Author: smithcate

The photograph was selected for printing. This selection formed the start of the context and defined the parameters for the translation, which was through the digital printer. The photograph was de-contextualised from the the laptop, where it was held and framed and re-contextualised as a print on A4 printer paper. The printed photograph could be held in the hands, it was pliable, because it was printed on paper. The source image was unable to be touched or held independently of it as the laptop was its object form, the screen in front and keyboard and screen and frame surrounding and supporting it. The photograph had lost the colour from the laptop, it had been de-contextualised from the digital context to the physical form of a digital print. The printing process provided it with its colour in its translated form, which it gained from the printing inks.

Printing it out caused an accidental print that revealed the direction and colours used in its creation, which allowed a comparison of its digital source. It revealed a low yellow ink, which I had to replace. It also highlighted the left to right direction of the ink, which was applied in the same way that text is applied on the printer, rather than the way I paint. The direction of printer application has equivalence with writing, although typing more so, writing is generally done in notebooks that have readymade lines. But it also has equivalence with painting and other forms of printing, such as screen printing.

The re-contextualisation of the photograph into an accident from an intuitive, but deliberately taken photograph allows me to consider what it means to create an accidental mark, asking why it been interpreted as a mistake. In this case the printer wasn’t checked, but it also ran out half way through printing a number of photographs, so it wasn’t that low to start with. I was attempting to print a photograph. What is an accident? A mistake? Something that re-contextualises an image as different? or from making a perfect image, or creating an exact reproduction? I didn’t get the photograph that I wanted, but I got something else.

A translation is a critical interpretation that offers a way of examining the source and translation through their relationships (Venuti, 2007). Is it a mistake if it exposes the processes inherent in its making, so that it helps towards understanding how the printed photograph is created? It highlights the different process. When I consider what has been lost and gained, the knowledge gained from it makes me consider its new interpretation. Therefore, although it is an accident, I have re-contextualised it not as an accident, perhaps as a valuable accident. The words are important. Its value is in how its visual properties have contributed towards understanding how the image is constructed.

Filmmaker Jonas Mekas considered mistakes vital in image creation, in examining daily life.

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“the mistakes, the out-of-focus shots, the shaky shots, the unsure steps, the hesitant movements, the overexposed and underexposed are part of the vocabulary”

_{Jonas Mekas, “The Changing Language of Cinema (January 25, 1962),” in Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American Cinema (New York: Collier, 1972), 49.}

Wade Guyton refers to mistakes as ‘facts”, rather than mistakes (Graw, 2018). The print is a fact, for sure, but it offers more than that. It offers a way in to understanding the process, how something is made correctly. It stays faithful to the ideal use of the printer, but this conceals its representational form. In interpreting the translated print as a mistake it allowed me to ask, can’t all creative acts, or interpretations on the photograph, or any image for that matter, be considered mistakes? What makes them not a mistake? If a mistake is a fact, what is factual about it and what about it is wrong? Jacqueline Humphries considers drips, structural devices to create work. She re-contextualises them as intentional, but not in a conventional or overly stylised way, but interprets them with a value in her work through the use of them as (and term) structuring device. An interpretation of the source photograph beyond that which stays faithful to its image or intended image and use allows it to be interrogated through its representational processes. It expands the dialogue with the photograph and leads to further enquiry. This is the generative nature of translation. I do not expect to completely answer this question in this blog post, but it moves the work forward by allowing these questions to be raised (to the surface, to be visible).

Mistake. Fact. Structuring device. Accident. Happy accident. Valuable accident. The words are important. The writing is integral to developing these thoughts in relation to the image. I can think, write and speak about these issues, but they are interrogated through their relationship with verbal language, which translates them again, for example here in this blog. It opens up (begins and expands) a critical dialogue with the printed photograph. The blog, thesis, speaking (and holding the image or pointing to it, referring to it) or thinking about the images (memory, mental images) all form the hybrid contexts that expand the relationships between images and words. Then the future work is affected. If I think about it as an accident I will likely throw it in the bin (new context), if I interpret it as valuable, then it can be used to generate work. Who decides what is a mistake?

