I’m continuing to draw from our flat in these weird locked down days. Two upcoming shows have been postponed indefinitely. The act of drawing is respite from thought; labour intensive activity to become lost in. This drawing has a star chart/night sky feel, employing several techniques. It’s currently composed of four A1 sheets of black card and feels like I could keep adding further sheets to it until our entire living space is consumed.
Detail I
Detail II
200 x 140 cm
Pen on Card
I presented this painted black gloss shape on black matte wall at a recent studio critique. It was accompanied by this sound piece, played through a powerful stereo:
It was sufficiently loud that it caused objects within the room to vibrate.
The group discussion read the combination of sound and visuals as being oppressive and ominous, combining to create an atmosphere suggestive of religious cult rituals or sinister political gatherings.
It was felt that the work presented in this crit represents a departure from previous work. The black gloss symbol has nothing of the organic, gentle feel of the pencil drawings. It is extremely assertive and dogmatic; very oppositional and uncompromising in every way, to the point of feeling threatening. It suggests none of the time based creative process of the pencil drawing.
I am gradually assessing where I go from here. The shape is just an arrangement of painted lines, although I can understand why it was interpreted in these ways. I do feel that playing with sound and visuals with a certain charge and potency has potential, though I want to find ways to puncture the pomposity these signifiers carry, to promote recognition of their ultimate absurdity.
The plug socket is included to give a sense of scale.
I cut out the traced blob indentation shape that keeps recurring in this work and projected it using this antiquated overhead projector; the reliable, clunky type I remember from school.
I moved the projector across the floor. The shadow shape was repeated at intervals across the wall five times.
The projector was moved progressively closer to the wall, and the resultant shadows drawn around. This made these concentric blob shapes.
I continued to work using this process at at intervals until the day of our group critique, the predetermined finish point.
The piece was accompanied by a fifty second tape recording I made by digitally slowing a ten second recording of me playing bass drum and hi-hat down. I shifted the pitch down and added a series of effects using a program called Wavepad sound editor. I chose analogue audio tape because of its warm hiss, it’s imperfection. The piece was interpreted as the sound of marching boots, or of an industrial process involving heavy machinery.
Fellow students and teaching staff thought that the sound and the drawing seemed to coalesce to a greater extent than before.
The wall turns black, ready for new drawings.
Our mid year show opened on Thursday night at the Belfast School of Art. Thanks are due to to all who attended. The area I share with the other part time MFA students looked like this
I’ve added a black band to the top and bottom of the main wall piece. I like it as a frame, but I’m aware the lines aren’t completely straight- I spent a couple of hours on Thursday trying, and failing, to get this right, it is probably time to invest in a spirit level. Fellow student Damien Magee has been painting the pipework in the space different colours since September. I like that some of the pipes are now interacting with my drawing, establishing a conversation.
I brought my drum kit in and performed some improvisation with my friend Michael O’Halloran playing guitar. He used a loopstation to repeat ideas, and then layered dischordant notes. Heartfelt thanks are due to him.
I think our course director took the above picture. I also included a small projection of a video I have made of my working on the wall from the early, tentative stages. It has been deliberately projected low down and at a small size, separate from the work. The idea is to have several pieces of stimuli that can openly question the relationship between the rhythms people have percieved in the drawings and the act of making, as well as the time based rhythms created by the guitar and drums. The noise we made reverberated around the space. I think Damian took some video of us playing, I will hopefully be able to upload some of this in future posts.
The show is open to public
11am-3pm on Monday 19th January
Tuesday 20th: closed
Wednesday 21st: 11am-3pm
Thursday 22nd 11am-3pm
I will be performing noise improvisations with special guests at the following times, all are welcome to attend these.
Tuesday 20th 10am
Wednesday 21st 11am
Thursday 22nd 12noon
The hope is that musical improvisation can stimulate further wall improvisation. I will not seek to create finished work, only to push further what already exists.
I talked about a need for new approaches to the ongoing wall piece in my last post. Since then I have been conducting experiments with new forms:
Responding to criticism, I have chosen an indentation in the studio to trace and repeat in the above rhomboid form. Care was taken to ensure the chosen mark’s shape could not be easily read as animal like, or to evoke many associations beyond it’s own pure form.
I am preparing for our MFA mid term show this Thursday night in the art college. Rather than try to seek a resolution, where the whole wall coheres as a piece, I have decided to heed one of my tutors advice and set up an experimental drawing ‘lab’ for the duration of the show. This will free me up, the idea of having to produce a ‘resolved’ piece fills me with anxiety. In my experience anxiety is a perrenial enemy of creativity.
One possible idea would be to use black as a framing device, perhaps with the repeated blob shape, as in this hastily mocked up photoshop picture:
This would heighten the impact of the central band of marks. Another idea for potential development is sanding the wall. I like the looking through tracing paper effect of this, as seen in this small section:
The piece will continue to evolve in the coming days, over the duration of the show. I will be performing in a time based work. I’ll update this blog with what happens.
The Orpheus building wall piece has continued to grow over the last few weeks. I have employed the same rational, measured and almost ritualistic process of tracing and transferring marks in it’s creation.
Marks congregate around my eye level, the natural and most comfortable place to work. In this way I leave a trace of the mass of my own self on the space.
Several sections occur where where marks are most layered and concentrated.
A photograph of one wall inverted. I think it resembles a constellation.
I could continue this approach until the end of the academic year, but I want to interrupt it and set new rules.
I joined several pieces of wood together that I had drilled, hacked and otherwise distressed.
One red lamp and long exposures create the impression of the room being bathed in a red, somehow primordial glow.
The assembled, glowing structure appears like some kind of hive ready to crack open to ooze lava.
John Macormac 