I’ve been back in the studio for a couple of weeks now and need to get back into the habit of posting regularly. More importantly, I’m trying to change the way I approach my studio time. One of the things this course has made painfully obvious is how much I rely on deadlines. Give me one and I’ll get things done. Without one, I drift. I really want to change this.
Since getting back from holiday, I’ve gone to the studio whenever I haven’t been working at the art school. It has been a useful experiment. All the jobs I could easily do at home (i.e. writing course materials), I’ve done at the studio instead, and it has made a surprising difference. I’m doing more, even though I’m not specifically working towards anything.
I’m also learning to lean into a slower pattern of experimentation and synthesis. I have finished absolutely nothing this summer, and I’m strangely fine with that. I need a way of working that is more sustainable, which probably means accepting that my horizons need to be longer.
To this end, I have rethought my approach to making work. I’m beginning to think of my practice as being divided into what I guess my old corporate self would call “streams.” Ever since I did my undergraduate degree, I have hopped from one thing to another as though I constantly need to prove that I can do something new. What I want to try now is balancing that instinct against making some stuff that I already know probably works.
I’ve made all sorts of things over the last few years that have gone down well, only to abandon them almost immediately because I felt I had to innovate. Perhaps I can do both. It might even be interesting to find out what happens when I stay with a particular workstream for a while, rather than taking an idea to a single output and then wandering off in search of the next thing.
Uploading pictures to accompany this post has made me realise quite how much I actually have on the go at the moment, so I’m going to break it down into different posts (for my benefit as much as anything). I’ll start here with some digital collages.
I want to push on with the paintings I was making for the exhibition I had at the start of the year. This is exactly the sort of situation where I have historically taken an idea to an output and then abandoned it. This time, I want to see what happens if I keep going.
That said, I’m also varying my approach a little. I want to make more paintings of imagined data centres, but I want them to be more colourful and perhaps more abstract. It might be interesting to test where the limits are; how far I can move away from the original imagery while still retaining something of the strange architecture and atmosphere that drew me to it in the first place.
The other difference is that these paintings will not be the only thing I’m doing. I’m also going to document, in separate posts, my experiments with text paintings and sculptural collages.
It’s hard to overstate how strange this feels to me. I have worked really hard to train myself to do one thing at a time, so the idea that I can mooch between different things feels… odd. It also feels oddly liberating, although I’m not quite ready to trust it yet.
Anyway, here are some digital collages that will help me make some paintings. I’m not sure whether I should make a choice or just put them all up on the studio wall.
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