Following on from my Masters Workshop at the beginning of the ASU2 unit I felt I needed to combine some thinking with some technique and see what happens. Using some water based blocking ink I had and drawings, created by a variety of students as part of one of my workshops I had delivered for Norwich University of the Arts, I had a play. What felt strange was replicating someone else's intuitive drawing, it felt wrong and by assuming ownership of the image who was the creator of the drawing? For these experiments I felt it better to copy by eye to rather than trace exactly to retain an element of spontaneity of line. I also wanted to see what happened if I used different drawing implements, a brush, a handle of a brush, a pencil, etc.
The above images show how I was looking at the materiality of the process and also how that was controlling more of the images than I wanted. Too much ink, too much background noise and yet the happy accidents, the unknown start to feature I could embrace them. The streak of red was intentional, I wanted to break up the black, it was start, it could be seen to represent a cut, anger, body, danger and smear of blood. This I used later on for some written words but for this, considering the described object was a petrol driven hedge-cutter, something used with care and certainly dangerous.
The mono versions worked better as negatives as there was so much background noise with the ink. I had to embrace this as I couldn't control it yet. The different drawing tools gave varying results and for the negative versions the more brush like strokes came out stronger, some of these were just wiped into the ink with a sponge.
2Faulty Poems - inked up
While I had all the equipment out I wanted to have a look at how I could interpret on of the poems we have created as part of our 2Faulty Collective (See: https://carldurban.wixsite.com/website/post/2-faulty-collective for a little insight). We had tasked each other to randomly take a poem and reflect it visually, rather than illustrate.
My poem to use is:
Them, together, the tree and its dreamer take their places, grow tall
It is striking
Time is the measure of motion (‘the numeration of continuous movement’)
Carpeted with wild orchids
Most thugs were mild looking a peculiarly courteous
When a poet knows that a living thing is in search of its soul, this means that he is in search of his own
Unified assembly under pressure
Temporal organisation is a fundamental requirement
Both Sylvia Pankhurst and George Landsbury attended the opening ceremony in that same year
They succeeded in murdering the whole party without detection
I didn't want anything too literal, so started to look at sections and the whole piece just as words. With it being a mono print I had to work out how I might want the words to look as it would reproduce in reverse.
After a few attempts at writing backwards, tracing over a typeface printed out backwards I felt the whole poem was too much for what I wanted, I couldn't be free or expressive enough with my writing. (Writing this now my answer would be write it bigger...). However, at the time I decided to concentrate on just one aspect and that was the last line.
This worked better with the red. It also inspired me to look at booking into print for a discussion as to how to take these ideas forward and what method to use.