The formation of QuARTile and Tow Path Eye

Posted on 29 January 2019 by beckybendylegs

This is a bit of a retrospective entry, about an art event that happened in the summer. The art collective, called QuARTile that began with that event though, is ongoing, and will continue to grow. Although my role in QuARTile isn’t directly relevant to my MA research, it runs alongside it and in fact, it could be argued, spurs me with my personal research.

Last last spring, one Tuesday morning, I found a small note on my studio table that read: ‘Come and see me at some point today, I have a project you might be interested in. Mac’. Mac was (at the time) one of the MA students, studying a year ahead of me. He still exists, by the way. He’s now a graduate MA student and artist-in-residence. We have a shared interest in common, Mac and I, and that is drawing. Drawing plays a large part in his art practice and it has always been a massive part of mine. I was intrigued by the note.

Going back further, to February last year, the MA students (myself included) were visited by staff from the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham. They gave a presentation on the history of the Ikon and various projects the gallery was involved in at the time and looking to in the future. During their talk, they mentioned the Ikon canal boat, or the ‘Slow Boat’ as they call it, upon which they allow artists to run small projects. At the end of the talk they told us that they were open to proposals for a creative use of the boat. The offer was casual. 

The Ikon Slow Boat

Mac had, at that time, as he sat with the rest of us listening to the talk, had a light bulb moment. He went away and thought about it for a couple of months. And then he approached me about his idea (via the note) to see if I would be interested in taking part. His idea was thus: him, myself and two other MA students would come together as a new collective. We would write a proposal to use the Ikon Slow Boat over a two-day period. We would invite people (passers by on the canalside in Birmingham) to participate in a community art project. We would lend the passers by a camera and ask them to take a photograph of anything that sparked their interest. The image taken would then be projected, on board the boat, onto a white piece of paper, via an overhead projector. The participant would then be invited to draw the projected image onto the paper and ‘create’ their ‘own’ piece of art. We would then exhibit all of these pieces of art inside and on the outside around the boat. The boat would act as an art studio and gallery. It would bring art and the community together. It would bridge the gap between the art world and people of the world. That was the idea. 

Mac’s investigation in the project involved looking into the relationship between the traced image and the ‘subject’ (i.e. the artist, i.e. him). This had formed a significant part of his research to date. He argues that the traced image, drawn in this fashion, although drawn by another person, has his index on it, or, his stamp. My interest in the project was about the process of creating images of ordinary ‘things’ and the choices made by the people taking part: whether it be a canal scene, buildings, each other or their shoes.

We wrote the proposal, met a few times, came up with a name ‘Tow Path Eye’, revised it, agreed upon it, sent it off and waited. We didn’t have to wait for too long.

Very quickly we received an answer from the Ikon: yes, let’s do it, why not? I confess to being very surprised to get that reply. I didn’t think they would say yes.

The next step was to meet with the Ikon staff one very hot summer’s day at the Ikon Gallery. We brainstormed ideas, discussed funding (there would be very little from the Ikon) and the practicalities of the project. We set a date: 11-12 August. A few of the original details of our proposal changed: the boat wouldn’t be moving now (we had wanted the boat to glide down the canal but this is too expensive), we would provide snacks, we might try to invite community groups (we were unable to do this due to time constraints), and we would have to find funding (we wrote to the Dean of the university and he came good).

The poster

Then we had some t-shirts made. We were to wear them during the two days.

The two days of the project went very smoothly. We hired the equipment from the university for the two days and took it all down to the centre of Birmingham (between the four of us, we just about managed). At 11am on Day One, just as we finished setting up inside the boat, we started recruiting passers by. We didn’t have too much trouble persuading people to take part. If anything, the opposite was the reality, very few declined our offer (except those on the way to the Sealife Centre). We managed to gather drawings from locals, tourists, children, parents, groups of friends, random single passers by, grandparents and lone wanderers. By the end of the two days, we had a lot of interesting drawings, all, arguably, with the stamp of the idea generator: Mac McCoig. I’m not sure how much of my stamp was in the drawings. But my interest and future research was definitely energised by the choices of images: my favourite being a pair of shoes of course.

The boatman drawing on the boat

This project, was to lead to another, this time I was approached by an act of serendipity, which I will write about next.

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Shadows and virtual reality

Posted on 28 January 2019 by beckybendylegs

Walking out of school today with my youngest child, as the low winter sun began to set behind the school walls, we had a discussion about shadows. We marvelled at the size of them and the depth of the darkness within them. We do things like that sometimes. He has an artist for a mother, he expects it.

My youngest enjoying a milk shake

This got me thinking: what do shadows and my virtual reality drawings have in common? It’s quite simple. They are both real, we see them, yet we cannot touch them or ever capture them. They both have wonder, yet we cannot hold that wonder in our hands, or pass it to someone else. Isn’t that in itself magical? I think so.

