Place.

Yesterday I was:

Thinking about Place. Sense of place, temporality, experimenting with materials, time, recording, raw, original, dead spaces, non spaces.

Today, I had a lecture about materials, and read a pretty amazing book, called, 'Place'.

The book is by Tacita Dean and Jeremy Millar, and has reinforced my ideas and feelings about a sense of place!

I have always had a strong interest with place, I always feel a connection or a sense of place, I realised to SPACES and PLACES where I have been etc...

But can we ever relay that sense of place, of that feeling we get when we are in a place? E.g. a photo of somewhere that was beautiful or a huge expanse of space, when I look back at my photos I see a photo with edges and its small and evokes a memory of that feeling, and im sure if I was to show it to anybody, they wouldnt feel it, they may think 'I would like to go there, it looks pretty' but they would not know that feeling and may possibly think back to their own memories. The essay of the book concluded with the artists Marine Huggonier, who ended her filming of the Afghan landscape, because she realised:

'the profound limitations of the visual.'

And so

'a more profound engagement must depend upon more than the visual, upon those things that remain invisible.'

'How can artists begin to deal with Place?' questions the book. We can use media and techniques that can describe a place tangibley, or through history and intervention. But how can we explore 'something that is so personal and intangible, but at the same time universally understood'?  is this my quest?

And so

Thinking about materials (with help from Tim Ingold):

properties: are objective and measurable; and also, not just attributes, but histories...

qualities: are subjective, reveal our own personal preferences.

What is a materials and what is not?

 

I still want to think about making things, and what materials I can use. And I want to walk around town, and 'word it up' collecting words of what I feel to put into drawings. As a start?

I'm going to have another think and come back soon.