29/1 Listening to Martin Barnes talk

This is what I want to be doing! Working with how objects can become stories within spaces. I would love to pursue the research topic of the exhibition as an existential landscape. It’s a space that is as unavoidably transient as photography, which is what I love about photography! I loved looking into the 5 x 5 = 25 exhibition, and seeing that one available photograph of it. Something about that limitation, within a world that is so obsessed with permanence, is so tantalising and affirming. I love the idea of life as just doing what you can to take part in the conversation.

This is what I have been dwelling on since yesterday and all of my existentialism. A few times in life I have had a clear sense of purpose, a clear reason for getting up (in the macro). And the one I remember most clearly right now is the idea that it is about being here and living out your story so that you can tell it, so that you can take part in the conversation. As David Whyte would say, coming to recognise the ‘conversational nature of reality’, and finding your voice within that. It doesn’t mean you have to tell a verbal or visual story, living can be equivalent to storytelling and conversing with life in many may ways. I am still searching for the way that I will enact my storytelling, even if I have found a voice, a big part of Whyte’s ‘conversation’ is to do with the compromise between what you want from life and what life wants from you. Luckily or unluckily what I want from life changes day by day. What life wants for me will only become clear once I have fulfilled my tasks for this degree. But I am doing my best to engage in the conversation.

Wha I am getting from this talk is obviously inspiration, which is always useful, even if it does not become a realised dream. But! Crucially! (Another favourite word) It is making me think about how vital accessibility is to all of this. I have to say, I really do care about accessibility. I care about it more than so much else within art, but I tend to produce completely inaccessible art and ideas and conversations. My defence for this is that I really do have a foundational desire to make ideas and stories accessible, but that would be pointless is the ideas and stories were accessible before I could do anything about it, so, it stays with telling an inaccessible story that I can then transform. This is what I’ll tell myself! I’ve never got there yet, but equally, I have never got to this point in my practice before, and I think I am ready for that.

So, February focuses. Doing this live brief should be a priority. I can explain this to Clare and talk it through with her. How do I use this first to turn my cloud of a project into a digestible, accessible story. This is really vital for what I want from arnolfini, so this is a really good thing to get started on now. I am not in need of more abstract visual ideas at this junction, which is where I have been thinking of heading. What I have done and can celebrate is to produce enough (through printing loads and testing rust and framing one) that I have a body of work. I have to accept that great projects take a lot longer than 4 months to develop, so I am in a really good spot for the timeframe. What I really need to shape this project around is a sense of the story I am trying to tell in space and through objects.