Shadows and my virtual reality drawings have another element in common, and that comes in the form of a question, a rather ancient one. It is a question that we have been asking about shadows for centuries (indeed a question we ask about the digital world today): Why do we regard such visual non-tangible reality as inferior to solid reality?

You cannot touch them, yet they are real

I asked my son: is a shadow real? He replied in the affirmative, of course it is real. He backed that up with the evidence: he could see it. We both can see it. I countered that with: but we can’t touch it. He thought about this but concluded that despite that, it was still real. I asked him why. He replied: well, we can still see it so we can’t say it doesn’t exist. My next, Plato-inspired question was, is the shadow you see as interesting or important than the person or object making the shadow? He thought some more. It is as interesting, and as important, he decided, as the real thing. Of course it is, it is just different, he mused. That doesn’t make it less important or interesting. He seemed quite baffled by that notion.

Where the shadows were today

I almost whooped for joy. Yes! That is the answer I was hoping for. That is the conundrum I’ve spent the last two years thinking about and churning in my head, thanks to the influence of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (introduced to me by my final year tutor as I completed the BA). There is beauty in repetition. My son sees that. As do I. The original isn’t the purest form. Why do we continue to think this? The copy is valid. The beauty comes from the difference in the repetition from the original to the copy to the copy of the copy and the copy of the copy of the copy. There is no dilution in quality. There is dilution in form. That’s not the same. Quality and form are not the same. The shadows on the walls of Plato’s caves are as important and interesting as the makers of the shadows despite what Plato told us. We still believe him (or at least I don’t).

Gilles Deleuze and his cat

There has always been a ‘shadow’-like unreal world that coexists reality, and we continue to believe that it is a ‘prison’ and a danger. We thought this about art, about photography, about video and now about virtual reality and the digital world. When will be realise that there is an equality of ontology of all things? We are all equal. We are all individuals.

My son and I disagree with Plato. We find beauty in the shadows. We find beauty in the digital. We find beauty in the things we can touch too. There is no single source.

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Virtual still-lifes – a collection of ‘can’t live without’ things

Posted on 28 January 2019 by beckybendylegs

Last week I spent a couple of hours at the amazing Fab Lab in West Bromwich with free reign of their virtual reality equipment and software. It had taken me a few weeks to organise myself to visit the Fab Lab. I had been putting it off for months, partly because I have been suffering from creative block, the most severe creative  block I have had for many years, and partly for logistical reasons (West Bromwich isn’t terribly convenient for me). Coming out of the fog of artistic constipation recently, albeit slowly and with trepidation, I forced myself to contact them so I had no choice but to go. I’m so glad I did. The chance to draw (in a virtual environment) for two hours, unfettered by distraction, has unblocked me even further and I feel I have some catching up to do now. 

In total, I was ‘under’ the spell for two hours. These were two hours of a hard-to-describe sublime experience which resulted, as before when I first came across virtual reality drawing, in utter exhaustion. It is better than drugs. I is better than rhubarb gin. I love it.

The means to enter the portal of virtual drawing

A couple of weeks ago, I posed a question on social media: post a photograph of an object that you cannot live without. The response was overwhelming, much better than I expected. It seems I hit an area that people feel strongly about and want to share. I received a plethora of images of weird, wonderful, ordinary, valuable, invaluable and valueless objects. I decided last week at the Fab Lab that I wanted to recreate these objects in virtual reality.

This exercise raised some conceptually interesting questions:

  • How accurate are the drawings? I had to draw the objects from memory. I was unable to refer to the photographic image of each object while ‘under’ the spell of virtual reality.
  • How connected are my drawings to the subject (the person who chose the object)? The act of drawing in virtual reality creates a hybrid object that is indexed to the image of the object in my mind, which is indexed to the photograph of the object, which is indexed to the object itself, which is indexed to the subject (person). How many times removed can we go? Can we go further (see next blog entry!).
  • How abstract are the drawings? The objects I drew were semi-abstract and semi-real / semi-recognisable. I was unable to draw the objects in a photo-realist sense, it is simply impossible with the current software (and my infantile skill in virtual reality drawing). The style of the software mirrors felt-tip pens (big, chunky ones).
  • What ‘dimension’ are the objects in? I had to ‘draw’ the objects in three-dimensions in the virtual dimension. Having only once before drawn in three-dimensions, this I knew was going to be tough. It is quite similar to drawing with the non-dominant hand.
  • How easy is it to draw in virtual reality? Drawing in virtual reality is immensely quick. There is little room for error (although there is an ‘undo’ function). As someone who is a slow, delicate draftswoman who likes to draw accurately, this was a massive challenge.
  • What do the drawings look like? The drawings are ‘solid’ yet non-haptic. The notion of creating solid objects from a flat dimension (my memory of those photographs) in a quasi-solid form (virtual reality) is a little bit hard to get the head around.
  • What are the drawings? The drawings I created were a bizarre crossover of my memory, a recognisable object, my imagination, and luminous solid lines. That’s the best way I can describe them.

