Accidental Ideas.
In response to experimenting with 3-D collages from our ice breaker challenge, I spent an evening making 3-D wooden letter sculptures without any idea in mind. It was to get used to working out of my sketchbook as well as to test something I didn’t have a chance to lockdown. I had thought about letters being the building blocks of words but I had never thought about actually building the words back up and testing out what would happen. I wanted to keep it simple and just used Poundland wooden letters and hot glue to form shapes until I felt satisfied, although to begin with I let chance take over and poured letters onto a piece of paper to see what shapes and aesthetics formed, when it came to building the structures I used a little more control due to structural reasons although the letters didn’t represent words at this level. Some were more successful than others, but that's how it goes. Even with the documentary photos, I find the shapes interesting as they don't look like letters anymore, they can be “read” but their comprehension is edited.
Step One - letter vomit
Step Two - hot glue
To start with, I want to create more intimate smaller sculptures but ultimately I aim to go as big as I can to create full-text sculptures, although until I complete workshops in uni, I’m not convinced what materials will be more successful. These wooden nests as well as the paper nests were inspired by artists such as Fiona Banner, Ebon Heath and Nicola Anthony. It was only until I had hung a wooden nest on the wall next to my word nest in my living room, that I had saved from last year, that I had an idea practically slap me in the face. If art has done anything to me it's made me a hoarder (and to critically challenge why I like what I like - sometimes “cause aesthetics” isn't quite enough.)
In a nutshell, the goal from the nests was to create a dynamic nonlinear way of understanding a narrative as it weaves and curves as freely as my written handwriting which is a juxtaposition to the strict identical typed font used in the book cut ups. Using a printed book I did have to decide whether I was looking at the narrative of the story as in what I was reading and the images it conjures, or how the text was presented aesthetically. While this is still a concern for the current experiments I am more concerned for the aesthetics of the letters and what they mean.
Seeing the two together gave me strong vibes of symbolism works while thinking of Frank Stella’s famous quote about his paintings ‘What you see is what you see’1, my work is exactly the opposite, as much as I would like my work to be simply understood like that, the fact I'm using text is undeniably connecting with further understanding. While it's true you can read "red square" and see a red square in your mind's eye, everyone square is different and up to interptitation. It was as if the full text from the paper nests were simplified to the wooden nests. In the same way, Broadway Boogie-Woogie, (1942) by Piet Mondrian uses black white and the primary colours that can be mixed into any and all colours of any other paintings, using the English alphabet (for my example) can be mixed to produce every and any word in existence. The colours are reduced and the words are reduced. Of course, that IS the point of the alphabet to be able to have a written language, although I feel I can justify the link between the art style and my work. I’m not sure what this means for my project although I found it interesting nonetheless, especially as I was not actively thinking about it at the time. Throughout all this, I am continuing to use fictional texts, concepts and narratives in order to create my own private world that encompasses my artwork, almost like a safe space or safe society. Similarly, Mondrian argued that art should always move on, searching for pure beauty, and the paintings "do not depict anything from the real world".2 My own world, to me, is far more interesting than the reality of reading and traditional literature. Just because we read on a flat surface doesn’t mean I need to stay on a flat surface.
Additionally, looking at my work through a new lens, told me that I don’t necessarily need to throw everything and the kitchen sink at work in order to make it successful, as well as the importance of not planning everything out since sometimes ideas can pop out of nowhere which cannot be planned for, but should not be ignored. As my mum always says K.I.S.S - Keep It Simple Stupid.
Ironically considering my work uses text, narrative and fonts, I’m quite literally “reading between the lines” in order to critically think about my choices and how that represents my and my artwork within the art world.
1 https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/m/minimalism
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