March 20, 2018
CONTEMPLATING THE CURRENT POSITION OF MY PRACTICE
20/03/2018
I have been considering where my practice currently lies and after conversations I consider myself to be interdisciplinary however I contemplate what this means to be interdisciplinary. To be inspired by another discipline as palaeontology inspires me to bring in this other understanding and learning at to begin to practice my practice through new methods of making.
Making noun
1 the act of a person or thing that makes
2 construction; constitution; makeup
3 the means or cause of someone success or advancement
Old English macian, of west Germanic origin, from a base meaning ‘fitting’
The understanding that I as an artist have with my materials and the physical making process between myself and the material has always been essential to my work, this presence of the artist now extends into another discipline yet the concepts of creating and making are very similar. A fossil does not yet exist until it is found just as a piece of art does not until it is created, by finding a specimen from the landscape it is the first stage of it being made, during fossil preparations I feel that the physical process is very akin to sculpture and art-making; to reveal something from the rock contains the skill of looking and the skill of removing to reveal a form. When it comes down to the formal qualities of sculpture I can apply them to my fossils within their placements such as: form, colour, size, tone, light, rhythm, balance texture, to name a few.
I am beginning to realise the similarities and differences of the two disciplines, from this I hope to be able to understand how I can improve my outcomes from this understanding. I fossils we consider the past and we bring together fragmentation to understand and visit history, in art I bring fragments of earth that I bring together in the present which forms the future. The definitive point between both of these ideas in my practice is myself, for when I am an a beach collecting I am hunting those pieces of the past, finding these fragments that tell an ancient story which I feel privileged to understand a small part of, in the studio I create my fragments my fine porcelain becoming finer and more skin like.
My current pieces of porcelain are becoming finer which I am exceptionally pleased with, I have managed to gain a translucency in the work which is something I have always aspired to do. On my studio wall I now have fine porcelain folds which although look so delicate are surprisingly strong, many of these pieces now hold fossils, the folds are becoming like my hands on the beach.