What I created in those two hours was a strange, otherwordly, collection of floating three-dimensional non-solid, luminous ghostly objects. They had an alien quality. Yet, I felt fondness for them. They were mine. Yet I couldn’t touch them. They just float in space. They are solid yet I cannot touch them. While ‘under’,  I could walk around them, walk through them, move amongst them, teleport myself to various points in the area, look at them from above, below, within, without and to the side. They seem ‘alive’ in some way. They are deafeningly silent as they float in space. I want to share they here yet I cannot!

I wish I could find the exact words to describe exactly what it is like in that ‘place’. That place exists on my memory stick and in my memory as I sit here typing now. I cannot explain adequately what it looks like, and a screen shot would not do the experience justice. Flat isn’t right. To feel it, you need to enter it.

That is what I hope to do for the final MA show – provide a means to enter my bizarre still-life world of ‘things’. Thing’s have power whether they are real, tangible, recreated, photographed, drawn, painted, made, moulded or, as in this case, intangible.

The power of things is not yet fully understood. 

 

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What creativity block has done for me

Posted on 24 January 2019 by beckybendylegs

It’s taken me a long time to write this so please be kind.

Creatively, I am usually very manic. At least, normally I experience short waves of activity followed by short waves of inactivity. It’s the way my brain functions. I can be high on life and art one week, feverish in activity, and then lost in a fog and slumped under a metaphorical duvet, pinned down, unable to move the next. It has been my natural order of things for a long time. I’ve accepted this. I’ve embraced the down days for what they are, recovery days, and enjoyed the high days for what they give, intellectual stimulation and colour.

Late last spring last year I fell into the usual slump time. However, this time it didn’t last a week. It wasn’t the expected short-term trough of the familiar wave. This slump lasted six months. It was the opposite of a tsunami. This longevity of slump took me by surprise and indeed it frustrated me. The cloud of creative inactivity refused to lift first after the usual week, then after a month, int continued to refuse to budge after two months. The suffocation seemed to have no end. I tried very hard to shift the cloud. Nothing worked. So I gave up, shrugged and buried myself in work instead. As it turns out my heart wasn’t completely there either despite my efforts. I found myself to be ineffective creatively and otherwise. Work acted was my distraction and my excuse for the lack of creativity. But the tactic wasn’t working. I found I was making mistakes all over the place. By Christmas, I had become confused and upset. Nothing was working as it should. By the end of the year, I was very lost. I didn’t see that though at the time. Don’t you just love hindsight?

Thankfully, the blockage has just lifted. And as a consequence, I now feel able to write about it and reflect on it. The lift has come just in time. I was starting to feel incredibly anxious and concerned for the future of my MA. I was a few months from the end yet I felt that I had stalled completely. I was avoiding contact with anyone of authority for fear they’d ask me about my work. I didn’t know whether this stasis was temporary or permanent. I was quite scared. That fear caused my great anxiety. The spiral downwards continued. So I saw the New Year in buried deep in a terror that this was it. I was no longer an artist. I felt a fraud. I didn’t have the usual optimism for a fresh start that is normally prevalent after Christmas. I was still swimming in glue.

I now can look back and see clearly what the problem was. I don’t want to go into details but suffice it is to say, I have had a hard few months in my personal life, with a lot of changes taking place, and although these changes are right for me and for the circumstances I found myself in, change is always hard. It doesn’t matter whether the change is positive or negative, it is challenges the psyche. Yet as I was living this period of upheaval, I did not want this to be a reason for the dulling in my creativity. That seemed too cliched. The last thing I wanted was to feel sorry for myself or to generate sympathy from others. I spent the six months in denial, battling the reality. I refused to accept that I couldn’t cope with life’s challenges and be an artist. That’s rubbish! I thought. No, it really isn’t.

Now I’m coming out of that fog I realise that that denial was actually, ironically, keeping me in that state. I see clearly that the things that happen in our lives affect our thinking and ability to generate ideas, of course they do. I have always been good at telling this to other people going through crisis. It is the human condition. So why did I ignore this truth when it came to myself? Pride? Stubbornness? I’m not a quitter. I was terrified of failure and that terror was making failure more likely. This is not uncommon. Many people do this and it is self-destructive. Yes this is easy to say, not so easy to recognise in oneself. It was only when I let go of that fear, realising that failure is not ‘failure’, it’s part of the journey, that I turned a corner and my old friend my creative side returned. Oh how I have missed you.

I can’t end this self-indulgent poring out of thoughts without sharing the advice that saved me. This applies to anyone struggling in life, creatively or otherwise. It  came to me at the right time, from one of my creative heroes, Michael Caine. It is simple, in the form of three words packed with power. Read them and reflect.