This is a print of the introductory chapter of my research thesis translation as a methodology within the expanded field of painting onto translucent (tracing) paper. It is a draft copy with notes attached for my supervisors to read at the upcoming submission on 11 April. It is printed on a Canon Pixma printer.

I am at home preparing this draft. I have been reading about deixis all morning and my head is all over the place. I spent three hours deciding whether the first sentence needs to stay there, be deleted, be altered in the text body or footnotes, or moved to the next chapter. I decided that I needed to remove myself from it, just for a short time, so I sat on the floor, beside the printer and made something else.

I made the sentence pink to remind me to go back to it.

Green text needs to be moved.

My head can’t be literally all over the place. A metaphor, or figure of speech is a word or phrase that deviates from ordinary (verbal) language, it moves, in this case not just to one place but all over the place. Where does it go?

Read: David Ritchie, Metaphor (Cambridge: University Press, 2013)

I read Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes a few years ago. I had found it, like many others, a moving account of loss and this interpretation of the book stayed with me. Barthes was grieving following the death of his mother and it was this loss that lead him to a realisation about the specific nature of the photographic image. The recalling of his search and discovery of photographic punctum through his account in Camera Lucida is something I remembered. Although Barthes knowledge of photography has been challenged, the book has been influential in photographic research. It influenced my work. In 2016, I developed a painting, which I called Summer Garden, using a photograph of my own mother as a child, split into triangular sections. This was the start of my research into the essence of the digital photographic image as I used it in printmaking. I did this through examining the geometric shapes derived from bitmaps and pixels, my favourites being triangles, so I started with them. I didn’t consider the triadic relationship between the sign, its referent and its interpretation was part of this essential nature.

The memory I have of Camera Lucida is linked to the account of the photograph of his mother as a child taken in the winter garden and the realisation that he had found her, or more discovered a connection to her in that image. This connection was not apparent to Barthes in any other photographs of her. This photograph connects Barthes to a loss, a realisation that there is something that will never be recovered and he connects this to her death.

I am here now, at home, reading Camera Lucida again, a few years after first reading it. The paragraphs above are recollections of my feelings towards the book and how it connected me with new events and encounters in my painting, how it lead me on a journey, one that has taken me to undertaking PhD research. I am now reading Camera Lucida in this new context, one where I am beginning to explore the indexical nature of photography in a deeper way, through its connection to translation. I put down the book occasionally to write in my journal and then pick up the laptop and return to reading. Reading, writing, remembering.

I have read a few articles so far, most of them refer to Barthes text as the basis for photography’s ongoing links to realism. The emergence of digital photography is forcing a re-evaluation of this. The ease of manipulation of digital imagery and the perceived distance from its referent due to the technological change from analogue methods as no light is transferred to trace in digital processes. Barthes however, does not appear to suggest the index is solely connected to the real and many references to this can be found in the text. He sets out the rationale early—what is the essence of photography, or as he states, what is photography in itself? He immediately connects this to the index. Barthes discusses the pointing index finger, the sign connected to the something there, or something happening. He does not talk about an object specifically, but a source, not immediately observable, an event, occurrence—something he calls this, something that points to the real. Barthes is discussing indexical nature of the photograph.

Interestingly, at the start of the book, Barthes dedicates Camera Lucida as an homage to Jean Paul Sartre’s book, The Imaginary—a philosophical text on the imagination. This might suggest a further context in which to reflect on this work—one that takes us beyond the objective concept of reality, to a more creative and intangible meaning. Was it Barthes intention to link photography to the real? It doesn’t appear so at first (more, second) glance. Barthes adds later, that he was finding it difficult to choose between using expressive and critical languages, that a reductive subjectivity was problematic for him. He considered that this might provide a link to his concerns within photography.

