Drawing

Saturday, 7 September 2024

The ecstatic journey

As I go back to thinking about magic, I have also been trying to work with what I'm thinking of as the poetics of healing. This is another sort of shamanistic idea, but one informed by Bachelard's 'The Poetics of Space'. At the centre of the idea is the votive, whereby an internal concern, be this a way of thinking, an emotion, a desire or a pain, is externalised and located within an object that has been specifically made to hold the idea in a material form.
The process of coming to terms with these more transformative approaches to art making can be thought of as an ecstatic journey. One where you need to have some sort of belief that what can be achieved goes beyond the aesthetics of art and begins to impinge on the psychic transformations normally associated with religious practices.
A belief that all is connected lies at the root of this approach, which can also mean that life gets very convoluted unless some sort of overall view is maintained. For instance, I am thinking about how important small things in the natural world are to the overall forming of reality, so one thing I'm doing is to try to spend more time in the garden, and as I do so I get involved with a story. I have become very aware that without earthworms we would have no soil. If soils consisted entirely of clay and silt particles, they would be too dense and airless for plants to grow in. The roots of plants could neither penetrate the soil nor breathe in it. It is crucial for plant growth that the individual mineral particles in the soil clump together into aggregates, which, because they are more irregular in size and shape than the individual mineral particles, have more spaces between them; spaces through which air, water and plant roots can pass. The aggregate structure of soil also stabilises it and makes it resistant to erosion. If the soil has no structure, it can very easily be washed away by rain or wind. It is organic matter that sticks the mineral particles together to make the aggregates and the actions of worms facilitates this. This story told by the agricultural science community is a powerful one and it helps us to see how worms glue the soil together. Slugs are also doing good stuff. They feed on and process garden debris, including fungi and rotting vegetation. They are a key player in the decomposition process and help to recycle and circulate nutrients into and through the soil, through burrowing, dropping their faeces, and eventually as their own dead bodies decompose, they operate as organic fertiliser pellets. So yes these stories are very important, so how can I make use of them? First of all I attempted to make drawings of worms. This was an attempt to raise their profile, my thought being that on seeing a drawing of a worm, a person would think that if someone was bothered to make images of the humble worm, there must be a reason behind their decision.

I found it hard to make images from drawing worms and slugs and realised why in the past I had drawn snails. Snails carry with them a powerful formal device in the form of their shells and give you an entry into a visual language straight away. The spiral is a very clear form and I've used it several times in the past. The segmented worm is a particularly difficult creature to make into a poetically convincing image but the attempt was made and someone may have taken an interest.

Homage to Beatrix Potter

Slugs belong to the mollusk family which also includes squid, octopi, snails, clams, and oysters; they sit in my mind alongside the arthropods, which include insects, spiders, mites, crabs and scorpions. Arthropods are bilaterally symmetrical, triploblastic, metamerically segmented animals that have a coelom (the fluid-filled body cavity of an animal that contains the internal organs such as the heart, lungs, and kidneys). Their body is covered externally in a chitinous exoskeleton which moults periodically and their appendages are joined.

Worms (earthworms, leeches, marine worms, etc.) are segmented, and belong to the Phylum Annelida; (from the Latin root word annelus meaning ring). The body of an annelid is divided into repeating sections, with many internal organs repeated in each segment. All of these creatures could be regarded as ancestors of mammals and each one at some point emerged from the sea. The fluid-filled body cavity that contains the internal organs such as the heart, lungs, and kidneys, being a particularly potent connection, a likeness that was beginning to worm its way into my own visual poetry.

Dreams of the fluid-filled body cavity

Inner body double

I had also been considering the anthropomorphic as a way towards animist thinking, hence my homage to Beatrix Potter, on the other hand I have, as I have been reflecting on these things, tried to find forms that I can use either as fetishes or as analogies. For instance a heart pain, as I pointed out in my last post, was read by someone as an attack by some sort of invisible inside the body insect/creature. When I showed them my visualisations of this they were more convinced that it was more like the sting of a scorpion than an insect.

Crab/scorpion fetishes

Looking back at the scorpion/crab forms I had made in response to conversations about pain and how it can attack you unawares, I began wondering around whether or not my votive work could be extended in some way by using these 'painful objects'. This took me back to thinking about pain and the depiction of body maps from imagination.

The imaginary inside of the body began with images made in relation to interoceptual experiences, but I now wanted to incorporate my feelings about non mammalian creatures. Their abundance suggesting that as we cause more and more problems because of our desecrating of the planet, it will be 'lower' organisms that will need to clean up after us.

