Once I was in the Giardini I found myself surrounded by work that had something to say about my own approach to art making. I have for a long time been looking for something beyond the art market as a measure of worth and here I felt were quite a few artists that were making work not just for its own sake, but for some sort of 'right thing to do' or necessity born out of their own nature. I go back to the first art theory book to impress me, I was still at school when I first read Ernst Fischer's 'The Necessity of Art', where he stated, “Art is necessary in order that man should be able to recognise and change the world. But art is also necessary by virtue of the magic inherent in it.” Fischer's view was that art could be both political and magical. I see art being political in the sense that it raises awareness and magical in the sense of its ability to animate materials. I'm becomming more and more convinced that what is often now called the "new animism" a movement that reinterprets animism not as an outdated primitive belief in inner spirits, but as a relational way of living, points the way towards a right path. It views animals, plants, minerals, forces and landscapes as actants rather than passive objects or resources. Our lives are the product of a commingling with everything else. As you enter the main Giardini exhibition hall, you go into a curated section of the biennale, which was where I felt if anywhere, the curator Koyo Kouoh had left her mark.
Big Chief Demond Melancon.
The first thing you see are two fabulous costumes by Big Chief Demond Melancon. As part of the public program of La Biennale di Venezia, Big Chief Demond Melancon had already presented a performative work, a project that centres on the body as a site of knowledge, memory, and political agency. Through gesture, movement, and sound, the performance invited audiences to attune themselves to elemental forces—water, air, fire, and earth—while activating a shared space of resistance, healing, and joy. The performance was both ritual and procession. Rooted in over two centuries of Black Masking Culture in New Orleans, the work carries forward an ancestral practice in which the Big Chief—community leader and cultural bearer—embodies history through the ceremonial suit. Through call-and-response, recitation, and collective presence, the group would summon and honour ancestral spirits—those who have passed yet remain as guardians of the community, the audience was asked to listen, breathe, and remember.
Big Chief Demond Melancon
I was fascinated by both the need for ritual and the hybrid nature of the culture. This was an art form that had evolved through an African American awareness of the cultures of indigenous people. The work came alive in its wearing and its place within ritualised sound and movement, something I wanted to remember as I walked through the Giardini galleries, so that I could keep in mind an awareness of the pinned butterfly effect. Something that can happen, as soon as you hang a collection of artefacts on a gallery wall. Perhaps I ought to explain. When you go into an old museum, there will often be a section devoted to Victorian butterfly or egg collectors. Several trays of butterflies will be on display, whereby rows of related, but all slightly different butterflies are pinned with their wings fixed open, so that you can marvel at the variations of patterns that their wings display. But what do these cases of pinned down dead creatures tell us about their lives. Nothing. If you want to know anything about a butterfly, you need to watch them, see their movements and visit their life cycle. Watch caterpillars eat, look for where they go to build their protective chrysalis and above all watch out for their metamorphosis. Hold in your imagination the idea that inside the chrysalis shell, the caterpillar body liquefies into a protein-rich soup, think about those special cell groups called 'imaginal' discs, that set about rebuilding that soup into a beautiful winged insect, that we call a butterfly. When I saw Big Chief Demond Melancon's work in the Arsenale it was presented as images flat against a wall and I was sort of interested in how they were made and the imagery, but when I realised on entering the Giardini that these were costumes and that they were part of a performance and I realised I needed to take another look.
As you passed Big Chief Demond Melancon's work in the entrance, you come across Celia Vásquez Yui's 'The Council of Mother Spirits of the Animals'. These ceramic sculptures emerge from the Shipibo culture of Peru.