I am aware that I am not reading Barthes words entirely. The original title of Camera Lucida was La Chambre Claire, published in France in 1980. Camera Lucida was translated in 1981 and copyrighted by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, for publication in the U.S by Hill and Wang. I am reading its English publication, by Random House, which was first published in London in 1993. Are these Barthes exact thoughts and ideas? What if his ideas have been misinterpreted? Kate Briggs wrote about how translated texts are read, and accepted by the reader, as though they are written entirely by the original author and not the translator, even though there is an awareness of this. I now wonder if Kate Briggs has any insights into the details of Camera Lucida, since she speaks French and has had direct contact with Barthes work having published a translation of his essays. I wonder whether she would translate this book differently and would she reveal any clarifications, or new thoughts arise regarding photographic indexicality.

I go back to reading.

A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).

Barthes extended metaphor likens the punctum to an accident, of being ‘pricked’. He connects feelings and thoughts of sadness and regret to a physical event. Metaphors are part of figurative language that connects text to visual images. The word bruise indicates this accident being made visible through colour, changing colour, perhaps yellow, red, blue, purple, etc. A bruise is a sign, one that points to an injury, an event or occurrence.

The prick also connects to poignancy, through thoughts, such as memories and the physical manifestations of those thoughts—feelings, or emotions, that exist in the present. Feelings are connected to physical changes in the body, for example sadness can connect to the appearance of tears. Sensations of pain, perhaps in the chest, or in the stomach, for example, can be felt or experienced physically. For example, they can cause significant changes to heart and breathing rates amongst other things. Barthes metaphor connects memory to a physical reality in the present through an indexical relationship. The word poignant originates from the word prick, through French and Latin—it has an historic link through language. The meaning of the word prick in this context, that of regret and sadness, indicates a reflection away from the present, towards something past. It causes temporal shifts in thought that connect the past with the present. It has a symbolic reference to the past.

In the example above, Barthes relates (translates) the punctum to something hidden, but made visible, something that connects the body, the memory of the past, with the present—through the photograph. Using this metaphor, Barthes is able to connect to something in the photograph that exists through words, but is undefinable, or indeed, untranslatable in reality. The physical body of his mother.

Charles Peirce Sanders defined three modes of sign usage—symbol, icon and index. Paintings are traditionally considered iconic, because of their perceived resemblance to something, which is the defining principle of an icon, according to Peirce. He stated that iconic signs only need to be partly related to their referent. For example, visual images such as diagrams and paintings contain some, but often not all, aspects of their connection to something, but enough to provide a perceived resemblance. There is a link to materiality and gesture. Peirce stated that despite variations in artistic process and application, a painting is ‘largely conventional in its mode of representation'(2). The properties of the medium are always connected to the iconicity of an image, Chandler p41. Eco essay. This means that if expanded paintings are connected to the specific nature of painting, despite not appearing to be a painting, they would still have a perceived resemblance to it. In this way, paintings would always have a resemblance to painting itself because they would follow the conventions of painting, whatever that might be at that time and in relation to each work.

The index is a type of sign—one of three described by Charles Peirce (1). An indexical sign is directly connected to the thing that it represents, either physically or causally, including through perceived connections. This means that when a sign is indexical, that we are no longer simply containing its meaning within the sign system, but opening it into wider possibilities that are contextual and go beyond this structure of meaning. The idea of perceived connections is interesting and something to consider whilst reading the literature and considering my own practice and experiences. According to Chandler, even if we do not fully embrace all the aspects of Peirce’s semiotic theory, in considering, or using indexical signs we are immediately taken beyond the simple signified-signifier structure of, for example, Saussure.

