Abstract:
My methodology for this essay can be considered quite simple. I allow one thing to lead to the next, or as Arthur Rimbaud puts it "thought latching on to thought and pulling."1 When one thought activates the next, I believe that I am being true to a primal self, a self that naturally responds to the environment and my (learned) knowledge. Instead of linking or bundling my scholarly knowledge together in crude groups based on proven facts or pigeonholing my thoughts, I like to rely on my unconscious to do the work for me. Tim Ingold uses an archipelago as a metaphor for this practice. Our conscious thoughts or knowledge can be seen as islands. These islands are joined with a network of propositions in the form of bridges. The flowing water that moves around these "knowledge" islands is what Ingold calls our tacit knowledge; that is the unconscious knowledge that sinks into our bodies. This is knowledge that is so deeply embodied in our subconscious that one cannot articulate it. The combination of the themes of art and ecology naturally form an environment around me, and we influence each other. I adjust to my environment, my environment adjusts to me. We are an interconnected web of nature: This is an expression that also resonates within my approach to a studio practice. This text is like skimming stones across a surface: sometimes the stone bounces twice, sometimes six times, before it sinks. Each stone is flung from the same hand. Some ripples, like thoughts, overlap , while others are so far away that the concentric rings never touch. 2 making, behaving, and being. Standing at an intersection between ecology and art, I often make work that involves endurance or physical exertion. My environment demands an awareness of my body in relation to space, pushing me to prove or physically exert myself, fighting nature in ways that could seem Sisyphean. By reading different landscapes and using them as a lens, I observe my relationship to place and land, and how I respond to it, and in a sense, vice versa. How does a place respond to us? "A place is what its place makers – humans or non-humans – do." 3 I began with the idea to write this essay in different environments as a conscious experiment: a chapter in Whatipu, a chapter in Banks Peninsula, a chapter in Seoul on a stopover and chapters scattered around the Dutch and German landscape or even in transit between countries. During this process, detailed descriptions of my surrounding filled the pages: grass, sun, rock, and moss. The longer I wrote the more focused and aware I became of my place in the centre of the horizon. However, instead of finding myself lost in environments far from humanity, the only moments when I had time to write were after museums/gallery trips in the surrounding gardens attached to these art institutions. Theory became secondary in my writing and I have detailed accounts of the Rijksmuseum gardens, the Berlin museum courtyards and the forest and sculpture garden that surround the Kröller-Müller museum. Environments that are filled with people crowding out of the galleries, swapping the static, quiet, controlled indoor space for the wildly contrasting outdoors, with its sunlight, bird movements, and wind rustling the leaves of tidy hedges. Initially I thought all these excerpts of writing were a failure since they didn't include any theory, but I realize that the writing indirectly touches on subjects that I had been reading about. Although writing in museum gardens was unintentional and a rather desperate attempt for "nature," moving from an indoor gallery into an outdoor landscape contributed to a heightened sense of "seeing." If all artwork is the same in that it is a response to the artist's environment, then the difference from work to work is in the honest intention: what is the purpose of the maker? If an artist chooses to make a work with the intention of selling it, then these "selling thoughts" are integrated into the making process. If an artist is making work intended for an exhibition, then these thoughts will also be integrated. Unconscious thoughts will be included in the work in progress and these thoughts will lie within the structure of the finished work. If the intention is not followed through and interactions/transactions are not been made clear, then the artist risks becoming merely a fabricator, a product maker, a designer, a decorator. Some questions I am considering are from where does the want to sell, the want to show, or the want to make arise? What is the source of this want? I was recently appointed a space on the ELAM premises as my examination space—a white walled corner between the elevator and the windows. By the time of the final exhibition, the wind will be moving through the green leaves outside the windows. The sunlight will filter through the trees in moving shapes. Some other questions: do I want the walls to be removed? Can we fix the ceiling? Should I place work on the floor. Should I blacken out the windows? I need to account for restrictions and conditions. Anything new that I make has the potential to be shown in this space. Do I want to make something for this space, and where would that want come from? Is being appointed a space to consider for exhibition equivalent to building a dam between my islands of conscious thought?