Celia Vásquez Yui
What was fascinating about this work was the related concept of 'kené'. All these creatures are covered with vibrant rhythmic patterns; more than mere decoration, these maze-like patterns represent a visual language, a cosmic map of the universe and a form of spiritual healing. Kené connects nature, music and energy pathways and I was reminded of certain Australian indigenous artwork, that again used pattern to express ideas related to the spiritual energy of the zig-zag. The coil-built ceramic process and maze-like patterns are handed down from grandmother to mother to daughter. Jaguars, monkeys, armadillos, and tortoises, among other endangered species, are arranged in a kind of parliament of the animals, and they are asserting the rights of nature. I found out that Vasquez Yui is not only an artist and activist but also a healer, roles that are closely intertwined in her culture. Vasquez Yui began creating alongside her mother, an eminent ceramicist coming from an indigenous background in the Amazon that dates back thousands of years. Celia now works alongside her daughter, Diana Ruiz Vasquez, forming the next intergenerational collaboration. When this work had been exhibited previously, it was accompanied by a recording of a special ayahuasca ceremony performed in the Peruvian Amazon by members of Asomashk, the Union of Shipibo Healers. This ceremony is not intended to treat humans, the chants act as a sensory interface between humans and nonhumans, with birdcalls, chirps, roars, hisses, snorts, and squeaks focusing attention on nature as the patient. “I am traveling on land and underwater. I’m flying over the sky and the mountains, I’m searching the riverbed to identify your sickness,” sings one of the healers, joining bodies, spirits, lands, and waters in a worldview that is about conviviality, reciprocity, and kinship. These values underscore the interconnected nature of Shipiboart making, environmental activism, and struggle toward Indigenous sovereignty. Again I was enthused by the idea of an art-making that fused together ideas of care, of deep meaning and spiritual necessity.
I had seen the work of Mmakgabo Mmapula Helen Sebidi (known as MaSebidi) the previous day in the Arsenale. Here was a vision coming from South Africa, but yet again it was one that was locked into a community. This time the artist spoke of a "responsibility to community, the earth and the spiritual presence of the everyday." These images were invitations into a complex way of seeing that was both physiologically revealing and emotionally quite hard to confront.
Mmakgabo Mmapula Helen Sebidi: T'he Walking House'
In T'he Walking House' (1990-1991), MaSebidi builds on her grandmother’s directive to be a “walking house”, that she should carry shelter, memory, and ethical capacity while moving through the world. In her work human, animal and ancestral registers co-exist. The Sebidi family spirit animal, the fish, enters as a guide and a reminder that water holds histories and circulates connections. The apparent 'distortions' of form, are shaped by a commitment to see beyond the surface of things and were again a reminder to myself about how important the invisible inner life of the spirit was to our sensation of being in this world.
Back in the Giardini I was entranced by Wardha Shabbir's images of gardens. Shabbir was trained as a miniaturist painter in Pakistan.
Wardha Shabbir
Her work was intriguing, she was able to compress garden imagery, into volcanic form, wombs, the goddess Kali and flowers; sometimes intertwined with satellite imagery and way-finding maps. A much more 'westernised' artist than the previous one, she has incorporated modernism and an awareness of abstraction, into a pictorial language that comes directly out of a long tradition of miniature painting. Pakistan has a famous and living tradition of miniature painting. It began with Persian and Mughal court art and in the 20th century, artists revived the craft at the National College of Arts (NCA) in Lahore. Today, several artists use these techniques to develop detailed images that can be used to communicate issues about contemporary social and political topics. Shabbir reminding me that I too was soaked in the traditions of modernism and that whatever I was trying to achieve, I could not simply jettison something I had grown up with.
As a printmaker I was very impressed by the work of the Uruguayan artist Leonilda González. She used wood cuts believing that its replicable and accessible qualities would help her communicate with larger audiences and she co-founded a graphic arts collective as an alternative to governmental cultural organisations. I was interested to find out that she used the soft side of her knife to carefully remove layers of wood from her blocks, allowing her to achieve very subtle tonal gradients. Her 'Revolutionary Brides' whereby she combined irony, sarcasm and anger, were protesting a system that seeked to “imprison” them.
Leonilda González
Leonilda González had managed to engage with her audience using a very popular style of image making. I had been reminded of this when I showed work recently in Graz, my linocuts were well received and perhaps I ought to think a little more about why that might have been?
