Although closely related to the ‘tangly drawings‘ series, this piece feels as though it branches out on its own somewhat. With this one I aimed to push the tangled, lively feel of the previous series further, also drawing on the idea of exploding small areas of materials and sculptures to far larger scales, to create an abstract, swirling mass that feels somewhere between landscape and body.
Compositionally I enjoy the packed image-plane with the flattening of any sense of foreground and background relating well to the idea of a ‘flat ontology’ – a recognising of the vibrancy of all matter, not just that which we might designate as important. This is summarised to an extent by Diana Coole in her essay in New Materialisms:
‘In moving to an antihumanist ontology of flesh, he would therefore need to maintain this sense of perspective yet eschew its subjectivist or anthropocentric implications. He did so, I suggest, by multiplying perspectives, a move made feasible by the recognition that bodies and objects are simultaneously seeing and seen, such that the rays or arcs of vision/visibility that crisscross the visual field emanate simultaneously from each profile of every object, all jostling together and intersecting to gestate and agitate the dense tissue of relationships that constitute the flesh and to place the philosopher everywhere and nowhere. This image of coexistence as an intercorporeal field then suggests a pre- or postclassical “topographic space”: a “milieu in which are circumscribed relations of proximity, or envelopment.”’
Diana Coole in New Materialisms (106)
The busy composition and mark-making also does well to suggest this all-over liveliness, and the abstract nature of the forms are successful at being nicely suggestive of something nonhuman but not tipping over into anything identifiable: we must recognise its bubbling vibrancy without being able to neatly label and categorise it – it demands continual investigation.
The piece developed out of several smaller sketchbook works:
I also took inspiration from Donal Moloney’s process of painting from his sculptures, allowing him greater freedom over the exact details of his reference subject. I drew from one of my ‘tangly sculptures’, which of course were created with this idea of vibrant materiality in mind, allowing me to build on an already conceptually and aesthetically strong foundations. My intention is to continue this on to become a series of drawings, hopefully assembling en masse to an assemblage of lively, shifting, unidentifiable nonhuman forms.
Anna Harris 