Inner visions

One series of drawings began to link my thoughts of how to visualise an inside 'thought form' with the idea of plant growth. Another 'hybrid' image resulted. An easy step then to other variations, such as a visualisation of what a fusion between an imaginary internal form and a fetish arthropod external form might look like.

So how does all this relate to the process of coming to terms with transformative approaches to art making, and the ecstatic journey? What has this got to do with psychic transformations normally associated with religious practices?
If I go back to my parents use of 'tranculments', those ornaments kept around the house when I was a boy, I can see clearly now how they were used to externalise thoughts. In my post on 'Thingamajigs' I pointed out that those ornaments were full of psychic energy and that they gave some sort of protection from the reality of life. I also pointed out that originally horse brasses had been used as charms or amulets to ward off evil and to bring good luck. I.e. we use purposely crafted objects to effect psychic transformations.
I have had very useful feedback from people who have now lived with my loneliness votives for a while.

Loneliness votive

They are small ceramic objects designed to be held in the hand, especially if and when you are feeling lonely. People do say that they work and that they keep them about their person, or sit them on a handy spot in the house. They are about feeling and touch and are designed to represent a simple hug. I call them votives because they are objects offered in fulfilment of a promise. In this case two promises. One on my part to make something that I think will help with the wellbeing of someone and the other a promise made by the recipient that they will trust in the exchange and be open to the possibilities that the object offers.
In a post on drawing and spirituality , I referred to the concept of transubstantiation, at its clearest and most often used when the wafer and wine are taken during Mass and these are ‘transformed’ into the body and blood of Christ. The physical in effect becomes spiritual, but only because the people involved, both priest and congregation, have trust and belief in the process. The shaman is a figure that appears in many societies and who still plays a central role in some people's lives, such as the Inuit people. Shamans operate with a belief that every living thing has a “soul” or life-force which exists independently of its physical form. They have often been cited by people as a model for certain art practices such as those undertaken by Joseph Beuys, but there is another role slightly different in the way it operates that was written about by Clare Milledge (2012), that offers the viewer a shamanistic vision but then makes sure they are aware that this is an artifice, a construction, that they need to take part in as much as the artist. I.e. it is a conversation and a co-construction. Milledge points out that there are several artists working in this way including Marcus Coates, Steinar Haga Kristensen, Jonathan Meese, Paul Thek, Justene Williams and herself; artists who have designed practices that return to the viewer the power that we often think of as invested in the artist, in effect giving to others the “gift of sight.” I like the idea of a practice that emerges from a conversation, especially one that helps both participants come to a better understanding of themselves and their relationship with the world around them. Another issue is that, as is pointed out in the introduction to the book 'Shamanhood and Art', (2014, p. 8), "a shaman should not be confused with a priest; he or she is an active practitioner and not a passive receiver of mystical messages..." As an 'active practitioner', I see myself as someone involved with the imaginative transformation of materials into carriers of ideas.

The body as landscape cross section

References

Djaltchinova-Malec, E.E. and Hoppal, M., (2014) Shamanhood and art. Budapest: Akademai Kiado, Warsaw: Polish Institute of World Art Studies.

Milledge, C. (2012) The Artist-Shaman and the" Gift of Sight: Sydney College of the Arts: PhD thesis Accessed from: http://hdl.handle.net/2123/9452

See also:

Magic

The continuing influence of Surrealism

Thoughts on a collaborative practice

Sunday, 1 September 2024

Magic

Title slide of the Magic in Art lecture

I am not teaching any more, but when I was, one of the lectures I gave was on magic and art. I proposed that magic was at the core of the process we now call art and that the boundary between the real and the unreal is what is played with in both the performance of magic and art. As key examples I used images from ancient Egypt, Rome, India and Greece, and suggested that often there was no distinction between art and magic.

What I wanted to do was to question the passivity of objects and to highlight how objects affect our experience of perception and effect change in our minds and bodies. Hopefully this way of thinking would lead to the construction of a different, more animist relationship with objects.

A few slides from the presentation

When discussing theatrical props in relation to stage magic, Robinson argues that there is a process of transformation occurring as the trick is enacted; the ‘illusory enactment’ (Robinson, 2014, p. 136). I see this as being very similar to the need for rituals in the energising of the inanimate, and the making of magical reality. When I make votives for people, I also need to develop a private ritual for when the votive is 'put into operation' or made 'live'. This might seem to be illusionary but it is as 'real' an experience as any other. This is the driving force behind ritual objects. But they must all have a point of contact with something that gives them traction or meaning. This is often called the 'Law of Similarity' or 'Sympathetic Magic'. In my own work this might be rather obtuse or hard to see, but I can track the connection, and this gives it, if only to myself, the object's spiritual energy.