The devouring eye
In particular I had made the eye image in response to someone telling me they were very shy and that they felt that people were always 'looking at them'. The devouring eye of other people, was really stopping that person being able to get on with life. Reminding me that repression can be something we bring onto ourselves, just as much as it can be something imposed on us by others.
I'm in the middle of making work that will be installed in a churchyard in September and I have had to consider its purpose and how it fits into the main body of work I have been developing over the last few years. I'm glad to have to engage with a community of people and to be able to test out whether or not what I do can have relevance to them. Venice was helping me to think through some of the issues related to where I thought I might be going.
It turns out that roughly 68% of the universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 27%. The rest - everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter - adds up to less than 5% of the universe. Come to think of it, maybe it shouldn't be called "normal" matter at all, since it is such a small fraction of the universe. If you take these statistics as facts and add to them the issue that like most of my peers, I enjoy the illusion that everyone cares about what I am doing; you have a paradox. The conundrum being that self consciousness works in such a way that it causes me to believe that I am very important. This makes it hard to even think about how insignificant I actually am and makes me respond immediately to any situation that tends to suggest I am actually doing something of significance. Therefore I don't just 'like' likes on social media, or in everyday exchanges with others, I can begin to crave for them. I have in an earlier post pointed to the research done by professor Yi Zhou, who discovered that, "just one standard deviation increase in narcissism, (size of an artist's signature) increased the market price of a work by an average of 16%, and increased the auction house estimates by about 19%". A fact that further reinforces the feeling that if we are not seen to be significant players, if we don't believe in ourselves, we are literally 'worthless'. This situation can reinforce in the majority of us a feeling of low self-esteem, whereby our self conscious selves are torn between the reality of insignificance and the illusion of seeking some sort of fame or recognition for what we do. I would argue this is where drawing can be really useful. It allows us to embrace insignificance and use it to communicate to others how wonderful the world is. As we do this, it can also help us to get past those desires for affirmation from our peers. I have already looked at how drawing can be used to help develop a state of mindfulness. Five posts were put up that were designed to be worked through one after the other, as a way to achieve some sort of harmony with the world, but you do need to dedicate a fair amount of time to the suggested activities if you are to get any benefit from those posts. This post is an attempt to look at the issue of mindfulness in another way.
Anonymous (late 15th century) St Jerome in Penitence, after Antonio Pollaiuolo
Estimated sale price £80
I think the print above is really fascinating. You have an actual landscape, represented by ships and a harbour entrance brought together with an imaginary scene from the bible, of St. Jerome in a desert wilderness. The two spaces, real and imaginary, being pushed one against the other, with no attempt to suggest. gradual change. Various scales of representation are used within the same image, size constancy being more to do with importance than perspectival spatial location. The invention of graphic signs for things such as grass or water or hair, is a very important aspect of the image's texture and again there is little attempt to account for differences in foreground and background texture. Powerful gestures are used to highlight the emotional state of the main character; St Jerome's distress, is echoed in the figure of the crucified Christ and the lions fighting. Compositionally everything revolves around the figure on the cross, its strong vertical stabilising the visual rotation. You can spend quite some time with this image and the longer you do the more you can sink down into its self enclosed world, a world with its own laws, but ones that the more you engage with them, constantly reveal new possibilities. The fact that we don't know who the artist is does no harm to any appreciation of the image, in fact it helps us to see past the 'great artist' barrier. I used to teach engraving on copper plate and so I am also very aware of the craft behind the making of the plate from which this image was printed. The 14th century German theologian Meister Eckhart stated, “When the soul wants to experience something she throws out an image in front of her and then steps into it.” You can step into this image and become fused with Saint Jerome and his desert experience, you can get lost in the various ways that the artist has built this image, an image that slowly engraves itself into memory; its formal impossibilities making the mythic possible; kneeling in the company of lions, being no more difficult than sailing the seas or reading a book. There is a rhythm to the work of engraving, as you rock and twist the graver, a rhythm is built into the spacing and arrangement of the lines that are cut; look carefully at the angled marks that are clustered together in order to make tonal patches and you will be able to imagine the plate engraver pushing the graver over and over again into the copper, until enough lines have been cut to hold the ink that creates its dark patches. Cutting an engraving is hard work and in order to have the necessary level of control, years of practice are needed. In looking closely at the print, gradually the ghost of the engraver emerges, we feel the presence of its making, each line a frozen action, each image a thought form. A human being is affecting us from a distance, this small piece of paper holding within it something of great spiritual worth, of far more value than the £80 it was put on sale for.
