Open Studios Week 3

Thinking through making

A rough collection of small maquettes and experiments

After not making for much of lockdown I have been using these first few weeks to primarily make, play and experiment, picking up where I left off last year but also considering what it is that will drive my work in a new direction going forwards. Themes of flow, deep time, immersion, surface and concealment have emerged, a mixture of ideas I was already pursuing and the arrival of some new ones.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Accessing deep time

These are all small, tactile objects that sit nicely in the palm of the hand. Ideally these works would be handled and explored on the viewer’s own terms, inviting exploration and immersion in the intricate flow lines and folds of these tiny worlds. Through this exploration I hope to begin to provoke thoughts around the deep time contained within these stones, placing our own human timescales alongside geological aeons.

Wondering//Wandering

I have been out walking a lot over lockdown as a way to fend off the divide between indoors and outdoors that has crept up now that I no longer need to move between physical spaces as often. Keeping myself and my work in contact with the outside world has become increasingly important and as such I have been gathering objects, primarily stones, which I have played around with using in my presentation here. For future open studios and general documentation I would like to take this further, taking my work back into a truly outdoor space.

Something I observed while walking was the way the eye and mind are drawn in by the unknown and unreachable. An unexplored path curving round a corner, a cave leading off into a dark hollow or a cove only accessible by sea set the mind racing in the absence of answers. In terms of my own work this is a device I have been using subconsciously for a while but with this realisation I now hope to bring this forwards into a more conscious way of working, using it as a tool to deliberately heighten a sense of intrigue and draw in a viewer. The beginnings of this can be seen in these maquettes, experimenting with different methods of obscuring and revealing, highlighting and concealing.

• 

• 

• 

Sketches – surface and flow

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

These explore a rock’s surface as a skin or interface between the beholder and what’s contained within, as well as exploring flow – partly leading on from, partly leading on to the interaction between rock and water, two substances with vastly different material properties yet both as old as deep time.

‘A stone charges a place with its presence, with time filling in and flowing around it, just as a sea or river rock affects the surrounding water by creating waves, pools and currents’ (Andy Goldsworthy, Stone)

• 

• 

• 

• 

The process of taking a rubbing to extract the surface texture of a rock in turn adds a new layer, molding the paper as though it were a new skin as it stretches over peaks and is pushed into troughs. These next paper casings, or shells, of larger rocks explore this idea further, almost entirely changing the rubbings from flat drawings to much more three-dimensional, sculptural objects. They are strangely delicate, almost ephemeral in comparison to the heavy, immovable stone they describe through their central voids.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

As well as experimenting with coating rocks with clingfilm and creating shells from paper, I have been trying to create a hybrid of the two through making cling film shells. Although none of them have successfully held their form so far this is something I am continuing to pursue, building up more layers of PVA and clingfilm until stronger casts are formed. However, the results so far have captured some subtle hints of the initial forms, as well as creating an intricate new surface texture that can be set against that of the stones.

• 

• 

• 

Free Fall

In considering the provocation of free fall, I looked back at some of my previous work where I made large close-up drawings of tiny sections of rock, as though to create new, imagined landscapes. The framing of these drawings was reminiscent of an aerial shot, looking straight down, and the rapid zooming in on details alongside the lack of any obvious scale alluded to a sense of a disorientating free fall.

The fictionalising of the surface is something that I feel could be further accentuated and as such the piece below is the beginnings of another large drawing of a closely cropped in surface. However this time I am using more intentional mapping conventions to truly accentuate this fictionalising and encourage the viewer to get lost in the rock landscape.

‘Above all, geology makes explicit challenges to our understanding of time. It giddies the sense of here-and-now. The imaginative experience of […] ‘deep time’ – the sense of time whose units are not in days, hours, minutes or seconds but millions of years or tens of millions of years – crushes the human instant; flattens it to a wafer. Contemplating the immensities of deep time, you face, in a way that is both exquisite and horrifying, the total collapse of your present, compacted to nothingness by the pressures of pasts and futures too extensive to envisage. And it is a physical as well as cerebral horror, for to acknowledge that the hard rock of a mountain is vulnerable to the attrition of time is of necessity to reflect on the appalling transience of the human body. Yet there is also something curiously exhilarating about the contemplation of deep time. True, you learn yourself to be a blip in the larger projects of the universe. But you are also rewarded with the realization that you do exist – as unlikely as it may seem, you do exist.’ (Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind)

https://www.instagram.com/anna.harris.art/

Listen to me discuss my work in an informal chat with Bailey and Nikki