For instance recent images that are like crabs, scorpions or insects, began with someone talking to me about a somatic experience of pain that felt like they were being stung on their insides. In my mind I saw the shape of this 'stinger', which was initially like a scorpion and drew an image for the person involved of a man riding a scorpion, like a horse; in effect getting on top of the pain, being in control of it. This became a print and as I thought about this 'creature' from the insides, it began to have offspring, other pain inflicting creatures, such as crabs that could pinch and snip you, or insects that could sting. We tend to believe that these sorts of creatures have no sentience, so in our minds they do not themselves feel pain, but this is probably myth too and they probably do feel pain.

Getting on top of the pain

Visualising a somatic experience of pain that felt like being stung on the inside

By bringing humans and invertebrates together in a visual narrative, it gives honorific value to both and some sort of equality as agents, even if the scorpion was initially only an analogy in someone's mind.

Eventually the drawings engendered solid ritualistic objects, as these seem to have more potency. Objects offer possibilities of actual 'exchange', they externalise ideas, and as they do they make them 'real'. In his paper, 'Becoming Real: The Fluidity of Objects in Magic', Fan-chen Huang explains how boundaries between the real and the imaginary become unpicked during the enactment of magic acts. He states, 'Since time immemorial, magic has been an art that, by manipulating human perception and simulating the real, alternates the passivity of objects and disturbs the stable relationship between man and things. As magic creates a real that surpasses the realm of common knowledge and becomes more real than the real, our recognition of objects undergoes a distortion.' He goes on to state that '...objects seem to be able to deviate from their normal course of thing-for-us in magical illusions, shattering our affirmation of perception and the scientific absolute.'

This unpicking of the 'scientific absolute' is a useful thought as far as I am concerned, as I'm always trying to find a place for my practice as an artist, and I sometimes need to work in those gaps between a logical, supposedly 'objective' view of the world and a scientific understanding of things. There still seems to myself something missing, whether this is 'spirit', the vital spark of life, Bergson's élan vital, invisible energy forces, that something or whatever it is that I can never quite touch or put my finger on, but which I intuitively feel is there.

I was in the Ashmolean museum recently making drawings of objects that made sense to me in relation to where I am in my own work, and one vitrine related to work from an ancient Egyptian civilisation going back to the Palaeolithic period, was full of significant objects. It was as if they could still talk to me, especially as I was already making images of scorpions and the ones in the vitrine were used in magical rituals.

From sketchbook pages drawn in the Ashmolian Museum

On returning to Leeds I went back into image making and began looking for that form that was both magical and real.

Drawing for ceramics

Of course I then had to do some research into ancient Egyptian culture and realised once again how powerfully these themes had already been dealt with, but instead of being put off, I am even more fascinated by the possibilities this approach to image making offers.

Serket

Serket, “She Who Causes the Throat to Breathe”

In ancient Egypt images, like the one above that was used as part of a spell to protect you from stepping on a scorpion, were used to put into effect sympathetic magic. Scorpions were also often pictured without stings or claws or they had knives stuck in them, to magically render then harmless. The protective scorpion goddess Selket used to guard coffins of the dead, and in order to effect this, statuettes of scorpions were often pierced, so that they could be be mounted on poles that had been pushed into the ground. As I read about this I was reminded of the work I made for the Patching Sculpture trail in Nottingham, where I had done something similar, this time using flower forms as a memorial to those drowned in the Mediterranean sea as they tried to get to safety in Europe.

From the YSG Patching exhibition: Breaking Ground

The objects I'm thinking about are only just emerging, several are waiting to be fired, others waiting to be glazed and I've as yet to come up with the right way to position them on poles and how to do this both indoors and outdoors, but I shall get there.

In the meantime I have a couple already made.

Crab/scorpions

Magic fetishes emerging

References:

Robinson, A. (2014). All Transparent: Pepper’s Ghost, Plate Glass, and Theatrical Transformation. In M. Schweitzer & J. Zerdy (Eds.), Performing Objects and Theatrical Things (pp. 135–148). Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Lynne U. Sneddon (2015) Pain in aquatic animals Journal of Experimental Biology Volume 218 Issue 7 April p. 967–976.

