ON MATERIALITY
A day of reflection, of repose, of reconnection.
I spent the morning scouring vintage stores where I often find fabrics more beautiful than anything I can find a fresh in fabric stores. Maybe its the quality of fabrics past, maybe the variety or maybe just the texture of a fabric well worn and washed. I've been working with pre consumer fashion waste (scraps of fabric from the cutting process which I source from friends who are local fashion designers) which I've really been loving. I've developed a way of working which i guess is a sort of textile collage. I call the medium 'hand pieced textiles'. Its a kind of collage, but also a kind of reconstitution. Rather than layering pieces one on top of the other, its more of a sort of textile construction.
Sometimes I sketch out a rough plan of the composition, but this comes out flat. The best approach, as I've found with weaving, is to be fully present with the material. In using offcuts and deconstructed garments, the raw material has an inherent form, a sort of animism, a character or personality which contributes to the conversation. This process is a form of meditation, and this is the method through which all of my most successful art making comes.
And how does this automatism work conceptually? If the mind is empty? without intent?
Well this is the practice, the practice of mindfulness, the practice of spirituality, of life, of art. I think of dear Agnes Martin who would sit in silence waiting. Then the image would come to her directly and in full mental visual form which she would execute directly and efficiently to communicate only the essential. In reading the catalogue of El Anatsui's recent phenomenal "Behind the Red Moon' commission at the Tate, there was an idea that really struck me in an essay by Kobena Mercer which reads "Unlike earlier forms of abstract art that wanted to overcome life's turbulent complexity through aesthetic transcendence, Anatsui gives us a worldly mode of abstraction that revels in contingent conditions that are always open to change". To overcome life's turbulent complexity through aesthetic transcendence. I resonate deeply with this statement, but I believe that there is more at play in this method of producing from stillness. While piecing together my latest artwork and listening to an introduction to Hegel on Phenomenology the recollection of automatic painting sprung to consciousness.
The idea of Automatism, one of the foundational practices of Surrealism is closely related to the subconscious. This poses that while conscious intent may be absent, the subconscious mind, unfettered by the relentless thought of the busy conscious mind is allowed free reign to express itself through symbol and form. In this way thoughts, concerns, and approaches toward alternative realities are expressed in the work not through direct conscious intent but as an act of phenomenology, in which subjective experience and understanding, informed by a through a broad and deep intellectual engagement with the observation of reality & knowledge systems, emerges in the work through the subconscious mind, supported by an intuitive material practice.
