The Drawings of Anna Barratt

Anna Barratt's art is centred on vulnerable and transforming bodies in flux. This is why I am interested in her work, as she has had to engage with a similar materials invention to myself, in the search for a visual language that can carry both emotional and physical information about how we feel about inhabiting this strange thing we call a body.
She is obviously dredging up some of her imagery from the depths of her unconscious, but at the same time the tensions of everyday life and what we can think of as the domestic come into play. Indeed in one review of her work it states, "transforming the everyday into the carnivalesque and back again."

Anna Barratt’s figures are often disembodied, an expressive use of her materials giving life to the various characters that inhabit her images. The interplay between material flow and image, helps to create a liquidity of attention, that flits from an attempt to work out the consequences of an image's form and a sense of needing to let it all flow and become an always becoming entity. All of which are issues that I have at one time or another tried to engage with.

Like myself she has made simple animations and she also uses notebooks to develop ideas, something that again I tend to do. I also love the fact that she recognises that when an animation is looped, it completes a process of transformation, that moves from the losing of an image's initial form to its restoration. All of which is lo-fi.

Cardboard bodies

Barratt's cardboard bodies are another reminder that you don't need expensive materials in order to make interesting work. The way a cardboard box comes apart, reminds me of a body and when opened out, it still has a memory of its former three dimensions. A memory that pokes thoughts into the flatness of any image laid on top of it. Thoughts such as those in my head that arise out of a memory of reading as a boy the H.G. Wells short story "The Plattner Story," as well as a little later Arthur C. Clarke's "The Reversed Man", both involving the inversion of a man's body. Turning human bodies "inside out", is something I now attempt to do on a regular basis, but now more concerned about hidden interoceptual feelings and attempting to visualise them. I still remember as a boy thinking about what might happen when you took a human body through a fourth spatial dimension and in my mind picturing all the guts and blood falling out as the skin was inverted. It's strange how an idea lives with you.

Thinking about how other artists work and why they might create the things they do is something I suppose most artists need to do at some point. Our ways of working are not unique, in fact the main reason work communicates to someone else, is that they have an overlap in feeling tone or type of sensual perception. Indeed it could be this overlap that builds the totality of the universe we are aware of. In my last post on OPH, it was suggested that the fundamental elements of the universe aren’t objective states, they’re 'observer patches', subjective descriptions made by observers and that subjectivity is what physics is built out of. Whether or not this is true, I'm pretty sure that is what art is built out of and without other artists we would be lost in an empty world, which is why at times I need to take a look at who else is out there. 

See also:

Anna Barratt's isolation colouring book

Barthelemy Togue

Still thinking about what I do

Our death is drawn
Drawing and healing traditions

Venice Biennale 2022: Part two

 

Candice Lin

Because I am fascinated by the way materials carry ideas, I spent quite some time looking at the work of Candice Lin. She was using all sorts of materials and media; tea, fungi, dead bats, ceramics, video, electro-plating, plants, silkworms, mud, paintings and of course drawings. At first the work looks as if it has been done by a mad scientist, perhaps a crazy anthropologist or pre-Darwinian biologist. But then you realise that this is about looking at colonial histories, histories that are embedded in the various disciplines and materials she is using. I particularly found the table-top pieces interesting, she was able to hold together paintings, living things, plants, ceramics and found objects by connecting them with stories. The tables set out stages of transformation: mud from a swamp in Saint Malo, the first Asian settlement in the United States, had been fired into ceramics; starch had been boiled and moulded into bioplastic, stories of craft, labour, ritual, botany, global trade, were all looked at from a perspective that reminded us that our present society has pushed out to the margins so many alternative ways of working and being. We need a bit of magic in our lives and Lin was seeking to put it there. As for whether or not this is drawing, I would still include it in the extended umbrella of contemporary drawing practice, as these objects are all threaded together, as Tim Ingold would say, by lines of thought.

Candice Lin

There were no clear divisions between Lin's pieces, one seemed to bleed into another. Her ceramic figures operated as plant pots as well as being God like totems, nothing being fixed and operating more like verbs than nouns. For instance the electro-plating was being done as you looked at the work, therefore it was still becoming rather than being finished. For all these reasons I think I remembered Lin's work more than any other. However I am trying to deal with very similar issues, especially the idea that all is constantly in flux and after reading David `Bohm's 'Wholeness and the implicit order', I am even more convinced that this is a good direction to take. He had this to say about what he called 'undivided wholeness in flowing movement'...

"there is a universal flux that cannot be defined explicitly but which can be known only implicitly,... in this flow, mind and matter are not separate substances. Rather they are different aspects of one whole and unbroken movement." (1995, p. 11)

Lin taught me not to be worried by work that might at first feel totally chaotic or unformed, so I'm much less of a completer finisher now and more of an anything might go sort of artist. 

Image (c) Vincent James

Image (c) Vincent James

These two images of my work from a recent exhibition were of sculptural objects meant to be unsettled and between things; insides on the outside, plants too big for their landscapes, no coherent use of materials, scales confused etc. So what might have been wrong a while ago becomes for me at least, the right thing to do now. I have to keep reminding myself that if all is flux, I need to constantly re-invent myself and my metaphors too. 

See also:

Venice Biennale part one