A long time ago I was awarded an art prize at school and I asked for and received for the prize a book on Indian Painting. In that book I learned that the compositional structure of certain paintings was based on how ragas were composed in Indian classical music. This opened a doorway for me that I have ever been grateful for and since that time I have had a fascination with Indian Art and have realised over time that it has many other doorways into understanding the world, perhaps even more so, than Western art forms. In the 17th Century in Rajasthan abstract Tantric paintings were made in response to certain religious texts. Painting was at this time and place regarded as a meditation exercise and once made these abstract images were often given as gifts. Their function was to help others also meditate. In this respect they could be seen as operating in a similar way to the icon, except they didn't need to be housed in or sanctified by the church, or they could be looked at in comparison the the work of the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint, who worked hard herself to develop a body of work that could be used as a doorway into spirituality.
Hilma af Klint's notebook
These images below are all taken from the publication 'Tantra Song - Tantric Painting from Rajasthan' and they are both beautiful and yet rather insignificant in their modesty. We will never know the names of the people who made them, and the people who made them would not expect anyone to acknowledge them. They are gifts to the world, small fragments of meditation on paper, made by people who were mystics rather than artists, people who embraced their insignificance and offered their thoughts on paper as a courtesy to others.
Before we get serious, I need to remind everyone that from many points of view this whole activity is very funny. Don't take yourself or this process too seriously, the point about stepping lightly is to not leave dirty boot prints all over the place. Hence the meditating frog drawing.
One of the reasons for immersing yourself into the working
processes of another artist is to try and push your own ego into the
background. In order to develop our sensitivity to the world and others, we
need to clear a path through that dense thicket of me, me, me and accepting the
fact that someone else might have an approach to life that can be of benefit is
part of that process.
However at some point you will need to build into your world
view an acceptance of yourself as a human being, as a process equally as valuable
as anything else. Your way of being and existence is as wonderful as the processes
of sky, as beautiful as the construction of a stream and as kind as the ecology
of a tree. The place you find yourself in, is simply a moving point in space, a
point interconnected to all other points in space and therefore to all other
things, and their possible combinations and existences. You are entangled into the
process of being and as your point in space moves, so does the matrix of
connections with everything else. Time and gravity combine to give weight to
your actions, and in many ways shape what you might in the past have called ‘intentions’
but from a different position of acceptance, see as ‘fate’ or simply the playing
out of possibilities.
This stage of drawing and mindfulness simply asks you to pick out something you have already done and to repeat it, but this time to reduce it down to an essence. Then to repeat the process again and again, until you feel you have gone as far as you can. Now review all your drawings and decide which of them you have the most affinity with. Now meditate on your bond with this drawing and finally create a family of forms that emerge naturally from the processes that you have evolved in your drawing's making.
By finding a relationship with materials, drawing hopefully
opens the door to a new way of being. An acceptance that other things have
agency, leads to an acceptance that the paper and dyes you have been using have their own ways of being and
as you learn their languages you become more conversant in the ‘touch’ of
material thought. This sensitivity leads to a type of caring, a kindness
towards the non-human, hopefully carried through into the rest of your life as
an attitude towards others, whether people, animals, plants or inorganic
materials. It hopefully also leads to the establishment of a point of view that always searches for the
processes of interconnection, rather than looking for the isolated, atomised
thingness of reductionist thought.