An index is a sign that literally points to something else, such as an index finger points to a specific object. According to Peirce, signs are indexical if they are considered to be directly connected, either physically or causally, to the (for example) object. Personal trademarks such as handwriting are indexical. Language and words are symbolic, according to Peirce, because they refer directly to language in an arbitrary but agreed upon way, according to Chandler, so it can be learned. (3). However handwriting is indexical, because it refers beyond the system of signs to being attributed to a specific individual or person who is writing—it is a signifier of a specific individual. Handwriting points to a specific individual. This means there is an additional context which can be considered when decoding or understanding handwriting—we can go beyond considering meaning within the system of language, to what it might mean to be connected to that specific person. Elizabeth Bruss discusses how indexicality relates to a relationship between things rather than a quality (Chandler, p42).

Photographs are considered to be both iconic and indexical signs (Chandler). Iconically, they resemble something, but they also point towards other things unconnected to resemblance, or appearance—its indexical relationships. Traditionally photography’s indexical nature has been connected to that of the relationship between the object that has been photographed. It is a trace of something that existed in the real world. Roland Barthes.

Film and Media theorist Mary Ann Doane discusses how in the digital era, it has been suggested that photography has lost its indexical qualities due to the manipulative potential of the digital image and the inferred distance from its referent—or reality. Doane considers the role of the index in photography in her essay Indexicality: trace and sign, where she discusses the confusion as to whether indexicality still exists in the photograph now it has moved from the analogue to the digital realm. She suggests that this confusion is partly due to Peirce’s varied descriptions of what constitutes an index, for example, as well as the photograph, footprints and certain words are also considered indexical. Peirce’s definitions of indexicality connect it to the other two sign modes—the icon and the symbol. The concept of indexicality connected to the icon, or image of representation, relates directly to a trace of something physical that exists in the real world. I am not sure whether the referent is light and therefore nature, or the objects in the photograph, or a combination of these things. The photograph has been considered a trace due to the imprint of light around objects on the surface of photo sensitive paper. It has, somewhat incorrectly, connected the indexical (icon) nature of the photograph to reality through its image, which for a long time presented as a representation of the real.

Doane explores another example of the index as proposed by Peirce—one that connects indexicality to the symbol—so connects it to language. This example of the index is as a shifter, or deixis, in language. In this instance the index connects with the symbol, but through contextually situated words such as I, she, he, it, now, here. So these words allow a specific relationship with the referent that point to something specific. For example I am here, online, typing this blog, remembering things I read from this essay and connecting it to my work, but I am also here sitting at home. Here is an index too—locational—it points to a place. I am feeling anxious about PhD year 3 milestones. I am also feeling excited by indexicality. I am remembering that I received an email I need to reply to. The I points to my relationship with many things, feelings, memory, academic work and personal life. Doane states that the index is connected to spatiotemporal properties, that its meaning is contextually derived, moving and not fixed. Considering the photograph through its contextually situated relationships is interesting. The photograph is of my studio—it is here on the blog and it is also here in my memory. This studio doesn’t exist any more as I moved two years ago at the end of first year. My studio is here at home on my laptop now as I work. My studio is also there, along a side street about ten minutes away from my home. There is a resemblance between these studios, but they are different from each other and relate to different aspects of the photograph. Indexicality connects me to my studio through different things.

Doane contrasts these different meanings in an interesting way. She describes how the photograph as a trace is often overfilled with meaning, one that doesn’t relate to the actual situation being photographed. In other words, it can be given more meaning than it is actually correct, or real. Doane describes this overabundance of meaning, as being connected to the photograph’s perceived connection with reality that goes beyond actual physical or material connection, but is based on an assumption that the photograph is evidence of it as reality. The reality of this studio exists in a different time and space.