Tuesday, 27 August 2024

Margaret Atwood's blue line

There is a collection of Margaret Atwood's short stories called 'Murder in the Dark' published in 1994 by Virago. One of her stories, entitled 'Autobiography', was I felt a wonderful evocation of what happens when you make a drawing. You begin with a line, in this case a blue one and this very quickly becomes the things that imagination breeds as the line moves on and the image gets more complex. But as Atwood's is a very short narrative, indeed a micro story; perhaps it's easier and much better to simply present it as I first read it.

Autobiography by Margaret Atwood

'The first thing I can remember is a blue line. This was on the left, where the lake disappeared into the sky. At that point there was a white sand cliff, although you couldn't see it from where I was standing. On the right the lake narrowed into a river and there was a dam and a covered bridge, some houses and a white church. In front there was a small rock island with a few trees on it. Along the shore there were large boulders and the sawed-off trunks of huge trees coming up through the water. Behind is a house, a path running back into the forest, the entrance to another path which cannot be seen from where I was standing but was there anyway. At one point this path was wider; oats fallen from the nosebags of logger's horses during some distant winter had sprouted and grown. Hawks nested there. Once, on the rock island, there was the half-eaten carcass of a deer, which smelled like iron, like rust rubbed into your hands so that it mixes with sweat. This smell is the point at which the landscape dissolves, ceases to be a landscape and becomes something else.'

In a few sentences Atwood shows how things grow out of the mind; in her case writing moves along and as it does it creates a world. Then at some point the imaginative unfolding will stop and as an artist you are once again reminded of the reality of what you are doing. As this happens the imaginative world disappears and you are confronted by marks on paper or a memory of the reality that lay behind the fantasy, in either case you step away from what you have created and see it as the fiction it is.

Taking a blue line for a walk

I have been making imaginative visualisations of the body's interior landscapes, often beginning by taking a felt-tip pen for a walk and just seeing what it will reveal to me. In the drawing above I was fascinated to see that what had emerged was an image that might have been designed as an illustration of the interior of an early mythic human. In his text 'the Symposium', Plato has Aristophanes narrate the history of what he terms the 'Soulmates', the first humans.

“According to Greek mythology, humans were originally created with four arms, four legs, and a head with two faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate parts, condemning them to spend their lives in search of their other halves.” Symposium, Plato

The interior landscape of these people might well have been a space where ribs and kidneys and other organs were doubled.

This is Plato's text in full.

“... the primeval human was round, back and sides forming a circle; with four hands and four feet, one head with two faces, looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears, two privy members, and the remainder to correspond. Humans could walk upright as men now do, backwards or forwards as they pleased, and they could also roll over and over at a great pace, turning on their four hands and four feet, eight in all, like tumblers going over and over with their legs in the air; this was when they wanted to run fast. Now the sexes were three, and such as I have described them; because the sun, moon, and earth are three;-and the human was originally the child of the sun, the woman of the earth, and the man-woman of the moon, which is made up of sun and earth, and they were all round and moved round and round: like their parents. Terrible was their might and strength, and the thoughts of their hearts were great, and they made an attack upon the gods; of them is told the tale of Otys and Ephialtes who, as Homer says, dared to scale heaven, and would have laid hands upon the gods. Doubt reigned in the celestial councils. Should they kill them and annihilate the race with thunderbolts, as they had done the giants, then there would be an end of the sacrifices and worship which humans offered to them; but, on the other hand, the gods could not suffer their insolence to be unrestrained." The answer was of course for Zeus to split them into two separate parts, which is why we spend so much of our lives searching for that 'other half' in order to feel whole again.

I'm sure Plato's thoughts, just like Margaret Atwood's were arrived at, as Yates put it, 'out of a mouthful of air', the narrative shaping itself as it came into being. As usual I didn't know what I was going to write for this post, just as I never know what a drawing is going to become and that is what makes me keep going; every day I find something new emerging and as it does it can often be a thing of wonder.

Wednesday, 21 August 2024

Venice Biennale 2024: Part four

There was a large section of the biennale devoted to the portrait, and of all the various approaches the one that made most sense to me was the work of Dalton Paula. His Full-Body Portraits (2023-24) were from a series of sixteen paintings of historical figures of African descent who led, or were involved in, anti-slavery resistance movements in Brazil. It was however the way that he treated the painting of these images that impressed me. He had laid white grounds down for each painting and had left gaps in the paint where the white showed through as cracks or fissures in the image. A stylistic device that suggested that the gaps were metaphors for images of people whose very appearance was constructed upon a white western model. Each of the figures is dressed in western style, standing or sitting in some sort of relationship with western articles of furniture. They inhabit a western world that totally dominates the Brazilian society that these people existed in.

