Eyes blinking like a mole...

I had an unexpected note from a teacher/mentor friend the other day, she being confined to her sofa for 8 weeks following one of those bizarre mishaps that can only happen in real life (broken leg from a dog walking incident). I have great regard for this person and her partner as artists and people, so it was nice to hear from her. She had come across a couple of my videos and was sending a "hi, how are you?" note. In the body of my reply, I wrote something that startled me to read: "I think I'm just emerging from the dark side of the moon..."

Which I am chagrined to say feels pretty accurate. The thing that bakes my noodle is that I'm not really sure how I got there to start with, or quite what to do now that I'm sort of peeking around the other side. At the moment (quiet, morning coffee, grey day and steady rain) I'm thinking it's a result of various combinations of speed, trajectory, circumstance and a collection of uncertainties. It definitely wasn't intentional, and for the most part, not desirable.

Not being certain or secure of my place in space is a fairly common feeling for me and I'm used to it. I've never been quite sure how to resolve that, or what to do with it. Now I have inklings (nothing more, yet) that maybe there's something there to work with, a point of departure if you will. I have a random set of skills and a wide range of interests and surely there's some connections to be made between them which will lead to some organic assemblage that makes some kind of sense. In turn maybe that will result in some illumination, definition, and clarity. For the moment whatever light there is causes me to blink in confusion, and wish for a cool pair of Wayfarers to wear.

For a while, I've been pondering questions of speed and scale, ideas of containment and expansion, and definitions of success, contentment, and satisfaction. I also seem to be hyper-conscious of points and purposes. Of course it's a meandering path through all this, no conclusions have been reached, and a lot of flotsam and jetsam is being created along the way. I firmly believe objects are artifacts of experiences, and muddling around and making things is one of the ways I communicate to myself the world at large should anyone be interested. Mostly, it'd just me trying to get stuff out of my head and into the light of day. There does seem to be a lot of fits and starts and dead ends and revisiting, but I never claimed to be very efficient.

As I said in the last video installation I made: I'm not trying to make great art here, I'm just trying to figure stuff out.

Maybe a little more light will make it easier to see...

1 comment:

Michelle C. Moode said...

i'm glad to know you.