Doane then contrasts this with the concept of the index as shifter or deixis, in which meaning derivations are context-based, moving and detachable. There is always a loss of meaning associated with this type of index, according to Doane, due to this context-specific nature. As my studio, it does exist as a reality, but not the one that might be supposed. It exists as an online reality, one connected to the digital image and a reality that is connected to the my memory. My memory is real, part of my perceived reality. If the studio was perceived or presented as, not my, but a studio, then it might be These opposing examples of what constitutes indexicality, according to Doane, can leave the photograph, with a sense of precariousness, with it being, or seeming, neither one nor the other. Doane suggests that indexicality is key to understanding static and moving images.

Doane considers the photograph as having both these properties—as the imprint of a person, object, or moment, but one that is detachable, repeatable and removed from its original context, reality and meaning, circulated into multiple other situations removed from its original time and space. In both these situations there is a physical and material connection to the referent. The photograph Blank Canvas (above) is here, within the context of this blog. It is functioning as an image here in the present at the same time it exists as another version of itself as existing there. However, in each specific there it exists as a here, for example in the context of my thesis the photograph will also exist as being here.

In her essay, The Value of Liveliness: Painting as an Index of Agency in the New Economy, art historian and theorist Isabelle Graw (4) asks us to consider painting as indexical. Graw proposes this is due to painting’s specific or residual nature as a signature or handwriting, of an artist. Graw states that even paintings that have been made indirectly by the artist can still be attributed to a specific maker. The indexical sign of a painting, according to Graw, is one that always points to its author—the artist. She continues that painting contains all forms of signs—symbolic, iconic and indexical.

Orientation

noun [mass noun] 1 the action of orienting someone or something relative to the points of a compass or other specified positions: studies of locational awareness and orientation in young children. • [count noun] the relative position or direction of something: using the orientation of a building to capture energy from the sun. • Zoology the faculty by which birds and other animals find their way back to a place after going or being taken to a place distant from it: recent research in animal orientation. 2 a person’s basic attitude, beliefs, or feelings in relation to a particular subject or issue: his book is well worth reading, regardless of your political orientation. • short for sexual orientation.3 familiarization with something: many judges give instructions to assist jury orientation. • (also orientation course) mainly North American a course giving information to newcomers to a university or other institution.

Index

pointing towards something, from a specific (contextual) point towards something.

I had been recommended W.G. Sebald’s text The Rings of Saturn by Tom. He suggested I might be interested in Sebald’s use of photographs within the text. He was reading it at the time. It sat, bookmarked on the living room table where Tom had placed it. I picked it up and began at Chapter 1, reading and quickly becoming absorbed. The first photograph, on the second page, was one of clouds under the grid of a sloping window. There was no caption. The narrator described it as a hospital window—the view from his hospital bed. I closed the book, put it back on the table and waited while Tom finished reading it. I found it, bookmark removed, on my bedside table not long after this. I picked it up and began reading, this time from a quote written just before the book’s contents.

‘The Rings of Saturn consist of ice crystals and probably meteorite particles describing circular orbits around the planets equator’.

Cyclic movement indicates a return. Returning to something is a theme within my work. I engage with one aspect of a thing and then return to it to engage with another. I continue this process of visiting and re-visiting, exploring, discovering, pushing towards exhausting the possibilities, until a deadline approaches. The possibilities are never exhausted. Time just runs out and I find myself at a point where I need to bring everything together. And so, I find myself at the end, and then, in that same moment, at the start again.

This process of returning, reviewing, editing is a vital part of the process of painting, of writing, of translation. The painter returns to a mark, a gesture, a line, a colour, considering, absorbing, scraping back, sanding, removing, re-working. The writer and translator returns to a word, to consider, to review, to edit, the best possible alternative to that word available in the target language, whether its own or another. The writer deletes and re-writes, removing the past efforts. The painter hides or makes visible their presence just as deliberately during the point of editing.

Repetition—being and returning provides me with layers that build upon each other—layers of possibilities, layers of connections, layers of time-space.—specific categories of layering. I return to this post regularly to edit.

This is connected to issues of fidelity, or truth between an original, a source, and its translation.

