At the end of last year I was lucky enough to have met an artist who has invited me to a wonderful 'artists in conversation' project for the new year - very grateful for the invitation. I am feeling excited but also a bit intimidated and challenged as this will be another event that will force me to face my practice head-on. It is only day 2 of only having my practice being central in the schedule (very grateful for these circumstances also, feels like a very healing and re-stabilising time of growth for me) and I already feel a shift in everything. I have spent my time making time for things I 'have' to do and not doing everything I can for the things I 'want' to do. and that's the thing about having a meaningful, sustainable practice... you have to have a way to facilitate the 'deep work' so you are not simply rushing to it with guilt and merely skimming the surface for a bit every other day, week, month. after my 'return' to painting yesterday, and I did it without really thinking - it was just me putting pigment on the canvas that was covered in my previous feeble attempt to ink it - I felt like something returned, but I still felt it was a bit empty. I was used to having imagery planned and roughly sketched in place to guide me, instead of painting straight from the subconscious - which is great - but I think the balance of it is making me feel a strange discomfort. I like abstract art where you can see more things rise from it the more you look at it. where you can physically feel points of tension and interest as you move your eyes across it. you can feel all of that exciting, tantalising, magnetic energy from across the room. I want my paintings to feel like that. like you can't help but draw your eyes to it, and take a closer look, and try to decipher what you're seeing. I feel they should involve forms that are relatively recognisable - I know I am not an expert on 'making things look realistic' but I don't necessarily want that to be the outcome. I want forms that reference the things I'm interested in, so that it is recognisable to the audience - and I have not really dipped my toes into the new way of research I want to do yet. I've spent years thinking about things and not doing them. I know I need to action something, find out if it 'works' or not, and continue or abandon it. I guess that is 'experimentation'. I think I was missing a large part of experimentation because I was trembling in fear, just like the raw fragments I attempted to present to myself as progress and evidence I'm 'doing something'. that empty feeling after 'creating' something that does not have much behind it, only the deep anxiety and lack of direction as its shadow is something I never want to feel again. I simply cannot make empty fragments anymore. I can make fragments, but they have to feel tangible to me. they need to feel like a natural extension of my being.
'..artists are invited to share their stories around how experimentation with materials has informed their practice - from successes, failures and/or methods in progress' - that is what the premise of the project is. at this point, how have I 'experimented'? To be honest, a lot of the 'experimenting' I've done so far is linked to my 'settling in' to this new environment, the galleries, how people think, confrontation of my losses from my previous environment, finding my new identity and shedding the bad in the old. It is so much experimentation of morning and night routines, organising systems, admin, 'failed' projects/job applications/opportunities, all the prep that was probably not 'doing the thing' yet was still essential to the journey that had led me here to this point. so I'm proud of myself for pushing to do all these new things through all the emotional turbulence. to learn more about how to speak to myself in a meaningful way. to know that my identity is currently shifting in a major way and to just let it. I might not know who I am right now in this limbo, but I know I'm on the right path overall. so - in my personal life I have definitely experimented with my 'lifestyle/routines' for the best one to support my purpose. but now I actually have to go deep into this supposed purpose. in my BA I experimented for the first time with oil colour, and I realised I do love using a lot of colours - even though I don't have a firm grasp of how they work and how to mix them or have any rules in my mind about them. I experimented with painting from film stills which meant recognisable figures and forms, but naturally added some of my personal abstract style to fill in those gaps. I experimented with visiting natural history dioramas and photographed and wrote about them, which fed into my work. through my practice so far I knew I had a certain relationship with writing and playing with language, and was drawn to conceptual art when I started my MA. I turned to the lack of images and colour, and became investigative to embrace the pseudo-scientific approach in an attempt to maintain the illusion of control of these 'experimentations'. some of it felt dreadfully empty and I couldn't figure out why. perhaps it was because I was straying away from the traditional 'painting' on a surface and leaned more into installation which mostly felt difficult when it came to exhibiting. perhaps I didn't care enough about the intricacies of presentation when it came to the three dimensional as installation artists. maybe I was lazy. I don't know. perhaps those installations, thinking about my degree show work, served more as inspiration for an archive to look upon for inspiration and to inform my paintings. nevertheless I enjoyed the titling, the obsessive writing around my paranoias and metaphorical agonies from a pseudo-fictional character. I became drawn to diagrammatic language, and now I'm seeing how they surface in my paintings even if it is not explicitly obvious. since coming here I have adopted several characters to help me survive in my life as a whole. characters like the artist, the machine, the flaneur, the scientist, the entrepreneur, the butterfly, the magnet, the magician, the writer. I think there is a way into those in the studio as well. I've also made myself stretch a canvas and paint on it - I've traditionally enjoyed painting on wood. I think I should return. something about the rough (compared to wood) surface of the canvas irks me when I get into the details. I experimented with painting from the subconscious - I realised that I enjoy seeing figures and forms from the abstract and simply uncovering and emphasising them more through paint - something I've always done in my paintings. I always think about this one book my mother got me (or maybe I just keep revisiting it in the taipei 101 bookstore that used to exist, now taken over by a luxury brand store probably) that was a series of illustrations that was so magical and embraced imagination and challenge as you have to work to uncover forms in the 'illusion' and busy illustrations. there were whole faces in the mountains - it was a surrealist-like style. it is always hard to describe memories from more than 10 years ago. I wish I could obtain the book now. I just spent some time looking desperately to no results. perhaps it is more magical and even more inspiring that way.