As I have worked through this project, I have come to realise that the challenge I face is how the material I am being presented with and the research I am being encouraged to do, influences my own creative practice. How do I select what is relevant and important, what resonates with me and my interests, and then how do I utilise that to inform my practice? The other challenge I have, is a little bit chicken and egg: I need to reignite my creative practice before I can be influenced by the study material, but I am looking to the course material to inspire me, to trigger me into creative action. At present, that’s not happening and I’m feeling stuck.
At present I have been siloing the course, separating it as a discrete entity from any personal intent, thinking or work I have been doing. This has meant I have been approaching the exercises as standalone activities, connected only to each other and not examining the possibilities for my own personal work. I will say, (repeat, perhaps) that the amount of research work being asked of us, precludes the availability of free time for personal practice (it does for me) and naturally forces the student into a state of responding to the material only: and there are only tangential references throughout the Unit to the need for your own practice. I accept that this is the second year of Degree study and the ‘ante has been upped’, but I would suggest that the transition to the new Units may have left a sizeable gap between the more directed handholding into creative practice that was present in the teach-out units of the first year and the expectation of self-directed practice that is present in the new second year modules. I am aware that I sound like a broken record, and there may be voices that say that this log is not the place to enter into this discussion, but at present I am struggling with this course and am trying to decipher its relevance to my creative practice. I feel it’s important that I am allowed to say that.
That all said I have begun some, limited, practice centred around the figure, investigating how to incorporate text into those figurative examinations – albeit very clumsily (see https://ideasresearchwriting.nikolashead.co.uk/2024/10/21/creative-work-october-2024/). This was really initiated by my research into Shirin Neshat for exercise 2 and subsequent exploration of Tracey Emin’s work. Investigating Tanavoli and Moshiri for exercise 1 helped me begin to understand the letterform, words, as not just carriers of semantics, but as having a visual presence, a materiality that can be exploited both in tandem with and separate from their read meaning (an understanding benefited by the exploration of foreign languages and charactersets). But at that stage I couldn’t envisage a direction that my work could take under the influences of either of those artists.
Neshat’s work asked me to consider how language could be employed in visual conjunction with the body, the meaning that is communicated because the two exist together within the same space. What would happen if the text or the body were removed from the image? Would the work carry the same meaning and power? Neshat’s work also brought home the decorative potential of the text, though at the moment, for me, that appears bound to the intrinsic qualities of the Farsi characterset and the cultural respect that calligraphy is accorded in Iran: to me Farsi is exotic because of its unfamiliarity, whilst the latin alphabet is so prevalent in my life – especially in my professional life -, it is difficult to focus on its aesthetic potential.
This (sparse) line of approach was further ‘greased’ by the research into the sensory response potential of writing. The holy grail of figurative artists is how to communicate a subjects inner world through the visual. I have begun to think about how conjoining copy and image within a work could better carry that communication to the audience. So across several life drawing sessions, I began to write how I was feeling, what I was thinking during the act of drawing. The problem I experienced was being able to successfully witness my feelings and thoughts during the act (especially when drawing for me is very much a quiet, meditative act) and then being able to verbalise those on the drawings. The results are very clumsy, forced, pragmatic, completely un-poetic. They don’t examine the materiality and presence possible with a poetic deconstruction of the school-structured forms of language I have grown up with. There is still a part of me that sees poetry and visual arts as separate disciplines, and that writing, especially poetry requires a specialist set of skills, skills that I don’t have.
I feel that the creative work I produced in response to exercise 3, ‘I’m more than the some of my parts’ evidences a grasp of some of the concepts discussed in this project: how visual meaning can be communicated through language, the affect of materiality on the context of the concept, how to carry a figurative subject through language only, how to address a concept through non- standard language, the decorative or visual potential of writing. It is an approach that offers plenty of scope for exploration, yet, as I mentioned in the learning log, this form of practice feels so far from the creative apporoach that I envision for myself, being too structured, very un-painterly and not engaged with the materials that I am interested in.
One of the most prominent places that evidences where I am merely responding to the exercises, was exercise 4. I found the conversation between Simone Fattal and Maggie O’Sullivan fascinating and accessible, especially as it provided a lens into their thought and making process. There are some concepts from the conversation that stood out to me – “the sound and the song of language” (O’Sullivan, 2022) “the textures of silence on the page” (ibid), “a culture of care is evidenced in the reception of the work” (ibid), O’Sullivan’s concerns of transcience, precariousness, vulnerability, the absences and silences being as important as the words themselves, how language brings something into being and helps its memory continue, the idea of somatic listening – there are more, but I haven’t had the time to consolidate these, ruminate on their potential influence and explore practice with them.
It’s worth discussing as an aside here, that I have recognised that, because I have been siloing the tasks, I haven’t performed a consolidation process on the learnings and insights from across all the exercises. I think that I should look beyond just making notes aligned to the exercise, and create a single, visual space into which I can extract and connect the insights, the learnings, the ideas from across all the exercises. At the moment everything is distributed across multiple different places in my learning log, and this, along with the fracturing of the available time I have for study, is disrupting my ability to make connections, and draw them out to see possibilities. This is the initial state of an archive that I need the most I think, just a single page – however long – where I note down those ideas and insights that resonate with me. This may give me the a window through which I can see possibilities.
For the last exercise, no. 5 (incomplete as of 4th November), I deliberately chose to reflect on the work artists that I know, that engage me, that connect with my painterly interests – work that I understand. I had a very resistant reaction to many of the artists referenced in the material. I struggled to find any recorded performances for many of them, and where I did, notably Hardeep Pandal, I struggled to understand the ideas in the work being presented to me, or gain any useful applicable insight: one of Pandal’s videos ‘JoJoBoy’ I found particularly challenging (his childhood handling of pet rabbits) and couldn’t watch. I am also struggling to to define performed poetry in the same plane as visual art, which was also hindered by not being able to view recorded videos. I freely accept that this creative modality is art (and that I don’t have to like a work of art to be able to speak about it critically), it’s just not an art form that resonates with me (at the moment). Tracey Emin’s work, Basquiat’s work, both I admire massively, they stimulate an intellectually unexplainable excitement and desire to know more, to understand their work: it’s work, as Michael Craig-Martin says, that I as the viewer, have willing faith in accepting what the artist has to say.
You either believe in a work or not. If you engage with a work, it can become magical, and if you do not, nothing happens, no matter how great the work itself. It accounts for why some people are artists and others are not, why some people dismiss works of art that others highly praise, and why something we know to be great does not always move us.
Michael Craig-Martin (2015 :132)
List of References
Material Poetries: Maggie O’Sullivan and Simone Fatal (2022) [Online Video] At: https://sculpture-poetry.net/public-events/material-poetries (Accessed 04/11/24)
Craig-Martin, M (2015) On Being an Artist . London: Art Books Publishing Ltd. pp.129 – 133