Reflection on my emerging practice. What is happening in your creative work? My process at the moment feels contemplative as I am engaging in a never-ending cycle of text. One question leads to another document. I start to feel grounded with ideas of action based on my critiques, and slow down the textual learning into a space for real action.
Where does the material want to go? I want to build more instruments to install in public space, starting with our class wind-chimes. Materials tell me stories and trigger ideas of how to make them sound in space.
How is it evolving over time? First imagined as installing many instruments around London, I felt it could be more transformative to have other people engaged in the making of these instruments. I want to making process to also be a bridge for connection and learning from one another.
What shape is it taking? The sounding of materials that represent personal stories, histories of place and non-human agency is where I want to go. It expresses my desire for more engagement with the physical worlds around us, and also to expand my art practice beyond my own ideas in the digital space of my DAW.
Might you want to change direction? As I aim to expand into fascillitation and practice primarily lead by political and social intentions, perhaps I will feel like I lost the sense of play and creativity in my work. Perhaps I’ll return to solely making music on my laptop and enjoy building my skills with that practice.
Why not? I feel pretty determined that the wind-chimes installation meets a lot of my desires about the change I believe I can be part of. I have had positive feedback so far and have enjoyed working with the materials used to make the chimes.
Notes and thoughts related to the discussion of participatory art and the politics of the spectacle in “Artificial Hells” by Claire Bishop.
@ the National Encounter of Avant-Garde Art in 1968, the reception called for an artistic revolution to supplement political work; they demanded that this artistic content be revolutionary and to “deal with the material in a shocking, disquieting, even violent way.” I wonder how this announcement relates to the precarious situations of today? How does the call for shock and violence through artistic medium relate or contrast to today’s necessary resistance and subversions?
My personal opinion is that aesthetics of violence and rage are no longer subversive or threatening to the tactics of alienation we experience in London’s disintegration into global capitalism. Violence and rage are necessary expressions for cathartic release and personal and collective healing, but must be a means to something new if it is to be healing. I imagine violence and rage as very necessary aesthetics in other places or in local situations here in mega London.
I imagine cute, wholesome and folk aesthetics can function as uplifting and gathering subversions to the rational mind of colonialism. A new folkyness can be a method to reterritorialise ourselves and our spaces. Imagine a neo folk tradition that re-engages with the ancient folk themes of nature and spirit, birthed in a new language. Neo would mean to reconstruct, and by reshaping our folk traditions we can continuing expanding contemporary values of liberation and identity while grounding those values in a sense of place and planet.
The cute and the wholesome combat a nihilism intrinsic to capitalist realism.For example, the aesthetics of hardness, fastness in techno or hardcore music cultures could be seen as a nihilistic, out of body accelerationism. To place our hope in accelerating the present means to believe in the liberatory potential of new technologies. If hardcore and techno isn’t about dying, then it’s about birthing a new hybrid existence of human and machine. It is being uploaded. It is techno-optimism.
Perhaps this critique is too rash of an analysis for cultures that celebrate non-textual movement and rhythym, that perhaps are about having fun! But I do feel the lack of wholesome aesthetics in my generation reflects a lack of belief in returning, in sustainability, or of overcoming this age of global capitalism we live in. Wholesomeness is a sort of fantasy of what society could be, and can function as a motivator for positive change around sustainable living and ecological sensitivity.
“Community arts have becomes harmless and unthreathening to social and cultural stability” due to a lack of self-critique. Those organisations became known as kind and compassionate, but not great, since it’s hard to critique the expression of strangers when the intention is about the process if engagement and not the product of creation. They began with a critique of the great, since the “greatness” of art represents a hierarchy of success founded on skill, quality and virtousity that conceals class interests.
What does community work look like today in London? I would like to learn more and how my practice with music and installation could become more participatory. Informally community work happens all the time in the underground, and in regards to my previous tangent this work could be concieved as neo-folk construction.
I would like my installation for the gallery exhibition to be wholesome rather than mysterious, not bending the perception of the participant to pretend an understanding as to conform into the gallery space, but make it simple enough so they can ponder in their own way. All it takes beside the work is a little emoji or a smile 🙂
Another side project that is not part of the curriculum but important to my development as an artist. I have been invited to be part of an event in Dalston this Thursday the 19th of January. The event explores the relevance of care in our communities and artistic practice, imagined as an evening of group learning, discussion, and experiencing of the works of the artists involved. For the first time I’ll be fascilitating a workshop. It is a listening workshop, and develops on my previous research in geographies, place and listening as research practice.