This blog is written as a series of encounters with thoughts
about drawing. Thoughts are triggered by various encounters with drawings,
conversations about drawing with other people, books and journal articles about
drawing, conferences on drawing and exhibitions and sometimes those everyday connections
with drawing that can happen at any time in any place. What ties them all
together is a search for how drawing can be used to help be at one with the
world. At times this can be thought of as a way to develop a spiritual response
to life, at others to foster a deeper awareness of the underlying mathematical
structures that underpin reality. A historical perspective can be as important
to our awareness as an emotional register and this as vital as an awareness of
the chemical composition of a material. As you look through various posts you
will become aware that no one approach is favoured over another, philosophy and
politics being as important as genre or gender. The continuing search for
connections is what counts and hopefully the somewhat rambling nature of the
various posts can give you an insight into how wonderful an activity drawing
can be. Buddhists are very aware of how important the shaping of an attitude to
life is. Buddhist belief also encompasses an awareness of the limitations of
verbal language, for instance the chanting of “Nam-myoho-renge-kyo” is much
more to do with the sound of the words than the individual meaning of them. It
is the sound and rhythm of chanting that activates the human potential and
there is no word for word translation. This is about faith and practice. In
repetition you begin to cultivate a state of sensitive awareness. However this
does not mean that things don’t evolve. The “Nam-myoho-renge-kyo” chant is made
of words that have evolved out of ancient Indian and Chinese languages and are
pronounced in Japanese. ‘Nam’ is from the Sanskrit, “myoho-renge-kyo” are
Chinese words, the fusion of the two being “Nam-myoho-renge-kyo”. This
historical fusion is often referred to as embodying a universal language, the
sound of the chant being understood by all who have been inducted into
Buddhist traditions. The sound is understood as one that creates a unity with
the fundamental rhythm of the cosmos. This chant was developed during the 13th
century and the fusion of languages that shaped it was formed out of a poetic
consciousness. The poetic consciousness is very similar to that one attained as
we are attuned to the finer adjustments in a drawing. It is this type of
consciousness that leads to a deeper understanding of entanglement, an activity
that shapes new forms and in their shaping reveals an interconnectedness that
underpins the morphing and reshaping of process. An image will hopefully arrive
out of the constant making of drawings that you can return to over and over
again. Each time you return to it, it should reveal new layers of connections.
This stage of drawing is also about letting go of drawing.
It is not about words, it is not about drawing, it is about finding a way of
experiencing a relationship with something that isn’t yourself. This
relationship being something that can become a model for future conduct,
something to use as you prepare food, cultivate your garden or work with other
people. As you move beyond this stage, you should sense a growing relationship
with the universe, an acceptance of your own being arriving alongside an
acceptance of other processes of become-ing, world-ing, plant-ing, forest-ing, animal-ing,
sky-ing, sea-ing, rain-ing, sun-ing, moon-ing and all those other processes of
interconnection that you are part of.
If I had to pick out one artist that would be an example for any of us that wish to take the drawing and mindfulnessapproach onto a further level, it would be Sohan Qadri. He used to approach his work in a way that was very similar to a ritual or religious experience. Qadri was influenced by both Tantric-Vajrayan yogi practices and Sufi mysticism. He developed his spiritual ideals through meditation, dance and music, eventually deciding to focus his art making on the potential inherent in the properties of paper. Qadri worked with heavyweight papers that gave him the opportunity to engage with his paper's structural and surface textural potential. In particular by soaking it and carving into it in several stages, and by applying inks and dyes between each stage, he was able to attune himself to the paper's properties. In the process, paper was transformed from a two-dimensional surface into a three-dimensional medium, or thin sculpture. In particular he developed controlled rhythmic ways of marking the papers, often using a careful repetition of incisions into the paper as he meditated. Each layer of marks would be followed by another layer of intense colour wash, the inks and dyes soaking into the newly disturbed paper creating powerful saturations and glowing surfaces of colour, that grew even more intense as each colour layer was absorbed into the surface below. Layer after layer of colour would be applied, each application regarded as if it was a paper's ritual bath of colour immersion. Qadri worked for many years, looking for a way to shape an art practice that would be an effortless method of creation perfectly in tune with his yogic practices. By respecting the crafting of paper, and by then furthering his awareness of that craft by engaging at an intense level with the fibrous nature of his material, he developed a way of working that was in total harmony with his paper's inception.
