THING

Why do I make physical products? What is this desire to mark surfaces, to describe, to litter the world with my debris?

It’s not a desire to leave behind a legacy. I can’t imagine anything more grotesque or self-aggrandising. It’s not important whether I was here or not. And what I thought.

It seems there is a form of compulsion, of therapy involved. My fingers twitch when I am engaged in a long phone conversation. I often doodle just as a means to help me think during difficult tasks, such as blogging, or as a moment to relieve tension. My creation processes are instinctual, even chaotic, and the turning point when I plan them as structured images in my sketchbook is a moment of deep inner work. A process where I feel more whole at the end, or where a fragmented feeling or sense of something is resolved. 

My recent work has involved salvaging abandoned paintings, identifying the textures and shapes that I felt were aesthetically engaging, and then juxtaposing these “edited highlights” together into a new a metawork of graphic designs, figurative representation and abstract forms.  I think I am trying to represent the collage of everyday life I experience: the real, the remembered, the fantastic, the mediated, the virtual. I state this with hesitancy, firstly, because my art process itself is highly instinctive, and secondly, as it is questionable how these realities are demarcated and defined.

This emphasis on the materials I use leads me to perhaps the final reason for making a physical product. That it is a sensual act. I find pleasure in the surface, the mark, the printed, the tactile. As I construct my images I am often investigating what might be appealing / unappealing aesthetically. So often the spectrum from beautiful to ugly is culturally constructed and I try to challenge my own ideas of that conditioned taste in order to find a new language. When experiencing other’s art I prefer some form of sensory gratification and struggle with overly intellectual approaches. I guess I am a little superficial like that. But if there is little aesthetic stimulation, I find it difficult to engage with an artwork. It often serves as a portal into areas that might otherwise intimidate. A lure into the political, the conceptual, or the traumatic.

I return to my original question in order to anchor the disparate threads that have emerged as I type out my reflections. Why must my artwork be physical?

• A form of therapy. The desire to bring coherent form to an unconscious state.
• An attempt to define or relate to reality itself or perhaps to describe a hyperreality. 
• A sensory experience that explores the aesthetics of various materials.

Each of these threads deserves deeper enquiry and so I see this exploration as an Introduction to The Physical Artwork.