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Inheritance.

I dream that I have inherited a beautiful art nouveau house. In one of the rooms there were wooden carvings on the walls of sleeping dogs, but they are fire damaged beyond repair.

I had this dream around the time I left my art-practice based research program as I was too unwell to continue. I simply interpreted it as saying I was suffering from burnout. I didn’t consider the fact that sleeping dogs had returned in this dream. In this case the sleeping dogs have to be left alone because they are too damaged to restore. I have been given a beautiful inheritance but I need to leave it alone.

The thing I left alone was my artistic practice. I did not do any drawing for two and a half years. I realised that my artistic practice if frankly daemonic, if I go with it and work when my soul returns from the underworld, all goes well. If I try to be creative at any other time things do not go well. My artistic practice has its own logic, one that has always remained a mystery to me.

It became apparent that certain images, which can be x-rays, anatomical illustrations or photographs that I come across in books or on the internet, evoke something or call something up. I am haunted by these images. They seem to communicate something that is just out of reach. In order to understand what it is that I am haunted by, a process of translation into artworks ensues.

I often return to the same images, sometimes after several years, and begin another series of translations into different artworks in different media. A retrospective review of my artistic practice revealed that it is not simply the same images which repeatedly return, haunting my artistic practice, but the same visual motifs. The main recurring motifs being birds, eggs, trees and bones. These motifs first appeared in artworks in childhood or adolescence. In some cases, they were the first things that I attempted to draw and paint, usually from images found in books. I have been translating similar found images into artworks ever since.

Those original images, first translated into an artwork many years ago, appear to be the central point around which the whole process revolves. The images that haunt me, that are subsequently translated and retranslated into different artworks in different media, evoke that original image without me being consciously aware of it. I realised that in the absence of that original image, a substitution occurs with an image that bears a likeness or resemblance to it.

It is as though pre-modern artistic processes that prevailed in the Middle Ages survive within my artistic practice, just as Nagel and Wood observe their continuation in Renaissance art,

‘Many of the archaising tendencies in Renaissance art, including the revival of ancient art, can be seen not simply as exercises in formal imitation but as quasi-theoretical efforts to reinstate the substitutional approach to artefact production.’

Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 50.

In the substitutional approach to artmaking,

‘… an image or building was a token of a type, invoking and perpetuating an origionary authority through participation in a sequence of similar tokens. The principle of substitution created conditions of real identity between one token and another, something like a magical bond.’

Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 49.

The magical bond within my own artistic practice appears to be a resemblance or similarity that evokes the original image first translated into an artwork many years ago. That first image acts like an archetype. Eril Shalit and Nancy Swift Furlotti explain that,

‘The word archetype is derived from arche or “first principal,” that points to the creative source that cannot be represented or seen, and from typos, “impression or “imprint,” which refers to a manifestation of the first principal.’

Eril Shalit and Nancy Swift Furlotti, Eds. The Dream and Its Amplification (Skiatook: Fisher King Press, 2013),8.

Below are three more images from the copy book I am working on.



 


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