More on that Discursive Shift

It's funny, I have felt stumped by a niggling worry that I cannot place myself at the moment, that I don't know where I am, as if this is a problem to be overcome and solved before I can resume an art practice or a commitment to writing regularly.

I wonder how much projecting ourselves into the future is locationally influenced. In Greece I let it go, circumstances forced me to live according to my mood, the space my inner world seemed to create beyond my physical limits in which to line the path before me on that day: the bad mood signifying a sullen commitment to my internal movements, a good mood turning my insides outside through a beaming smile.

Anyway. The manner in which my lack of placement has been known to me is the unease that my artwork - and particularly my blog - has been accompanied by when I have thought about it. I have noticed that my clothing style has changed in able to converse more relevantly with my London setting, and now I look on the works that I produced in the last year with the same distancing judgment, that my work was fine for the setting I was in but it must now be updated, freed of its innocence somehow, its safe position as outsider looking in, automatically possessed of the outsider/artist eye.

What am I, who am I here? Good questions. What I am is someone trying to define myself in this mix, knowing intellectually that definition should be treated with suspicion. Who am I? Silence. Silenced by the lack of definition.

I let the new thoughts crowd in: am I a failure that at my age I am (only) a gallery attendant and not successful as something of my own? How successful am I at playing the game? being part of this city? showing that I am part of it? what is my art? what do I want to achieve? what do I want to create? what do I want to say? what do I think?

Who do I want to be?

I am looking now at a set of cardboard storing boxes piled up beside my table. They are each wearing a different configuration of light and shadow. I think to myself 'it's beautiful' and I reach for the camera. After taking a series of shots I put the camera down, and I think about this decision making process I am involved in while photographing: natural shape, being - according to a kind of faith that I possess - instinctively the same as the shapes that our thoughts take. All our inner workings follow the same laws that the natural world does and therefore we can understand our own workings by seeing the similarity, or instinctively feeling a resonance with these shapes, knowing they tell us something about the behaviour of thoughts, conceptualising, and creativity.

But this thing about what is beautiful sticks with me here in London. Beauty is unquestioned to the traveller in Greece and being a tourist believing she had the kind of eye that went just that little bit further than the average tourist's goes unquestioned. Read: my ego met no major external challenges. By contrast, London is immense and home to countless intelligent, questioning, 'creatives'; they have already marked out the territory for themselves. London is grimy and difficult. It is competitive and requires of us hard work. And it is so big that it is difficult to get perspective.

My experience of London has always been one of looking for my place, although perhaps actually that is just life. It was always expressed by radical changes in the clothes that I wore, identities I assume, and continues to. It occurs to me this morning that the question of place - geographically, psychologically etc. is an intersection that pegs together a set of queries that I am so used to living with that I don't even see them, and yet they are the flimsy abode that I have lived within since I can remember. It's funny how far we go to discover new territory and yet the new material is just more of ourselves uncovered.

Last Batches of Bodmin #4

Finally:

Last Batches of Bodmin #3

Sunny ones:

Last Batches of Bodmin #2

Foggy ones:

Last Batches of Bodmin #1

I'm just uploading the last few Bodmin images that still command my attention in an attempt to move on.

Time Frames

More from Bodmin

It's a dream of mine to make images that are of the natural and mundane realms that seem completely abstract, that is, without completely losing touch with the thing in its setting. Er, abstraction that isn't totally abstract... or at least isn't allowed to drift off to lofty heights...







These three are more obviously from, and of, a journey. It was a day trip I took with my half-brothers Jacques and Jim. I sat in the back taking in the beauty of Cornwall and trying to hold onto something from it in these photos.

Untitled #3

Moorhen Blues

The sound of a moorhen crying from the other side of the river during my run this morning was a jolt. It was the sound of an animal communicating in a language I will never understand. It was a very lonely feeling.

I also saw a giant fish leap out of the water.

Untitled #2

Grumpy today.
Though doing this is cheering me up just when I was looking forward to really wallowing in it.

Aggregation

These two images strike me in ways different to the more landscapey shots I've already posted. Still from Bodmin, still marked by my sense of 'homecoming' obscured by the newness of everything, these shots hone in on things strewn about the place, found at the back of a garage etc. When lining up the camera's viewfinder with what my brain wants to see as a composed image, I am guided by a certainty within myself on how to order the image, a logic. Categorically I wanted to avoid photographing one thing, isolated, and instead show what happens within the frame as a conglomerate of parts to make the whole, consciously disrupting the normal edges of a thing in able to show it as aggregated within a new - or just my own - frame of meaning.

Art-speak flowing then today. Sweet.

Sky as Opening

Tunnel Vision

Mizzle

The pathways diverge when you look at plants, the line of stem parting to go two ways, maybe more, eventually to flower, itself an expression of future and forward motion. Skin unfurls and green shoots push and at the end something pretty blooms for a time.

Over the top of the hill wind splutters with the 'mizzle' from across the moorland. The sound enters the house through drafty gaps in the window. Looking out at the grey sky, green land, the sound joins the pool of aural memory and ceases to speak of this moment, instead being a reverberation of childhood spent in drafty houses and long looks out at the land beyond.

Small knarly trees in sillouette hold out against the grey sky, warped, wrapped in the wind. Young trees that look old in this ancient landscape. Flattened shapes of grey hedgerows receeding back into the mist.

Bodmin Started

Contact

Hi! I don't know how long it's been since I posted but I know I've been out of it, feeling the lack of commitment to something that I make.

I just scanned the humongous list of blogs that I follow and haven't had a chance to look at (I have no internet at home at the moment) and had a pang for everything I'm missing. The internet keeps me connected and in conversation with art, imagery, words, news, culture, ideas, lives, people...

I returned from a trip to Bodmin (Cornwall, UK) over the weekend and will post some of the photos from what was a really beautiful trip.

Bluerp!

If I could make a textual equivalent of that noise that happens when a stylus rips across an LP to mark a change, then I would. I have moved countries and am aware that everything in this blog so far has been a response to my being in Crete. I don't know yet how to make the change. I don't know yet if I will attempt to continue the previous practices in London (a shift in subject but continuation of viewing framework) or if London will demand different working practices. Until I settle down I won't know the outcome and things may be a bit turbulent in this changeover.

One of discourse's decisive shifts.

Found on the Other Side of a 'To Do' List

Horror of groundlessness, of the reset button, of losing yourself in the attempt to uncover that elusive something worth believing in.
The reset button puts us back at the rawness of the experience, it sweeps away the illusions, self-fufilling structures of being that justify their own existance, the structures built to give us something to hold on to. We wipe them away and there is nothing to hide behind and the rawness of our response comes.

The Ugliest Ceramics in the World.

Apologies to whomever made them.

Overview

Trying to decide which of my photos might be appreciated as a gift for my two closest friends here in Chania. These are a few of my short list:





















In the end this process has become a bit of an assessment of all the photos I took whilst being away in Greece and Egypt. A natural closure.