Sohan Qadri
Before embarking on this next stage you will need to make a decision as to whether or not to make your own paper. If you have access to the right resources this can be a very useful thing to do because you will develop a deeper understanding of your paper's nature and it will help you to become engaged with it's materiality. There are lots of resources on 'You Tube' and the university has resources and technicians that will advise you on how to do this. If you want to begin with ready made paper, that's also fine, but you may need to spend more time exploring the surface properties of your paper in order to develop an understanding of its nature and how it can be worked with. See older posts on paper to get an idea of the possible range of papers to use.
You will need to use colour in order to reveal the changes you make to the paper, and colour will need to be applied between every stage of your paper transformation, so you will also need to experiment with dyes and inks and explore the way they effect your chosen paper.
Once you feel confident that you understand your paper, you need to familiarise yourself with the tools you will work with to make marks into it as well as the applicators for your dyes and inks.
Your paper marking tools and colour applicators will be vital to you. The process of making these tools can itself be part of the mind letting go, by gathering up objects and transforming them into tools for marking paper, you begin to see the world from the point of view of inter-object relationships. Perhaps as you take apart an old cheese grater and fit handles to its various parts, this activity might take you into thinking about your hand and how it holds things, of the sharpness of the different surfaces of the grater, of the potential for these surfaces to be used as scratching tools for roughening up your paper. (Typically you will make or find scratching tools, but also sandpapers, incising implements, polishing things and embossing tools) We have looked at making your own tools before.
The development of an organised almost ritual approach is going to be vital and you will need to embody or materialise your thoughts as part of this process.
You will need to begin with at least 20 sheets of your chosen paper.
Take your first sheet of paper and position it in a portrait relationship with yourself. It may be lying on the ground in front of you or on your table. You need to see it as a whole. It is like you bilaterally symmetrical, the right half mirrors the left half. Meditate on this for a while, what does it mean to you? Are there any 'off centred' aspects that you might want to think about? Are you left sided or right sided?
Now make a mark on the paper. Just one. But be as inventive as you can about how you make this mark. Look at the paper and feel for how this mark has effected your awareness of the the rest of the paper. What are its qualities, where is it? Is this mark nearer the top, or closer to one side or the other? Now put the paper to one side and make another mark on a new sheet of paper. Do this carefully and each time try to vary the quality of the mark and positioning. Carry on until 19 sheets of paper have a mark and one is left unmarked. As you make each mark, feel for how it relates to your own body, does that mark down on the left relate to your left foot, if so what does it feel like?
Now take up the first sheet again and make a line down the centre of the paper that represents your own awareness of the fact you have a backbone. Is this a single incised line, is it composed of several short marks that visually appear to become a line when seen from a distance? Once the first line is made, pass on to the next sheet and the next until you have made 18 different vertical lines. These can be lines made by pushing pins through the paper, dragging a compass point across the paper surface, incising with an empty biro, drawing with your fingernail, scraping with a knife or scratching with your cheese grater tool.
Once you have made these lines paint a colour selected from your dye mix across the first one and spread this colour right to the edges of the paper. Now look at what you have done and let your mind wander into it.
Do this with 17 of the sheets.
Put the papers aside and begin the same process on the first sheet once again, make a mark, look at how this changes the relationships set out between what you have done already. Then once you have done this with 16 sheets, move on and make another vertical line on 15 sheets.
Now paint your dye across 14 of these sheets.
Put these images in a row and look at them, what is happening, look at the difference between a mark that has had only one covering of dye and the others with two, compare the white sheet with dyed sheets.
Take 13 sheets. Look at your two lines on the first sheet and in your minds eye thicken one. It will become a rectangle, perhaps a long thin one, or if it expands out to the edge of the paper a much more regular rectangular shape. Now make the rectangle you see by building a surface of regular marks. These could be horizontal or vertical scratches, regular punch holes, overlapping hammered marks, regular scratchings from your cheese grater. What ever you can do to make a continuous surface that stops at 4 straight edges.
Paint a dye over 12 of these sheets of paper.
