At Christmas time I put together a calendar, that I use to give to friends as presents. I try to write a small aphorism or quip that can sit in the calendar's date boxes, so that people have something to think about every day. The fact that many people who get them hang them in the toilet, seems to suggest that is where we like to sit and have a little something to think about. Over the last few years I have been contacted by people from outside my family/friend circle, by other's wanting these calendars and interest seems to continue to grow. I usually choose a visual theme from the work I have been doing over the year and write the aphorisms at odd times during that same year. When I was teaching, at one point I was developing a thought for the day that I would put to students first thing in the morning as a sort of wake up call. When Twitter arrived I then used to use that as a way to disseminate the idea. The calendars emerged as a way to record a year's worth of thoughts and were quickly taken up as a more condensed or easy to read, idea a day stimulus.
I have been involved in a variety of projects this year, some focused on ceramics, one on animation, several on drawing and I have done both collaborative and very solipsistic work. The strand I decided to use as illustrations to this year's calendar, was selected because it represents the impact on us all of the continuing political churn that is emerging from the USA. I have met several people who live in the States over the course of the year at conferences and all of them were talking about their worries for the future of academic freedom and they cited the use of military forces on the streets of usually Democratic voting cities, as the tipping point for them. Like so many of my ideas these images initially emerged as responses to conversations, it seemed that the anonymous forms of semi-military personnel, had wormed their way into people's imaginations and it became my role as an artist to find forms for them.
I was very aware however that each and every one of the ICE personnel that people were referring to, was underneath whatever covering they wore, an individual, who would have thoughts and feelings no less complex than those who were witnessing these events. An ex student of mine was now living in Chicago and had posted an image of ICE agents dropping into the city by helicopter, who then went on to storm a hostel that held immigrants. She was obviously disturbed by what was going on, frightened by the possibilities it was raising in her head. I could not fail to be affected by these things.
Events such as these are part of a much wider issue, immigration is a hot topic and the media use several rhetoric tropes to stir up people and agitate the situation. The reality is that people are worried about the non integration of large numbers of people coming into the countries of the northern hemisphere. Global warming, war and famine, are together driving thousands of people from their traditional homes, the weather as you go further north is still as yet reasonable and the economic viability of the western world, appears from afar, as creating a haven in comparison to the places where people are coming from. It is no surprise then that people will want to move, but also no surprise that the peoples who already live in the various western countries are resistant to an influx of people that are outsiders. The resultant conflict will I suspect become worse as heat rises. As an artist I have no answers, my practice is focused on listening to people and trying to find images that visualise their fears, anxieties and worries, as well as aspirations, exhilaration and joy. Our world provides us with a complex mix of experiences, some people such as scientists seek some sort of rational understanding of these and others such as artists try to develop more poetic or mythic concepts that help people find an alternative understanding of life's experiences.
My approach to making visual responses to what I encounter is to set up a situation whereby the materials of image making, be these inks and paints or clay or wood, become another partner in the development of an emerging something. In the case of these recent images, I was looking at TV news footage and first of all scribbling down notes in pencil onto sheets of A3 paper. I then went back through these notes applying ink and watercolour washes, letting the flow of colour and line talk to me. Each image took its own time to emerge out of the materials of its making, I had no idea of where I was going with them and made them on and off over several months, many of them were useless daubs but a few began to chime with something inside me that suggested that they were ok. I didn't want to set these images up as critiques of a situation I had no real understanding of, they were, as are most of the images I make at the moment, more an attempt to capture the psychic feeling tone of people that I have spoken to or an attempt to capture what is in the air.
These are the pages of this year's calendar.
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