Maybe the realisation from the previous post is a product of where we are at the moment with the world in shutdown due to the virus. I should maybe care that i’m just shut away in my studio, my brand new studio and exhibition space which I was feeling my way towards what I wanted from it. It has been suspended. But I find that most of the time I don’t really care. I’m just here alone making stuff and putting it in the window. People go past and have a look in and some of them smile at me and give me a wee wave and others look haughtily at my work for a moment and see me but ignore me then walk on again. They are consumers and I don’t really care about them. I care about the wavers. When we get back to having more public space again it will be the wavers I’ll welcome in. Perhaps that should be the title of this post – Not Consumers but Wavers.

When I first started out painting again in 2014, I felt it was important to say ‘I am an artist’, in order to build up my confidence to continue. It seemed a vital thing to say that the act of making art would de facto make you an artist. I needed to be defensive about it, in the face of doubt both from other people and from within myself. I realised today that I don’t feel this anymore. i’m now very comfortable saying that ‘I am trying to be an artist’, and that I am ‘trying to make art’. When I started out, I was paddling in the shallows, trying it out, but not entirely committing, and yet I made the bold statement ‘I am an artist’. Now I am comfortable diving in to the deep parts of the ocean, but unafraid of nothing showing up. The point of having a studio practice, with having a process, is the realisation that maybe about 1 in 5 ideas land, that 1 in 5 things are ok, maybe even less. When you are working from this assumption, it can be much more relaxing. I feel knowledgable about my own work, it belongs to me. I trust that when it starts to go wrong (and it always does), I will be able to either pull it around or abandon it without a sense of loss.

Maybe this is a temporary place, and one day I will again need to say ‘I am an artist’. Maybe it won’t be driven by need or desire, but will be a simple statement of fact. Actually when I think about it, I believe that being an artist, proper, is being in this state anyway.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve found that I’ve been too unsettled to do any work. The speed and intensity of the Coronavirus pandemic has swept all of our lives ahead of it. Its been enough to stay at home with my children and husband (who is working remotely from home), keeping us safe and healthy.

I did spend some time trying some studio practice exercises, just using line and breath, but I found myself feeling sickened, distracted, fearful. In the meantime I have been pinning up random images which attract me, and song lyrics which I find meaningful. Some of the images are found; work by other people, and some are my own – a photograph of our gate I took one day as I left and found a vast silvery sky ahead of me, some experiments I had been doing with graphite, etc.

Erasing the violence of the past – Palimpsest

My previous post was added with some haste, and I intended to write more about it, but events, both worldwide and close to home took over; the coronavirus pandemic and subsequent societal lockdown here in Scotland.

The work was done at a weekend retreat with Janet Melrose at her studio in Crieff on 22nd and 23rd February 2020. We met on the Saturday morning and briefly discussed our worries concerning the coronavirus outbreak. It was on our minds, but it was in no way the overwhelming situation we are in today.

Janet had previously sent us a call to action; to respond to the word ‘palimpsest’. Do some research – think about what it might mean to us. I immediately responded to the word, as I have been working on renovating two conjoined shops in Burntisland in Fife (more on that later), and had really enjoyed the process of uncovering layers of history in the place, both removing and leaving traces of the past. When I have been leaving some trace, I feel like I am ‘framing’ them, helping them to be seen anew.

The group found that we sparked off each other very well, and some interesting discussions ensued. Janet had provided some written material to look through, and I was immediately drawn to a print out of an essay by Brian Dillon in the Tate etc magazine from 2006.

In particular the essay contains two photographs: one is an undated photograph of Voroshilov, Molotov, Stalin and Nikolai Yezhov, commissar of water transport. In the second photo Yezhov has been ‘removed’ from the image. He was shot in 1940.

I found the images very powerful. There can be no type of erasure more violent than the erasure of an individual’s existence for political or ideological reasons. The doctoring of a photograph to change the narrative about the shifting political landscape is a frightening act of erasure because it is an attempt to skew the views of people living through the period, to propagandise the actions of powerful figures and governments. Ultimately it is an attempt to change the course of history by changing people of the future’s knowledge.

Janet had also provide us with some materials, including pages torn from a book, and purely by coincidence the pages I was given were from a book about Russia; its geography and history

I started the process by handwriting the quote above over the printed text. I repeated the same lines over and over again, beginning each new paragraph at the end of the previous one, destroying any ‘sense’ which could be previously gained. I used a red marker to randomly block out pieces of the text, using a method of dotting vigorously though sheafs of thin cloth-like paper, the patterns on the cloth creating randomly assigned patterns. it wasn’t until afterwards that I realised the cloths themselves were part of the work. The dot making shook the table and made a disturbing and disruptive noise, however the other people at the workshop seemed to enjoy the disruption. In retrospect the movement was performing a violent act of erasure. Using rough blue stitching I covered over text and joined pages of text together randomly.