Fidelity or faithfulness to an original is a highly contested aspect of translation. Anthea Bell, a translator of Sebald’s work, explains how translation is not perfect but it has to give the illusion of being so, it has to keep up the pretence. (Bell, 2011, p215). Bell describes how, when she would firmly argue her point to Sebald regarding a specific translation in Austerlitz, he would agree to her choice, but in a later essay, a decade after its publication, she wondered whether his own translation would have been more appropriate.

The first image I came across was a photograph of a window. The narrator describes a period of time in hospital—the view from his bed being the colourless patch of sky framed in the window (Sebald, 2002, p4). Or is it? The image is not titled. It sits in the middle of the page, the frame of the window is obscured, blackened through poor reproduction. Why would he place such a low-quality image in his book? Does this image belong to Sebald? Is he the person behind the camera? Is he the narrator? Is this a view from a hospital? Did he even go to hospital? What on earth is going on.

Anthea Bell, Chapter 8, Translating W.G. Sebald—With and Without the Author, in Saturn’s Moons: A W.G. Sebald Handbook. Ed Jo Catling and Richard Hibbit, (Abingdon: Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge, 2011), p209-215. <Accessed 14 August 2020>
ISBN 978-1-906540-0-29

Clive Scott, Chapter 3, Sebald’s Photographic Annotations, in Saturn’s Moons: A W.G. Sebald Handbook. Ed Jo Catling and Richard Hibbit, (Abingdon: Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge, 2011), p217-244. <Accessed 14 August 2020>
ISBN 978-1-906540-0-29

W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, (London: Vintage, 2002) Trans. by Michael Hulse

Mid-August 2018. I was about to begin PhD research examining my own painting practice. I had spent the summer so far outside engaging with the physical natural world as much as I could—cycling, going for walks—around applications to funding organisations and working to raise some cash in case that fell through. Over the course of one day, I cleaned and re-organised the studio. Following the academic calendar is perfect for me because it coincides with the temperature and mood of the seasons. In the heat of the summer, at the end of term, my mind and all its thoughts rest and my physical body takes charge. I indulge in physical activities during the summer that let my body feel the warmth and air .

Writer WG Sebald introduces this concept at the start of his book The Rings of Saturn, in which he begins a journey through Suffolk towards the end of the dog days or hottest part of summer and sets the themes that will underpin his text [1]. This journey was an attempt to re-energise his body which had grown lethargic after recently completing finishing a work project. The end of summer—leading into the start of the academic year—is a perfect structure for me to pause, reflect and re-organise work projects and something I continue to do even when I am not enrolled to study. Ideas begin to pick up momentum at this point, carried through across the year and come to a natural conclusion towards the end of spring, with summer a point of reflection.

Sebald describes the journey at this point as a tour, which presents it as more than walk, it is a guided expedition—the word has variations on its linguistic meaning. Sebald is both tourist and tour guide, as he takes the reader with him on a journey that encounters many—fictional and non-fiction—characters and crosses many time-spaces, including that of a linear path through Suffolk with an occasional detour or loss of way.  This mirrors the reader’s journey through the book, which would also be linear, encouraging detours and divergences not dissimilar to the author’s as they explore his encounters further through online searches and multiple-genre texts, skimming back and forth, to and away from Sebald through his journey and to its end.

