Brought sculptures to Cambridge Artworks to photograph today. Exciting getting them into the empty, echoing space. Just back from unloading van after the photoshoot, and reflecting on the day.
Thinking back to the opera workshop I attended this weekend. A director and a singer led us through lots of playing with movement, writing and singing. The director said that humans are always inventing narratives, and encouraged us to indulge this tendency. What happens when you freeze the movement of people, remove half of them randomly, then look for what stories emerge from the remaining clusters of people? This is often how I work with my sculptures, and how I approached the photoshoot at Artworks today- arranging the forms in a space in relation to each other and then considering how they can express different meanings and ideas, how conversations emerge.
The opera singer told us that there are 6 stages in any creative process: 1- This is amazing! 2-This is kind of difficult. 3- This is crap. 4- I’m crap. 5- Maybe I can salvage something. 6- This is amazing!
Not quite sure which stage I’m in at the moment. Tired.
I took ‘time lapse’ shots, taking a photo each time I positioned a sculptural form. I built up very tall stacks, first in the middle of the room, which went well, then spread the forms on the ground, then built them up again in the corner.
The balanced forms teetered near the ceiling. I got over-ambitious. I got the photo, but then the stack collapsed with a tremendous, resounding crash. That room has a good reverb.
So a few of them are cracked, which was disspiriting, as I need these for the rehearsals and performance with in situ: theatre next month and I don’t have time to make more.
I switched to placing forms into compositions and arrangements, and photographing these. Oh, I forgot to say that I had switched from overhead to natural lighting halfway through the first set of photos, which gave better directional shadows from the floor to ceiling windows along the front of the gallery space.
I photographed larger stacks in relation to each other, stacks balanced along the wall, and tiled forms moving out from the corner at an angular line. I tried out some simple ‘rules’: in threes, in pairs, random across the room, arrays.
I did walls and paths but they started to look too much like those limestone rocks that people cement to the tops of their garden walls in Yorkshire. I think I started to lose some enthusiasm at this point.
So I got out my steel plinths, arranging the frames and boulders in various relations to each other. I made some tall stacks of balancing forms that reached to the ceiling. I decided I didn’t like the frames visually- in any case, not the two stacked on top of eachother, so worked more with them individually.
I got some good photos but dropped another form, cracking it, which was again disspiriting. Why do I spend so much time making things then destroying them? I suppose most of life is like that: we make things and they degrade. Just not immediately.
Admitedly, it would be exciting to smash them. One of the most thrilling moments was when the corner stack started to audibly creak as it settled, then suddenly dramatically shifted and smashed. And then all was still again as the echoes faded… but… is that just sensational, breaking something just for the thrill? What is the purpose of artistic activity?
Reflecting Later
This evocative moment of collapse would be a powerful metaphor, relevant to many contemporary circumstances. But I question how relevant this is to my own artistic aims. In the studio I am pushing meaning and exploring boundaries for myself, but then there’s the interface between what I’m impelled to make and how this may be regarded by others. If I dramatically smash artworks, am I doing it for my own art or because others might find it thrilling?
I put the frames away and spent time arranging the forms around the space and wandering through them. I’ll review the photos later. There must be at least some interesting ones to use.
I’ve been trying to experiment with how I write about my work, sometimes just collecting words that come to mind.
smash, brittle, worn, stacked, balanced, precarious, rocking, tipping, stones, ice-floes, collapse, lumped, separate, fitting, paving stones, settle, scuffed