapoetic name. The abstract dots turned out to look a little like the midges which were using updraft from the stream to circle back into their throng. I thought it might work as a drypoint.

Here are some of the first proofs.

The paper was a bit too damp at the bottom which is why the marks are fluffly and smudged. Although I liked this reference to water, overall they lack a balance between boldness and accuracy of mark making. 

Shortly after this I started a course in intaglio printing at Leicester Print Workshop and picked up some tips; I needed to scratch the plate on top of a harder surface rather than leaning the plate on cutting mat and when I re-cut it the results were much improved.

Next steps:

I'm really taken with this idea for exploring sensorial space to produce an abstract image as it is accessable and there is no really wrong way of doing it. I like drawing without a sense of impending failure! So I'm developing an experimental workshop to share it. 

City Arcadia in Coventry is going to be redeveloped at the end of this year which is felt keenly amongst artists in the city because it currently contains precious exhibition space alongside various other small business, charities and community ventures who are going to lose their units. So, although the buildings have already been widely captured photographically, I think capturing a personal visual response to audible sensations of a space would be of value. I will publish that Eventbrite via Coventry Artspace and put the link in here when it is ready.