A bird flower
I have argued before that drawing is a great way to problem solve, so what sort of problem are these posts designed to solve? What sort of problem in fact are my own drawings trying to solve? (The slight shift in sentence structure is useful, 'what is it my drawings are trying to solve ?', being a better way of putting it than, "what is it I'm trying to solve through making drawings?" It gives more agency to the process or the event.)
I'm someone that uses drawing to think, a person very interested in aesthetics and how to think about them. I have also been posting quite a few thoughts about my worry over words and objects and that I am beginning to think that all we really experience are events and sometimes we play a big part in them and at other times we are very much a bit part player. Therefore I'm less interested in aesthetic objects and more interested in a capacity that aesthetic situations might have to bring ways of living into being or to transform themselves in order to be more inclusive or entangled into the events that occur. Politically I'm worried that a rigidity of thought may be developing that leads to a fascist future and in opposition to that I'm trying to develop ideas that celebrate flexibility and the possibilities of new futures that come from the mixing and recombining of peoples and their cultures with the world itself.
If you think of the world as constantly 'problem generating' then humans, like all the other things that exist, use experience of it to try to respond to the problems it sets. For instance the problems associated with basic physical forces. Our bone structure, our size and physical makeup are all answers to the problem of gravity, as a mammal we have found a pretty unique answer in standing up on two legs and learning to walk on them. We can also climb trees. However the dinosaurs evolved a very different answer; feathers, hollow bones and wings became much more useful than large sizes and sheer bulk. Theropods surviving eventually as sparrows and hawks and leaving behind their giant cousin the tyrannosaurus. By being sensitive to their entanglement into the possibilities of changing events, birds escaped the extinction moment that ended the time of dinosaurs. But how do bodies know they can do things like this, how has all that previous experience been passed on, and how do cells know how to put a body together to be able to do these things? There has to be some form of memory of these events, and how they shaped reality, to enable the experience to be passed on. Memory begins for both birds and human beings in their bodies, or more precisely their bodies are the product of memories. Could it be that the bird or the human is in fact an idea that can be passed on? If so, this is about formal principles and if that is right, it’s about ‘aesthetics’. If it is though, we will need to approach the old chestnut of aesthetics from a different perspective, one of inbuilt necessity, patterns or the forward planning that is found in the structure of basic elements. I'm suggesting a way of thinking about aesthetics that explores capacity for possible change in relation to given forms; rather than looking for sets of principles concerned with the nature and appreciation of beauty, I'm looking for aesthetic principles of connection. The 'beauty' of any one situation being its processes of attraction for other forces and the 'rightness' of its relationships. It is in the joints between things, and in an awareness of how connections are made that this aesthetic domain lies.
This situation or situatedness (a theoretical position that posits that the mind is ontologically and functionally intertwined with environmental, social, and cultural factors), also means that ideas themselves have to be aligned with material forces not just by being sensitive to the possibilities that any material offers, but in a sense that ideas are ‘driven’ by their material nature and their use value is dependent upon how they can reveal a possibility or understanding of relationship within any identified complex of interrelatedness. This is why a human or a bird can be seen as an idea, they are both responses to formal principles passed on by physical memories and forms that allow for future possibilities. I’m suggesting that memory is actually rather like an empty cast, a shape from which things have come in the past and will come from in the future, but as with all memories things are never exactly clear, there is never quite a one to one correspondence between a memory and what is remembered, just as there is never a one to one correspondence between you and your father or mother.
Pen and ink forming images on paper
It has been impossible for me to escape thoughts relating to the corona virus, especially because of the imposed social isolation. The situation has heightened my awareness of what you could call 'the aesthetics of existence', or “what the heck’s going on?” Why things are the shapes and forms they are is a question written about extensively by Raymond Ruyer, and I can feel his concept of embryogenesis seeping through my recent images. Elizabeth Grosz uses a quote from Ruyer to open the chapter, 'Ruyer and an embryogenesis of the world' in her book, 'The Incorporeal'.
He stated, 'Memory is not the property of bodies. Bodies, or what appear as "bodies", are the property of memory'. From: 'There is no Subconscious: Embryogenesis and Memory'
Ruyer's text is a strange read and I found the religious aspects very suspect, but there was an idea in there that rang bells. Consciousness begins with the very first material idea. A forming principle is at work, right from the beginning and this principle or set of principles directs all actions. That's why he points out that "bodies", are the property of memory. Every cell forms itself out of the 'memory' of the principles adhered to by sub-atomic forces. What we think of as consciousness, is no more and no less than the movement of relationships between atomic forces. How they can move and in what possible variations is dependent both on the structural principles inherited from all the previous generations of electrons and protons, neutrons and / or electromagnetic or other forces that underpin everything and the way these rules determine the possibilities of events coming together in different arrangements.
