A very useful tutorial with Yvonne Feng on Thursday (5 March) following her artist’s talk Tracing the Unspeakable: Painting as Embodied Seeing. The discussion I had with her and the way she described creating her work during her artist’s talk link really resonated with me. 

In her talk Yvonne described in detail how she uses gesture and the act of making to access traumatic memories. She then talked about how gesture is also used to engage the viewer’s imagination and how this allows them to access ‘stories’ in the work. Using Gerhard Richter’s September 2005 as an example she described how Richter’s scraping action affects the viewer, how the blurring it causes ‘provokes a sense of horror in absence’.

Similar ideas are discussed in Griselda Pollock’s ‘After-Affects, After-Images: trauma and aesthetic transformation in the virtual feminist museum’ which I have just finished reading. She references Phenomenology and how we use the sense we have of a work to access meaning. For instance - our corporeal understanding - of the ‘skin’ of Alina Szapocznikow’s work - the look and the imagined feel of its texture -  is used to transmit themes of trauma, both personal and societal. 

My understanding of Phenomenology has developed through reading Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In his essay Eye and Mind,  he explains how no scientific analysis of the world, or reflections on it, are possible without our own corporeal sense of it. My tutorial with Yvonne, hearing her artist’s talk, reading ‘After Affects’ and Eye and Mind have all combined to galvanise some of my thoughts about own practice.

I have begun to try and describe or name my work – soft, heavy, bulbous, shiny, cold and brittle – all of which are qualities I want the work to have. I want to use these to convey ideas of vulnerability and a sense of the corporeal as well as wonder and metamorphosis. I have not yet formed a ‘language’ that can do all this, but I have a better sense of what I am aiming at. 

The soak staining that I did on large pieces of fabric in C131 on Saturday (29 February) and Monday (2 March) contain some of the right mark making. The runs, the accidental marks made by dribbling on the Lascaux Aquacryl colours on to pre-wet or dry fabric have a delicacy to them, a sense of the venous or lymphatic systems, or the tissues of the organs. Once the fabrics were dry I was not entirely convinced by colour which had seemed less ‘bloody’ when wet. The dry red marks seem too obvious and lose something of the quality of ‘Textured Flat Form I’ because the colours are less subtle. However, I intend to continue to work with them for the moment because they have other qualities that I like such as the type of mark. It is also to reactivate the pigments by wetting them with a brush dipped in water and then to re-work them, adding other colours or watering them down. You cannot remove the stain completely, but you can change the feel of the mark. 

I have started to embroider on top of Textured Flat Form II (now named Happenstance) and although it is early days I think the shapes are more successful than the very round ‘decorative’ shapes I used in Textured Flat Form I. The shapes in Happenstance are more visceral and the way I have stitched it and added in texture works better, it is less of an embroidery piece. Yvonne questioned this but I feel happier with the shapes. Yvonne also questioned the need to retain the rectangular stretched canvas form and the use of canvas itself. Both of these I had already begun to question. I definitely intend to move ‘off the stretcher’ (or away from the rectangular format) and to trial a range of textiles and possibly including Japanese paper and latex too. I will experiment with painting on wax, varnish and acrylic mediums to  add texture and make the work more three-dimensional. I want to find a language somewhere between an unsettling sense of the corporeal – the inside body made visible - and delicate beauty.