Working Title: Defining The Bigger Picture (A Complete Overview)
Description: A Project to Present an Exhibition/Installation in an Attempt to Process Personally Relevant Information in the Guise of an Encyclopedic Collection of Types of Objects and Images whose Categorial Boundaries are yet to be Defined.
To record in a series of images, texts, artefacts and sounds, an account of a specific kind of place over a particular period of time, and to collect and classify objects assembled as evidence to convey the peculiar sense of atmosphere arising from the aforementioned time and place.
Establishing an account (from memory) and incorporating an assumed (and) suggestive bias:
Eyewitness identification, in criminal law, evidence is received from a witness “who has actually seen an event and can so testify in court”.
In an attempt to pin down, and create a record of, an event (its time, the place in which it occurred and the action), I depend on my memory and I source as many supporting facts as possible – but as a remembered event, I have experienced discrepancies in the eyewitness accounts of others. When these accounts challenge my own memory, I am aware of two distinct effects on me:
1) My own account is reliable, the other person’s unreliable. Their testimony is dismissed.
2) The resulting paradigm shift (of incorporating new evidence/accounting for a more informed point-of-view), makes it impossible to hold on to the original memory. The new information is included. The memory re-jigged.
This raises further questions: Does memory change over time?
Do eyewitnesses incorporate information learned after the event into memory? They may talk to another witness and use information from the conversation to fill in their reconstruction of the events. They may do this by combining two memories into one or by using bias or expectations of what probably was seen.
As people recall an event over and over, do they drop details from earlier versions and add new details to later versions? All things being equal, accuracy probably declines with each new version. I’m also aware (how?) that in some cases eyewitness accuracy can be low when questioned immediately after a traumatic event.
The Subject Matter:
Memories: Eyewitness, Witness and Unreliable Witness.
Define ‘significant’ events from memory as a record of the minutae.
Traumatic events: establish an umbilical connection with Place.
Joyful events: exploring the vicinity of Place whilst being protected within the window of tolerance. Exploring the wonder of discovery. Freedom of Imagination.
Collecting Evidence
Memory in descriptive form.
Create from memory the items that appear in specific memories.
Collect and classify items of importance to be displayed in cabinets, presented on surfaces, broadcast in sound and image.
Maps. Public records. History. Geography. Cultural and/or iconic items.
Items of Evidence
Ordnance survey maps (doctored to include what was imagined to be ‘over the hills…’).
The novel that was imagined to have been written by the unseen lady who lived in the farmhouse at the End of The Lane.
The Fiction (The Bigger Picture), typeset and designed to portray selected Passages in the style of its Time and Place. Printed and Bound.
Key Books that Inspired.
Tobacco tin with ‘treasures’.
Ideas:
The subject matter of my work often focuses on the social, class and personal labyrinths we exist in; conventions which we are conditioned to inhabit. I am specifically interested in the judgemental, (and sometimes hysterical) response, by communities and families, to an individual’s private and domestic tragedy, trauma or shame. I want to describe and interpret the emotional effect of social taboos, (often media-led, but propagated by us all), high-lighting the social disadvantage for its perceived, and tarnished victims, scape-goats or Other.
The exposure of personal vulnerability, sniffed out by an alert populace hungry to bully and victimise, highlight the ‘Dunning-Kruger Effect’. I create images which draw on the absurdity and emotional cost of being in a state of liminality. The paintings and digital prints highlight specific moments based on my memory, or visualisation of situations, sometimes held in little more than an expression, which have been constructed into staged settings in which the events are symbolised.
The exhibition should contain selected narratives; narratives that arise from accumulated memories/items of importance. Narratives that emerge from placing one picture alongside another, in sequences of seven.
Seven: A grid sequence to contain, in rhythms and succession, an order. To build tension, (the central piece in the fourth position) distributing the weight in a perfect balance, producing equilibrium and harmony.
Senses: Hearing, Sight, Smell, Taste, Touch, Feeling, Thought
Rainbow: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple, Violet
Virtues: Chastity, Temperance, Charity, Diligence, Patience, Kindness, Humility
Stellar Objects in the Solar System: Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn
Ages of Man: Infancy, Childhood, Lover, Soldier, Justice, Old age, Dementia
Sins: Lust, Gluttony, Avarice, Sloth, Wrath, Envy, Pride
Orifices (human head): Ear, Eye, Nostril, Mouth, Nostril, Eye, Ear
The Seven Samurai, (The Magnificent Seven)
Days of the Week: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday
Wonders: Great Pyramid of Giza, Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, Statue of Zeus at Olympia, Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, Colossus of Rhodes, Lighthouse of Alexandria
When rolling two standard six-sided dice, Seven is the number most likely to occur. It is the sum of any two opposite sides on a standard six-sided die.
The Liberal Arts: Literature, Languages, Philosophy, History, Mathematics, Psychology, Science.
Referring to the beliefs and ideas I have about myself. These beliefs are used to guide and organise information processing, especially when the information appears significant. Self-schemas are important to my overall self-concept.
Having developed a schema about myself, I am aware of a strong tendency for the schema to be maintained by a bias in what I attend to, a bias in what I remember, and a bias in what I am prepared to accept as true about myself. My self-schema becomes self-perpetuating. The self-schema is then stored in long-term memory and both facilitates and biases the processing of personally relevant information. The narratives that weave their way through the images and the schematic employ themes of: All that rises, all that falls. The bitterness of Love – Hate. The mongrel as metaphor for working class. A moral compass not drawn from religion, but from instinctive and memetic codes of practice. Conformity. The Asch Experiments. The idea of The Beaten Track. Quest stories.
A self-initiated schema gives me a diagrammatical device for placing ideas in rows and columns – order out of my own flitting chaos. If the constant compulsion to create pictures is an attempt to move toward visual ‘enlightenment’, or some sort of understanding – presumably the purpose for my continual practice – I must present all images as equal; that the subtlest or briefest look in one image; a momentary or fleeting peripheral glance in the next; a studied and patient stare, should attempt, or should at least be as capable of, communicating some kind of ‘truth’.
My practice is naturally, intuitively and instinctively ‘series’ led. I can know this by recognising the pattern of my design work process; by recognising how each aesthetic decision and visual discovery, in each project, leads into and influences the next. The series allows a flow of ideas; that the journey from one image to the next allows the brain to concoct a narrative. That even the flitting nature of my cognitive process can relate (with hindsight)… that momentary journey the eye takes in the space between seeing one image and the next – that beginning or first stage of a process. The liminal state of lying between otherwise defined areas without belonging to either of them. The threshold of discovery.
Notes:
Discovering that an arrangement to meet up with fellow artists/interested parties, makes a huge difference to the ‘professionalisation’ of my practice. All very supportive. * Discovering that talking (showing and telling) garners fantastic results – rather than be dismissed with disinterested yawns (as I sometimes worry), people have been fascinated and encouraging.
Quotes
“We do not see what we sense. We see what we think we sense. Our consciousness is presented with an interpretation, not the raw data. Long after presentation, an unconscious information processing has discarded information, so that we see a simulation, a hypothesis, an interpretation; and we are not free to choose” (Norretranders, 1999).