Act of I | Setting the Stage – Print vs. Gestural

This project focused on navigating personal narrative and using language, objects, and memories as creative material. The task essentially involved adopting the experimental writing style of Georges Perec in his work Species of Spaces (as discussed in Seminar) to write poetry describing our personal experiences or environment, and then creating gestural, hand-drawn, or assembled versions of our final poems.

Ideation

The ideation process for this task began with making multiple lists of 50+ items documenting different objects, places, and experiences. The purpose of this was to encourage more detailed consideration of our personal lives and spaces. I made four lists describing practical items in my home, my bucket list, places that feel familiar vs. foreign, and materials I can make art with. While none of these lists translated into my final poetry, they aided significantly in drawing out ideas and observations about my habits and environment that I may have been ignorant to prior to this task.

Further to this, as I began the process of brainstorming for my poems, I simply began typing out every idea that came to mind, whether I fully realised it or not. Out of a list of around 7 – 8 different iterations (a combination of complete and incomplete poems) I selected five to further refine for my Seminar assignment. 

Finally, I selected three of the poems based on which I would create my drawings, and then listed ways to visually translate the actions and feelings described in the poetry. The writings I chose to turn into drawings discussed themes of habit and repetitiveness, a creative block or cluelessness, and the nature of memories, hence I tried to find symbols or imagery that would represent these ideas more abstractly while also experimenting with unconventional materials/processes.

Final Work

Below are the finalised iterations of my poems from Seminar and their respective drawings / assembled works for Studio.
NOTE: My apologies if the writing on the left is too small to be read! Just in case they cannot be read here, this is a link to a .pdf  of my Seminar assignment, which also contains the three poems referenced below.

This blank verse poem describes a weakness – a habit that is consistently repeated despite knowing that there is nothing to gain from it. The poem is deliberately vague about what precisely this habit is and where it occurs, to allow for the reader to interpret it in their own way and fill in the blanks with their own experiences; although I have intentionally described the action as a repetitive, almost unconscious bodily phenomenon. I wanted this vague repetitiveness to be reflected in my artwork, which is why I made use of the universal motif of footprints moving backwards and forwards across the page.

 

This ‘tutorial’ is a meta-writing about writing for the seminar assignment and reflects my inability to understand where to begin, and later on how to continue. The writing describes the action of starting to write, giving up, distracting yourself by making coffee, and eventually admitting defeat. I wanted these actions to be literally reflected in my assembled work, hence I explicitly conveyed the metaphor of burning through pages of senseless writing. I have also used coffee to discolour the paper, although this was more of an aesthetic choice than a conceptual one. Finally, the circle enclosing the papers is symbolic of my inability in the moment to think beyond the confines of what I already knew and approach the assignment in a creative way. Essentially, I wanted the blandness of the writing to be reflected in the artwork.

This piece of writing is based on my desire to preserve fading memories like one preserves old souvenirs. The translation of this poem into an artwork is quite literal. The traced photographs showing faceless figures floating in space are a reflection of my “moments of solace” disappearing from memory, whereas the densely packed marks covering the page – made with packing materials described in the writing, like bubble wrap, tape, and cardboard – symbolise my desperation to preserve these dying images.

Challenges and Surprises

As described in my second work, one of the biggest challenges I faced was starting the process of writing itself. Although I wouldn’t know how to describe them now, I undoubtedly had very specific expectations of myself and the subject matter of my writing, so every time I wrote something that I didn’t like I would delete the entire piece of text and begin again, which was a huge hindrance to getting work done. But once I embraced the discomfort of the process, and just kept typing out and accumulating all the ideas I had despite any preconceptions as to whether it would be successful or not, I was surprised by the fact that I ended up with a pool of content that I refined and restructured in order to produce work that I was actually satisfied with and felt conveyed my perspectives. I think this really goes to show that it’s not about good or bad, just about getting work done!

Reflection

Overall, I found that the process of working on this Bridge Project was one that really pushed me out of my comfort zone in terms of both the Studio and Seminar tasks. In working on the Seminar assignment and having to experiment with how words occupy the space of a page and contemplate how these choices can change the meaning of a text altogether, I was able to better understand the performative aspect of language. Additionally, having to take poetry that was already abstract and turn it into a drawing / assembled image posed a new set of challenges that encouraged me to think outside the most literal approaches to doing so, and instead focus on portraying conceptual ideas. Furthermore, I was very keen on being experimental in my use of materials and I believe this objective really led me to create in new and interesting ways such as in using footprints, burning materials, and using cardboard and bubble wrap to make marks.

Most successful iteration (Seminar): Out of the five poems that I wrote for this task, the one that I find the most successful is the one titled Excuses. While I didn’t make use of this poem for Studio, I still think it is my most successful, as I believe out of all the iterations, I experimented the most with form and sentence structure in this one. Being a long-time literature student and extremely used to more structured, analytical writing this poem was quite a breakthrough for me in terms of expanding my approach to writing.

Most successful iteration (Studio): Out of the three drawings, I believe my third iteration (titled On Memories) is the most successful, as although the translation from writing to drawing is fairly simplistic, I believe this artwork captures the intention of my writing the best. Moreover, I am quite satisfied with the choice I made to use packing materials to make marks, as they were quite unconventional and interesting to use in the process of creating this work.

Connection to Creative Practice

I think this project connects to my creative process as both my poetry and drawings are conceptually concerned with the human experience and personal identity. These have been thematic preoccupations in my work for quite some time and using these new techniques and processes to explore them further has been quite inspirational in terms of identifying new ways in which I can explore them further.

Questions to Explore Further

The journey of putting together this project raised quite a few questions for me. Here are some of the questions that I came up with that I would like to further contemplate:

• How are materials symbolic?
• Can the perception of different materials in an artwork be subjective?
• Are there any materials used in art that cannot be controlled / manipulated in the traditional sense?
• How can memories be used as materials apart from physical representations?
• How can spoken word / language be used as a material?
• How are the materials that we surround ourselves with in our personal spaces / work with in our art representative of ourselves / our personalities?

Work from:
Integrative Studio 1 with Professor Matthew Villarreal
Integrative Seminar 1 with Professor Marina Blitshteyn