Take 11 sheets and look at what has happened to your other line. Is it lost under the rectangle you have made, does it stand clear, can you still see part of it? Make another line designed to reinforce awareness of this line. Do you make a shattered disjointed line next to a clear sharp line, or do you echo it by making another sharp line but how far away should it go? Once you have made these 11 new lines, paint the dye over 10 of your sheets of paper.
Now lay out all 20 sheets, look at them closely. You have in effect been playing with a particular variation of Paul Klee's idea of moving 'from point to line to plane'. However by adding colour you have included a very emotional ingredient to the sequence that will hopefully ensure that this is not a cerebral exercise. The fact that only changes in the paper surface are used to capture changes in colour intensity should also make you far more aware of the paper as a material, rather than as a background on which to work.
As you look at the sheets you have worked on hopefully one will stand out as being of interest in some way, you will be drawn to one of the sheets for whatever reason. Take it out of the presentation, look at it for a little longer and add a fold to the structure. Work on the back of the paper to ensure the fold is sharp then flatten out the paper and fold the paper again in the opposite direction. Then flatten back out. Now paint your dye over the whole surface.
Pick another sheet of paper from your remaining sheets and look at this. Now cover a proportion of the surface with a sheet of thick clear paper. Whatever is left uncovered lightly sand with rough sandpaper, or scratch over with a set of regular marks. Now paint your dye over the whole surface.
Take another sheet. This time close your eyes and feel with your hand over the surface. With your eyes still closed take a sharp implement and scratch into the surface feeling for the difference you are making. Now look at what you have done and dye the paper surface.
Take another sheet and do nothing to it. Now take a different coloured dye and paint it all over the surface.
Take out another sheet. Using a bowl of clean water and a rag wipe away as much dye/colour as you can from one area of the sheet of paper.
On another sheet make a straight line one inch wide from one side of the image to another. This can be an any angle. Make the line in anyway you want, it can be dyed, scratched into, embossed, whatever you feel is right.
On the next sheet make a square anywhere on the paper in any way you wish using any of the techniques already used to mark the paper.
Now take a sheet and make a tear into it.
Take another sheet and make another tear, this time you are to dye the sheet once the tear is made.
Draw a circle into the next sheet of paper using any of the paper marking techniques you have been using.
Now lay out all of your sheets of paper again, look at them and think about how they might relate to yourself. This is a very personal thing and how you make the connection is up to you, remember there is no right or wrong way to do this.
Pick one sheet, close you eyes and feel it, follow the lines and surfaces with your fingers and build up a picture in your head. Now look at it from a distance, and feel for the differences between sight and touch. Now decide how to respond to what you have felt or seen or both by making either a mark, a series of marks, a line or a shape. You could work on this sheet with eyes closed, by working whilst looking very hard, or alternating between looking and feeling. Use any combination of the techniques you have introduced.
Pick another sheet and reinforce one element by painting into it with a different coloured dye.
Pick another sheet and do the same but this time using the dominant coloured dye found on the chosen sheet. In effect this would be blue on blue or red on red, a heightening of saturation or intensity.
On another sheet remove a large area of information by sanding or any other appropriate erasure technique.
On the next sheet to do the same thing but this time to erase within a sharp boundary. Such as working within a taped out boundary or using a clean sheet of paper to mask out the area you are working in.
Repeat this process on two more sheets and then apply dye across both sheets.
Finally, choose a sheet and simply dye the edges, letting the colour fade out into the existing colour field.
At this point it is time to stop. Go back reflect on these images and see what has happened.
The next stage is up to you.
You will now have a much better understanding of your chosen paper. Do you move on to explore a different sort? Are there any sets of marks or forms that particularly intrigued you? Do you begin the next exploration by starting with these? Do you begin this time with a square sheet of paper rather than a rectangle? Do you use tearing techniques alone? What if all your marks were punched into the paper? What is it about the colour that works for you? How would you approach dyeing paper if you had to do this again? What if all your marks were confined to one half of the paper?
The next stage will be about focus and it is your decision as to what that is.