A virus, is no less conscious in its formation than a tree, they both follow a certain set of organising principles and both are in constant interaction with all the other constantly changing sets of circumstances that we call reality. For a few moments in time a certain set of material circumstances combine to form what we call a virus, circumstances that have been many other events before and which will become part of many more in the future. But in this local time frame, the events associated with societal responses to a viral pandemic have caused the ink that I use to draw with to be moved about on paper to form images of things that reflect an instability of scale and image identity and at the same time follow the implications of a memory; a memory of what the virus looks like, images of which are all around me on various media outlets, but also images of plants and flowers I have looked at and drawn previously and all the other things that for one reason or another have stayed in my memory. We shouldn't blame the virus for what it clarifies for us, but be thankful for the complex of interrelatedness that exposure to the virus reveals. We as humans are not separate from the world, we are deeply embedded into it and as such our actions need to take this fact into account. The images that I am producing being the product of the coming together of a series of different forces, from the cellulose structures of plant life, via the metal amalgam of a gold tipped drawing tool, combined with arthritic fingers linked to an ageing brain in a mash up with news footage, invisible microbes and viruses, social networks and quantum mechanics and yes a memory of a reading of 'Ruyer and an embryogenesis of the world'. There is a framework within and out of which which these images emerge, a framework that gives shape to them before they are thought, but which is directing possibilities, in just the same way that my originating cells directed the possibilities for my growth.
Try to think of a memory as a chemical change and a chemical change as a product of elemental particles interacting according to the fundamental laws of physics. In this way you can begin to sense ‘originality’ or where something comes from; its roots.
Originality is often misconstrued as ‘newness’ or ‘novelty’, which as far as I am concerned has nothing to do with art, simply to do with fashion or titillation. But an awareness of the deep structures which impel form, that give shape to possibilities is a different order of thinking and of aesthetic value. Memory in this instance being the passing on or inheritance of a sort of code or template on which can be built different possibilities. So my suggestion is that your memory is no different from your arm or your hand. The idea of ‘memory’ is encoded in your genes, just as the idea of a hand is. You don’t have to invent memory as a youngster, it just gets used, just as you don’t have to develop a hand it just gets used, and as you use it you get better and better at working out what to do with it.
So where do what I might call short term ‘human’ or ‘local’ memory and long term ‘elemental’ or ‘universal’ memory come together at their optimum? I would argue in the act of perception, itself. Let’s say you are looking at some marks in soft ground, experience tells you from the shadow cast around them both something about the time of day it is and what might have taken place to leave the marks. The sun is shining low in the sky in that moment and you have also seen it shine at different angles to the ground and memories of these things fuse in your awareness that its morning rather than midday. Your fusing of a memory of deer passing and leaving hoof prints in soft ground, allows you to conjecture that it was deer that left the marks in the ground in front of you. But there is room to move. What sort of deer, black or red coated, young or old? A more experienced observer might be able to tell you from the shape of the hoof prints whether or not the deer were old or young, but there is always ‘wriggle room’ for invention. It is in this wriggle room that I draw.
The space for invention is about possibilities, but and this is where the two sorts of memory conjoin, only certain possibilities are possible. However the more connections that the ‘consciousness’ has become aware of, the more possibilities become available. In this way we can avoid thinking about humans as being special. We have as much right to claim consciousness for ourselves as anything else, we are not special, we are interconnected and as I have pointed out before, one of our roles as artists is to help others see this.
Lifelines of humans, plants and viruses
This is also about the flow, the sense of a way through things, the invisible forms that you discover as you move your body through them are all possible connections. This is why every drawing is also a performance, every moment that you exist within being a sort of ‘swimming in a sea of the possible’. Our propensity for rigid structures and systems within which to operate is a mistake, a mistake that has misunderstood structural possibility for a cage. We like to think that photographs tell us something about the world, but because they are always taken from one point of view they cut us off from the possibility of interconnectedness by framing things. Drawing on the other hand can deal with emerging possibility as well as awareness of perception at the same time.
So, what sort of problem are my own drawings trying to solve? It is a problem of ontogenesis, or where does it all come from? What lies behind the evolution of life? What shapes do possibilities form and how is everything interconnected? Above all what is existence and how do I engage with it? Questions that have been asked over and over again, but life’s like that, we are all born, we all grow and we all die.
The pattern of our lives is something like a game. In response to these things I have now finished designing a game based on the votives I have been making in ceramics. There are 52 different cards, the virus cards, positive and negative, being played like trumps. But that's another story.
The pattern of our lives is something like a game. In response to these things I have now finished designing a game based on the votives I have been making in ceramics. There are 52 different cards, the virus cards, positive and negative, being played like trumps. But that's another story.
Two cards from the votive pack
Faraday's lines of force
When the past overhauls the present Includes link to 360 degree view of exhibition
Drawing it all together
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