[1] W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn (London: Vintage Books, 2002). Sebald discusses the dog days, which are allegedly connected to the Dog Star, Sirius. Sirius is said to rise almost at the same time as the sun at the hottest pat of the year. This has been attributed to moods and behaviours of agitation and unrest. An article in the National Geographic magazine <https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/07/150710-dog-days-summer-sirius-star-astronomy-weather-language/&gt; discussed how the origin of the term has been lost. The importance of Sirius in ancient Egyptian mythology and religious practices, then later in Geek and then Roman is explored by JB Holberg in his book Sirius: Brightest Diamond in the Night Sky. The rising of this planet, alongside the sun at specific times of the year, coincided with natural events of the time such as the rising water of the Nile, and featured prominently in Egyptian life and ritual. This was attributed to wars and civil unrest in Homer’s time is now a literal interpretation of dogs going crazy—of losing control in the heat of summer. Sebald attributes this part of its meaning to superstition, or myth, the stories that were told in ancient times, but that have changed now. As scientific knowledge grows, these myths slowly disappear, making way for scientific fact. According to scientists, the movement of the Dog Star, like other planets, does not equate with our calendar year, which is constructed and approximated through, for example leap years. Biological and natural times do at points fall out of step with constructed times of clocks and dates. It is suggested that Sirius will rise later in the year, in the middle of autumn and then in winter over the course of a few thousand years. This movement of the planet Sirius out of time with the calendar year will no doubt result in a further change in its meaning in the future. But also, it highlights the movement between the planets and our own, the slippage between nature and our imposed understanding, our approximation of time. It puts into focus the imperfections in our own calendar, the imperceptible, changing nature of our supposedly fixed timelines. It exposes science as almost. Science and superstition are, in this example, both approximations of the truth, both altered in meaning with the change in times—based in increased knowledge about the world outside our own, our expanded spaces and relevant to the stories being told in our time. There is still a link to changes in mood and behaviour of humans in the summer. Seasonal Affective Disorder is a largely Northern Hemisphere disorder characterised by periods of depression in the winter, followed by a summer remission. It seems that despite the myth, there may be some truth in the basic interpretation—that is, humans feel differently at different times of the year and it is, in some way attributable to the seasons, weather, time, the planets or something else out-with our scope of knowledge. These concerns are a key component of Sebald’s text—part fact, fiction, myth, superstition, science, history, anecdote—Rings of Saturn sits somewhere in between all these places, never fully revealing a truth belonging to any one thing.

 

 

*Talking Heads, I Zimbra (Burbank, California: Sire Records, 1979)

 

I selected some music on the laptop to listen to while I tidied things away. I had been listening to Talking Heads’ Fear of Music throughout the past year while I made the last body of work and now I needed a change*.

When I am painting I like the room quiet, so I can immerse myself in making something. In between making, for example, when I am making coffee, having lunch, or just generally need a break to stretch, I listen to, or dance to music in the studio. This is very often music I enjoyed from the late 1970s  to mid 1980s, a time where I was very creative and accessed this creativity freely, without considering whether it would result in a piece of art, or form a career. That is, I was creative for its own sake. When I listen to this music now, I easily access this part of myself and it relaxes me, allows me to again put aside the end goals or external pressures that don’t relate to the concepts and allows the work to generate, as far as it can, naturally.

Each body of work has a soundtrack that I listen to for the entirety of its making. I usually only pick one or two albums from the same band and listen to them through the duration of making a particular work. The last work, the work I am cleaning from the floor of the studio was made to Fear of Music. Mostly, it was just I Zimbra**, since I usually have danced all the excess energy off me after the (roughly) three minutes of the track and I am ready to get back to work before the next song.

**Gadji beri bimba clandridi
Lauli lonni cadori gadjam
A bim beri glassala glandride
E glassala tuffm I zimbra

Bim blassa galassasa zimbrabim
Blassa gallassasa zimbrabim 

A bim beri glassala glandrid
E glassala tuffm I zimbra

Gadji beri bimba clandridi
Lauli lonni cadori gadjam
A bim beri glassala glandride
E glassala tuffm I zimbra