The workshop will consist of a short presentation and discussion on listening practices, tuning in to imperceptibilites and navigation as a form of place making. Then in smaller groups, we will walk outside, following prompts on an activity sheet as a base for listening and noticing. The sheet is below. After this activity we will return to the venue and discuss what came up.
I am nervous and excited to fascillitate the workshop. I imagined myself learning how to fascillitate group activities in the future sometimes, but this has ended up right in front of me! Like a hot stone in cool water, practice for social change cools me down, so I am very grateful for this opportunity.
To follow how this can relate materially to my preparation for the exhibition, I plan on writing a sound walk activity for the gallery space. It might follow certain prompts as in the one above, depending on how the workshop will go.
I continue to conceptualise my sculptural piece for the exhibition. I have been gathering objects from my trip to Ireland, on the beaches of Tramore on the East coast and Connemara on the West. Playing and listening with these objects I reflect on their becoming into the temporary forms, or illusory staticity, of a shell, a rock, drift wood. I draw on them and gift them to people, imagining what their future entails.
The windchimes will contain a gathering of objects from our class; I have prescribed to the class that these objects be somehow durable and they won’t be returned, so the piece can have durability and perhaps be installed permanently after the exhibition. I am excited to learn about these objects and what they mean to my classmates, and learning about my classmate’s histories and cultures in the process. I feel glad and confident that my practice is actively constructing meaning from the critical analysis I have been forming. I feel like I can hold that critique of social alienation and ecological crisis through the action of making this object and connecting with people.
In my home town Tramore I went to Boyce’s Yard, a metal scrapyard, with my Dad. We found an abundance of used copper pipe, copper wire and hooks to form the chimes. Below are my notes for the neccessary parts.
The copper pipe is the tonal instrument. We cut it to random lengths, between 4″ and 11″, to find out how it sounds. I am not interested in tuning the sculpture to a certain scale as the choosing of this scale is problematic. After some trials we found a sweet spot between 6″ and 9″ for a 1/2″ diameter copper pipe. We formed it onto a set of chimes using some stones from Connemara, a board from a chest of drawers and a grimey plug. Apart from fishing line to connect the pipes and objects to the board, all materials are recycled. I felt a joy to hear the sound of this new instrument, and imagine the gathering of histories in it’s sounding. I was happy that this project is also a bridge to connect with my father and make memories together.
I left the chimes in Tramore between my mother’s house and my father’s house, so they can both hear the tones on a stormy night.
“Vibrant Matter, A Political Ecology of Things” outlines the importance of recognising agency outside of the human. Bennet uses a history of vitalism and object oriented ontologies to deconstruct a fundamental belief of Western thought, the binary between life and matter. Bennet points out by looking beyond this binary we can begin to recognise an assembly or assemblage of agencies that occur with any event or organisation, or a collaboration between different bodies, sometimes human and often not. Bennet claims that by thinking more horizontally about the agency of things, we can step away from the god/man/matter hierarchy that inevitably leads to inequality between humans, and a lack of awareness of our ecosystems that we are within that leads to the environmental destruction of today.
… Can we feel joy, weirdness and love for all the minerals that compose us and those worlds we rub up against?
… The cosmic flow is a vibrating intensity of matter in which we generally reduce to patterns or tendencies in order to act and survive.
… Can we imagine practices and mediums that attune to this flow as political and constructive?
This research inspires my installation piece for our Gallery 46 exhibition. I want my piece to inspire independent thought on the value of objects and materials that surround us. Beside my sculpture of a wind-chimes, containing objects from the class, I will have a textual list of those objects and their origins. I imagine that stating the personal histories of these objects could stimulate a recognition of their value and activeness, as they move between a personal life or landscape, the gallery and the auditory perception of the listener waking through.
Final draft of my first listening activity, Ear Pilots. At the beginning of writing these activities, I had so many different issues and ideas I wanted to bring up. I was interested in stimulating thought about the histories of a place: what has been removed, transformed, and silenced. Also thinking about engagement with the non-human, and engagement with our own intuition, that of navigation. I ended up with a more simple piece that is very self-reflective. The self is a great place to begin! I also kept it curious and open to interpretation. Any reflections that arise will directly some from the listener’s engagement with the place.
