Meditations: Materiality as discursive

Abstract

This essay maps out a series of case studies where I reflect on materiality, as matter without form or design. In part, the first person is employed to convey to the reader that this reflection relates to my own encounters with materials which have prompted a somewhat introspective and idiosyncratic focus. Secondly, I put forward case studies that address the discourses that emerge through these encounters, accepting here that these are critical components. More specifically, these case studies look at examples whereby the established and dominant constructs of the west are called to be dismissed and methods of detachment are put forward. Following on from these case studies, I am led to question such methods and consider examples whereby the intention to detach one self, or to look for an alternative to the dominant constructs, becomes an ideology of its own. In a later consideration in this essay I turn to explicitly abstract models of detachment. Primarily these models are concerned with blindness and subjectivity and lead me to look back at the economy of materials that I have developed in a painting practice. This analysis renders some distortion in terms of a linear or art historical focus and allows me to frame a discussion around what interests me most: the inarticulate, divergent and meditative responses to the materials around me, where choosing takes place in Duchampian moments of the freedom of indifference. This is a form of creating my own space for a new kind of agency and I employ it as a method in my practice. It is paradoxical that this creates agency: I find myself becoming detached from intellectual and aesthetic constructs that stem from my conscious and unconscious biases. At least this finding is what I seek in the work that I make.