I am constantly trying to tune in with chance in my practice, invoking coincidence and allowing random events and chance encounters to open up connections with the world about me and help me to tune in to resonances from the universe.
This drawing I called Tesla’s Egg, and I made at the end of August . At the same time astronomers were getting their first magnetic waves back from a collision of neutron stars 130 million years ago when dinosaurs roamed the earth…..as I found out from an article published in Discover Magazine this week

these coincidences offer moments of synchronicity perhaps a tapping into the fine tuning of universal phenomena…. I am struck by Robert Dienel’s impression of the event and how similar in form it is to my drawing…

this is from an article

Dawn of an Era: Astronomers Hear and See Cosmic Collision

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2017/10/16/gravitational-wave-neutron-stars/?utm_source=SilverpopMailing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=News0_DSC_171016_000000_Final&utm_content=&spMailingID=31037036&spUserID=MTE2MDc4NTMyNzY5S0&spJobID=1142063036&spReportId=MTE0MjA2MzAzNgS2#.WeTw74ZrxZoreate

These are drawings combining images from my neglected garden, and my own interior landscapes allowed to play out on paper while listening to podcasts from Timothy’s Morten’s idea of The Mesh, and a musical studio environment created from classical and experimental music on lyric FM.
The drawings are not specifically about something definitive, more a series of entanglements, a processing of these various exposures. I see them as compositions in the musical sense, taking form from soundscapes merged with headspace imaginings.

ecology
ɪˈkɒlədʒi,ɛˈkɒlədʒi/
noun
the branch of biology that deals with the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings.

This is the result of time spent with dried leaves graphite pencil paper and Lyric FM

25 July on an overcast evening changing from daylight to fluorescent midway

Summer is time to get away from work, I love this from Carol Bove

I decided to stop using the word “work” as an experiment. It was very difficult! I had to compensate by substituting a more specific description of the activity. For example, instead of “I’m going to my studio to work,” I’d have to say, “I’m going to make some drawings.” Or instead of “I’m going to work around the house,” I’d have to say, “I’m going to clean the kitchen and fold some laundry.” I discovered that the absence of the word ‘work’ forced me to reconsider assumptions about leisure, because the idea of work implied its opposite. I let go of the notion that I deserved a certain amount of downtime from being productive or from being active. The labour/leisure dichotomy became uncoupled and then dissolved. I couldn’t use labour to allay guilt or self-punish or feel superior. Work didn’t exist, so all the psychological payoff of work for work’s sake had nowhere to go.

WHAT IS AN ARTIST’S ACTIVITY IF IT’S NOT WORK?

I started to adjust my thinking about productivity so that it was no longer valued in and of itself. It strikes me as vulgar always to have to apply a cost/benefit analysis to days lived; it’s like understanding an exchange of gifts only as barter. The work exercise made me feel as if I was awakening from one of the spells of capitalism. And there was more to it than that: I was able to begin the process of withdrawal from my culture’s ideology around the instrumentality of time, i.e. that you can use time. I think the ability to withdraw from consensus reality is one of the most important skills for an artist to learn because it helps her to recognize invisible forces.

full article here:
http://www.artspace.com/magazine/news_events/book_report/carol-bove-akademie-x-52712

The Tate Gallery website defines PROCESS ART “the term process art refers to where the process of its making art is not hidden but remains a prominent aspect of the completed work, so that a part or even the whole of its subject is making the work”

I understand the act of drawing as a bringing forth, a way of connecting with the world and a drawing out from within. When embarking on a drawing I see the context as the laboratory for the practice – each new context yields a particular assemblage of criteria and elements for creative play. Part of the making is a an invocation to these elements, a spell binding to bring forth this potential, it is important to remain very open at the start of a project to allow for a gathering of  parts, protagonists and behaviours – and then a settling – I think of it as a stirring of the ground where seeds can find purchase. Nurturing and honing comes later as the form takes shape.

I have had a clear out in the studio, various drifts and collectibles have become salient. In the studio I am alone and in tune with R Serra’s verb list with my ‘of gravity’ and ‘of entanglement’ forms working ‘to hang’ ‘to unloosen’ and thinking about drawing in space.

Listening to Tim Morton’s lecture Nature Isn’t Real

On the fragility of lichen – where algae exists symbiotically with fungi  o-o-o  –  if a thing exists, it exists in the same way as everything else – in this discussion about a flat ontology (but not a flat ethics) Morton proposes a new term, Implosive wholism (subscendence) where the the whole is less than the sum of its parts, and an argument for interconnectedness.

Set Theory
the branch of mathematics which deals with the formal properties of sets as units (without regard to the nature of their individual constituents) and the expression of other branches of mathematics in terms of sets.

