A New Year - Refined Ideas - Maybe!
So - its been a month away from making (won't bore you with the details) - but it's been a great time for thinking, planning and getting ready for assessment.
My starting point for my MA was all about using the attributes of clay to bring narratives of south Wales to life, and to allow other people to find there own meanings within the work. So my reading has been about meaning, semiotics - even going back to reading Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge, where he explored the discourse that the artist has with the object and the object has with the viewer. This has been augmented with James Elkins' The Object Stares Back, which explores how so much looking is passive and unthinking, so if we want people to read things from our work, then we have to engage, make the act of seeing into an active, deliberate action, recognising that there are layers of seeing, numerous iterations, and that work needs points of engagement to capture the viewer! A real consideration is when attaching memories or ideas to things, do they reside with us or with the thing?
Anyway, I'm confidently moving on with the meaning when I read Webb Keane, and he questions the division between object and idea, indeed, questioning the current apparent desire to render all things meaningful, challenging us to look at the values of things rather than always seeking a meaning.
Anyway - lots more reading and thinking to do - whilst at the same time exploring layers, strength and fragility - as well as other attributes of the people who made south Wales. Assessment went OK - challenging I'd have to say.