Dalton Paula: Sketchbook study

Dalton Paula

The work of Xiyadie, a father, farmer, gay man, migrant worker and artist, reminded me that the term 'artist' tends to single us out and that we are also fathers, mothers, factory workers, worried old men, happy young women, gardeners, walkers, mountain climbers, politicians, refuse collectors, cleaners and botanists. He cuts paper into visual narratives of his life, images that have documented his life as a queer man in China. For instance 'Sewn' (1999), describes his difficulty in accepting his sexuality while trapped in a heterosexual marriage. Pain and the helplessness of being trapped in a domestic setting are suggested by a huge needle piercing the roof of his house, while a large snake slithering inside him represents his desire. His images are allegories, but because they are made, by cutting out thin white paper and mounting it on black, then highlighting areas in a very limited palette, they seem very fragile, as if the life depicted could at any time fall apart.

Xiyadie: 'Sewn' 1999

Xiyadia: Detail

Xiyadia: Gate

Yuko Mohri wasthe artist representing Japan this year. Her work done by inserting wires into decaying fruit, 'Decomposition', was a demonstration of how you could generate sounds and light from a very natural process. When you insert wires into the fruit you in effect re-create the fruit as a battery. The juice in a lemon, acts as an electrolyte, while the wires act as the battery's terminals. When the wires are inserted into the fruit, chemical reactions occur that create an electric current. The fruits’ internal state is shifting constantly as it decays, which in turn is modulating the pitch of a sound or the intensity of a light. At the same time the fruit is emitting a sweet smell of decay, and its exterior is looking more and more withered or going brown. The fruit was presented on items of furniture that felt as if they had been found in a second hand shop, and old cabinets had been reconfigured to take lights or to now become speakers.

Yuko Mohri

My thoughts about art working as a battery and the idea of it working as a form of energy transmission were immediately triggered and I began rethinking some of my ideas related to sculptures using electrolysis. I had already done several drawings related to sculptures that also worked as electrolysis tanks, using metal coating from copper terminals via dilute aqueous solutions of copper sulphate and sulphuric acid. LEDs are so sensitive now that they only need a tiny amount of electricity to make them glow. I really do need to get back to some of my ideas and re-develop them, which is one of the reasons you go to these exhibitions, there is always going to be something that sparks off either a new idea or gets me to return to old ones refreshed.

In particular an artist from South America really did enthuse me to get back to my large complex drawing ideas. I have sort of avoided finishing some of these, not wanting to put in the effort, as it does involve a lot of concentration and physical control to cover large areas of paper. This is not just about sustained drawing invention but I also have to have enough formal control to enable some sort of visual coherence to be constructed. This has often in the past meant lots of adjustment and removal of initial invention, so that the various elements can fit together as a whole.

Santiago Yahuarcani is of the Aimeni clan of the Uitoto Nation of northern Amazonia, which is at present thought of as part of Peru. His images collect together the memories told by his ancestors, the sacred knowledge of medicinal plants, the continuing existence of nature spirits and Uitoto creation myths. For Yahuarcani both the landscape and its inhabitants are conscious, because he believes in an animist view of the world. The work is in effect a conversation with the artist and his surroundings, a conversation that is facilitated by the artist's mind inhabiting the plants, trees, and animals of the Amazon, as well as conjoining with creatures from spiritual worlds and other powers that emanate from the landscape he lives in.

Santiago Yahuarcani: Fight between yucca worm and grasshopper: 2022

Santiago Yahuarcani, Shiminbro, el Hacedor del sonido (2024

I went back to the Arsenale to look at Santiago Yahuarcani's work twice and if I had been in Venice for longer would have done so again and again. Each time I could see more visual ideas and the way he fitted it all together was terrific and so exciting. He had also used some ideas that I had come up with myself, such as fish slippers and he had no worries about using multiple and various scales in the same image. I of course looked him up on line and realised like myself he also made images about particular isolated narrative aspects of the mythos he was working with, such as his 'Fight between yucca worm and grasshopper', which again I emphasised with.

Santiago Yahuarcani: Details

The work of Santiago Yahuarcani re-energised me and reminded me that you can make work that is full of complicated detail and yet it can also be funny, exciting, inventive and in Yahuarcani's case colourful. Above all, looking back on the images I took when there, I'm very aware that instead of reflecting on the exhibitions visited this year, I ought to get on with my own work. I have a stained glass window to finish and have already returned to making large drawings that fit together to create a complex narrative about my own world and how strange that is.

Fish slippers