The Mesh
The ecological thought does, indeed, consist in the ramifications of the “truly wonderful fact” of the mesh. All life forms are the mesh, and so are all the dead ones, as are their habitats, which are also made up of living and nonliving beings. We know even more now about how life forms have shaped Earth (think of oil, of oxygen—the first climate change cataclysm). We drive around using crushed dinosaur parts. Iron is mostly a by-product of bacterial metabolism. So is oxygen. Mountains can be made of shells and fossilized bacteria. Death and the mesh go together in another sense, too, because natural selection implies extinction.

Beginning new work – picking up threads from play with space/line and suspension/gravity.

Image shows standoff between 2 kinds of suspension – the freeze frame stasis of plaster and the live suspension of hanging things There is a tension in this counter balance of forms that I want to inhabit for a while

Drawings showing the interior of mouth, being inside a yellow rose, and fir cone explorations.

Cassie and Carol have started some expressive drawing sessions in St Peter’s Church. What a lovely opportunity to play together.

These are some sketches- an experimental, experiential approach to drawing.

This body of work is emerging out of a residency with Virtually There. I am working with in an open enquiry about materials and layering. I envision finished pieces as photographs (re-assembled as photographs) but for now they are held here in sketch form. These drawing have been made in dialogue with young people at Killard School and a largely based on a sense of being together for a short time in a public park, our dialogue took place afterwards online:

Drawing assembles from a collection of things: material and colour and gesture. The yellow, wet and the way it affects the paper – dimpling puckering and pooling in draws in, collecting – does the liquid draw the paper around it, a protective gesture or does the paper embrace the liquid, also protective, this drawing is about that – belonging in the environment.

This is another drawing assemblages using Yellow. Cut drawing as well as mark drawing. Themes of covering and obscuring run through this body of work, concealing and revealing.

drawing with shape and form. This is part of a large piece which took over my studio, hanging from the rafters, ideas are collaged together loosely hanging – ready to move, nothing is stuck down.

This Drawing is a different kind of assemblage, there is a figure mapped out in pen and ink represented in a landscape and there has been an intervention here, a weathering, the drawing is layered with other kinds of mark-making, is it debris? Or an explosion? The yellow is joyful, the gesture is joyful here but sprung from behind the figure – is she aware of it? There is a more systemic patterning above the figure, yellow once more but neon this time, electric, perhaps a thought pattern, the inside of the figures mind? A softly pastel coloured geometric pattern appears left, again hints of yellow with peach and pink and pale blue could this be a pod of some kind, a more formal element, there are other shapes like utterances floating in front and above, and there are other layers holding the elements in space.

This is a collaborative drawing I made with a student, we were experimenting with layers and graphic imaging tools on an interactive whiteboard. Included here is an image from the David Hockney exhibition we visited, recalling the trees which gave us an unforgettable experience at Mount Stewart, the idea of proxy is contained in this drawing, the sutdent’s avatar and Hockney’s image standing in for an experience we shared. Here we are adding to the imagery drawing over it with digital tools.

Here is the avatar again printed and placed over one of my drawings of our trip to Mount Stewart.

Drawing in layers detail mixed media

Drawing of the coney lanterns at Mount Stewart, transformed into a mountain (in my mind verbally this locates with the fabled Coney Island, I’ve never been there but I know how it figures in the American psyche. ) The repetition of this image carries through all iterations of drawing cycles.

Aims for this project are to create a drawing room an immersive environment drawn together with collected iterations and assemblages from the project.

I have been feeling my way here. Drawing has been beating in the background, quietly sustaining a practice. Drawing is a current with a pulse. My present work is to bring drawing to the fore. This excavation is where my interest lies; curiosity is at its height when the destination is elusive, and drawing is the expression of working towards, of seeking, perhaps never wholly finding, hopefully encountering surprising glimpses into the vastness of what it is to be, and finding it briefly in small moments, attention to a detail that has been overlooked or hidden.

to understand

to probe

to meditate

to log

to visualise

to revisualise

to invent

to exhume

to explore

to extract

to express

to hone

to be

Adding, subtracting, trying new ways of seeing, understanding, logging, drawing is the basis for experimental thought. Drawing (not language) is the house of thought* .

At the Guesthouse Reading Group we are reading Martin Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism,  a response to Sartre’s existentialism (Sartre never replied)

I aim to open up the ek from Martin Heidegger –  If I was in conversation with the philosopher I would suggest that he might try a drawing (not meaning to be trite)

…and so back to language, drawing is embedded in the idea of drawing out.

*Martin Heidegger p 254 Letter on Humanism

the human being is not only a living creature who possesses language along with other capacities. Rather, language is the house of being in which the human ek-sists by dwelling