Each body of work has a soundtrack that I listen to for the entirety of its making. I usually only pick one or two albums from the same band and listen to them through the duration of making a particular work. The last work, the work I am cleaning from the floor of the studio was made to Fear of Music. Mostly, I listened repetitively to one song—I Zimbra, since I only need a few minutes break to stretch and get back to work. This music sets the rhythm to my work. It supports it in providing the pace, the speed or energy of the work as it is made. When I zimbra starts to play, it begins as a regular pop song with a unified sound. Then the lyrics begin and the track changes direction, it moves somewhere else to what feels like a different space, far removed from the intro. Like the lyrics, the sound re-enters and evolves into something entirely physical yet undefined, there is no sense to it, no pattern, no recognition. It is unknown, frightening, bizarre and sometimes violent. A synthesiser takes over and spins the sound around in yet another direction. These directions are not bi-planar but multi-directional, multi-dimensional—layered. The rhythm is fast, moving backwards and forwards with unequal weight, climbing, tumbling, with jolts and turns, snaking through the room, up the walls and back down under the table.  The paint is thrown, rubbed, splashed hurriedly and vigorously on to the floor, onto the walls, at pieces of wood or paper, which are often missed targets, catching the remains of a movement, an outstretched arm, a colour, a violent change in direction, an exclamation, half of a made up word—all in the one space. I zimbra is reflected in the last work I made in the studio. I zimbra is in the stain I am cleaning from the floor.

I stop listening to the music once the work is finished. If I play the song at home, or hear it elsewhere it always connects me to the many experiences I have had listening to it, which now include the making of this particular work. The album has been compared to the works of Italo Calvino—each song appears to transport us to abstract places and times, according to writer Brian Gresko, reinforced through titles which imply a concept for each time-space. My work has a fragmented abstracted narrative, a negotiation between times and places, where memory, the present and the future, contract and expand within the same narrative linear space.

I Zimbra was written by Dada artist Hugo Ball. He is credited on

I am currently listening to Boards of Canada, interspersed with 70s disco.

 

 

 

 

*Talking Heads, Fear of Music (Burbank, California: Sire Records Company, 1979).

Jonathan Lethem, Fear of Music (New York: Continuum, 2012)

Brian Gresko, The Strange, Tense Power of Talking Heads’ ‘Fear of Music’ (The Atlantic,  2012) <https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/04/the-strange-tense-power-of-talking-heads-fear-of-music/256071/&gt;

September 2018, I was sitting in the hall on the fifth floor of the Mercure Hotel in Ingram Street outside a small room. This is where I would meet with the other ten PGR students in my cohort for the next three months to complete our training programme. I took out the notebook I had brought with me and wrote while I waited to start the induction. I wrote quickly, anxiously, distracting myself from thinking about all this, about what was in front of me, about whether I was up to it or not, about wanting to both stay and leave, about the tightness in my stomach. I had the photograph tucked inside the back pocket of the notebook. The first few lines were,

Hidden in leaves,
Cowering behind hot coffee,
Almost overspilling
onto
the next line

I continued writing all the way down the page until I ran out of steam. Meeting at the Mercure Hotel took the edge off returning to academic life. The hotel staff had placed racks of individually packaged tea-bags, teaspoon measures of instant coffee and chocolate chip biscuits on a table behind us that sat untouched. The Mercure Hotel pens and notepads at each place setting were pushed into the middle of the table to make way for our own notebooks and laptops, where we scribbled furiously each week.

The last time I had left The Glasgow School of Art was in 2014, three months after the fire. I sat at home watching the smoking building while on the phone to my panicked classmates and we spent the remaining months in a different building on campus. The fire was extinguished at the door of my studio, one of the few in the Mackintosh building to remain intact. In the summer of 2018, I sat at home watching images of the burning Art School, smoke and flames appearing from the window and finally destroying my old studio.

I am at home now with a coffee wondering how things will change at GSA following the (so far) four-month lockdown during the covid-19 pandemic. The Mackintosh building has been five layers deep under scaffolding since the last fire. The School of Fine Art has been relocated to the Stow Building. I am heading into my third year of research.  I am working at home, going back and forth to the filter coffee machine, occasionally via the chocolate biscuits in the fridge. I catch up with the news each day online. I am reading an essay on metaphor, its getting near to the end of my research.

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