I have just come out of the Max Ferguson show and conversation and archive conversation. Super interesting. And is making me think a lot about archive, but also making me have a lot of ideas, as usual, lots of images in my head of the way that work could be produced that is inspired by this show.
I feel like I'm always researching in this very modern/ digital/ low attention span way where you're scrolling through and you're picking up and you're gleaning the important information and then you're moving on. And there's something nice about recognising an instance where I have genuinely been like deeply influenced by someone, a single person's work, and in a slow way, that takes time, and that takes actually meeting them, and doing activities, like the workshop I did with Max in spring last year, and the time I came to London for a figure 8 group show, and then seeing the show go up at ICVL (Alex invited me to help with the install, I was there for the planning of it but not for the install itself unfortunately), and now seeing a second iteration of it in the koppel space!
I loved the playfulness of the workshop/ his work in general and after that I completely changed around the way that I presented my DPIP2 work, and I fell in love with it again. And I think a similar kind of thing is necessary again for my practice: just falling in love with how I document and sketchbook my process because you miss out so much when you don’t find a way to include the messy bits in the frame.
Another thing I was thinking about when I was listening to Max talk was how well he has understood his own interests, and how to communicate them, and the immense value that is added to his work as a result. He said something like: he's really interested in the space between memory and history and the fault lines between them. It was really well put. I feel like the longer someone's an artist, the better they get at these one-liners and the more they have in their repertoire.