2014 Myriad Thoughts
My hands cannot keep up with my mind. Ideas flow thick and fast, triggered by the most ordinary things; a crack in the footpath or a shadow on a wall will inspire a thousand imagined drawings. No matter how hard I work I am always trying to catch up. Like many artists I am always “working”, constantly collecting – words, images, objects, thoughts – storing them away in boxes, jars, folders, online and in my mind. I imagine a wall of tiny drawers, such as you would find in an old apothecary, or a wunderkammer, a cabinet filled with curiosities. Treasures put away for safekeeping, for the moment when I might open the drawer and discover the very thing that might spark a whole new body of work.
Space
This process of leaping ahead in thought while trying to keep up by hand is constant, which is why the collecting is important. No matter what I might be working on in the present moment, inspiration is always ticking away in the background – concepts nagging and pulling at me and demanding to be made into something. It has become apparent to me in my practice that the “artistic process” is becoming an end in itself, perhaps even more important than the final result. Every time I finish a body of work I feel a sense of disappointment, of loss. Every time I mourn this loss momentarily, before I open another drawer (both literally and metaphorically) and the cycle begins again.
Space
Myriad Thoughts is about trying to illustrate this process – to put the collecting and the thinking on display away from the studio where it usually takes place. The “treasures” and “specimens” on display reflect my love of drawing, close observation and intricate detail – I am attracted to the detritus and the discarded, the incidental and the residual. There are drawings I have done and drawings I want to do for no other purpose than to satisfy myself – that is, my compulsion to work and my love of observing things closely. Meticulously rendered, they don’t seem to fit anywhere else other than within the process itself. The subject matter is the process.
Space
Throughout the show I continued working in situ in the gallery space, essentially allowing it to become an extension of my home studio. I invited the public to bring along small objects that could be drawn and included in the exhibition, and the installation continued to grow and evolve throughout the four week duration. The artistic process became almost like a performance where the conceptual development and the making of the work occurred in “real time”.
Space