On Friday, the 6th of December, we had a really interesting activity/lecture with an artist who worked in memory. In her process, she would look at old family photographs in order to activate her memories and inspire new work central to her family’s history and sense of identity/lack of sense of identity. She was raised in stories about Africa and the Caribbean, but she was born in London. Our initial family stories are brought into our cannon by our parents’ curation. I am also working from family photographs in order to piece together a narrative/identity that I am not entirely sure of, so bringing an awareness of that bias when looking at our personal timelines was incredibly useful.
After the lecture, we brought this lens of analysis to our own practice in the arts. We were asked to bring in three objects that represent our past, present, and future artistic practice.
Past: Painting, an easel. We were tasked to write about this object.
How do you capture a memory?
The Easel
It is metal and cold and temperamental. I looks a little like a minimalist robot.
It should be still, but sometimes in the middle of a stroke, the critical horizontal edge would squeak and dramatically fall, placing the image it cradled in peril.
Sometimes I’d catch the painting. Sometimes it would fall forward on the grey concrete floor and leave a ghost of itself on the wrong surface, ruining its intended surface.
I loved the room, but hated the easels—the angles and hinges always worked against me. It was the exact opposite of the oil paint, which was warm and liquid and pliable, comfortable on my fingers. I loved the smell of serpentine and how the smell diffused throughout the big angular room.
Whereas a blot on the easel would always prove peril. Was it a new paint stain or an old one? Wet paint that continued to be dangerous or a mark of a previous mistake.
I remember setting up the easel when I painted Sawyer. When starting a new painting in the studio, I’d have to drag the easel out of the corner, which was difficult as the heaviness was distributed awkwardly—almost randomly. It was made more difficult by the fact that it was about the same height that I was. Like a thin, cold assistant that would occasionally act up. I was always nervous to interact with the easel.The hinges were pinchers of death, and injuries to the hand are the worst thing that can happen to a painter, but I was especially nervous then.
The easel and the masonite surface protected me from him but also to obscure him so I had to peak around it. It was difficult to use it as a recording object
Present: Linocut–we were tasked to create a timeline to follow an abject related to our current practice.
Future: Book–I brought a book by Tom Gauld to represent the future of my artistic practice, and we were meant to present our relationship to it. I see the future of my practice to continue to explore many different media. Currently, the media that I am exploring is linocut, but I will continue to be narrative driven. Ultimately, I would like to collaborate with writers to build a world to write a story and force myself to write more, but it seems like a larger jump from my current practice.
RCA Graduate Diploma 