The wise Mr Caine

Use The Difficulty.

I am back. UTD always.

 

 

 

 

 

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The object I couldn’t live without is…

Posted on 22 January 2019 by beckybendylegs

What would you expect the answer to be to this question? Something treasured, something alive? Something vital to life? Some unique artefact of sentimental object with a personal history? Or perhaps something useful?

Could you live without John Snow?

When I posed this question to my Facebook Family and asked them to post photographs of their ‘can’t live without’ objects, I was flooded with images some of which surprised me. Some of the things they declared as objects that they couldn’t possibly live without included the above – treasured things (rings), living things (pets) and things vital to life (glasses and an inhaler). However, I also had some responses that surprised (and, frankly, baffled) me. I do love to be baffled though. People aren’t predictable and that is a great thing.

Perhaps living without this little cutie would be impossible

Two people posted photographs of a pair of slippers. To me, this was really fascinating and unexpected. I could easily live without my slippers. I also saw three means of heating houses (a boiler and two fireplaces). These are useful, perhaps, but not much fun to have around. I saw lots of shoes and boots. As a lover of boots I could see the merit in saving one’s favourite boots but again, there are other things I’d chose before I grabbed my boots. One person decided that she couldn’t live without a swimming pool. She lives in New Zealand, I guess that explains.

These slippers are well-loved by their owner perhaps

Another friend declared that her iPhone was the object she couldn’t live without. This answer I liked. This would be my answer too. My iPhone is my means of communication with loved ones and friends, my diary, my alarm clock, my sporting statistics generator, my portal to work emails, my window on that vast jungle of joy we call the Internet, my photograph album, my camera, my video camera, my notebook, my sketchpad, my art journal and my news channel. It also allows me to do complicated sums, watch music videos, listen to music and read. It is so much. I simply could not live without it. I think that many people might secretly also feel the same way. It’s odd to me that not many would be prepared to admit this.

I have thoroughly enjoyed this little social media exercise and I hope that I get more replies. I just love that I was so baffled. Thank you dear friends!

Herewith the statistics on the responses so far:

Animate things (pets): 3 (2 dogs, 1 cat)
Mugs of tea: 3
Boots: 3
Shoes: 3
Cushions (one with John Snow on it): 3
Fireplaces / boilers: 3
Books (one shelf, one kindle and one book about Morris dancing): 3
Slippers: 2
Glasses: 2
Remote controls: 2
Jewellery (rings): 2
Dairies: 2
iPhone: 1
Keys: 1
Drawing pins: 1
Crystals: 1
Swimming pools: 1
Toy trucks: 1
ITV television centres: 1
Sewing machines: 1
Crochet hooks: 1
Cans of vimto: 1
Cotton buds: 1
Hats: 1
Scarfs: 1
Coffee pots: 1
Inhalers: 1

And the award for the most bizarre object goes to: ITV television centre.

Is Jeremy Kyle worth keeping?

What I am going to do with this information, is something that is in the creative pipeline. All I can say is: watch this space and you might find out.

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The objects of cyberspace – who is the creator?

Posted on 29 November 2018 by beckybendylegs

I’ve decided that I want to recreate a physical, yet not quite physical, virtual reality of cyberspace in a virtual reality environment. 

What is cyberspace? I’ve already written about that so I won’t repeat myself. Now I am getting closer to the end of my MA by Research I am asking whether it would be possible to re-create the imagined objects of cyberspace, as other people see them, in an environment they can physically enter yet not touch.

Cyberspace is a mental reality. It is also a physical reality. It exists so therefore it is physical, we cannot deny that. Yet, what does it look like? We can’t touch it so therefore it isn’t physical. Yet it touches our lives. We all enter it every day, for hours sometimes. It can be an addictive place to be in. But really, what does it look like? How I see it might be different to how the person reading this sees it.

This is a very science fictional image of cyberspace

To me, this parallels how we see the mind. How I see my mind cannot ever be the same as how the person reading this sees their mind. I see it as a physical place, somewhere I enter when I’m thinking or I’m trying to sleep. Somewhere I feel I really am physically immersed in when I am asleep and dreaming. Is not cyberspace a bit like that? Can we describe it? Is it a positive space or a negative space? 

So my question is: would it be possible to re-create a cyberspace based on everyone’s interpretation of it? Or is that a little too ambitious? After all, I can’t imagine recreating my mind.

If I manage to do this, the question is, who is the creator? Me, or ‘you’. If I ask ‘you’ how you see cyberspace and I create a cyberspace based on the answers from a lot of ‘you’s’, then who is the artist? You are.

Indeed, who could we describe as the original creator of the real cyberspace? God created the physical world (or so some believe), therefore did he create also the virtual one? There is no such thing as something out of nothing.

 

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MA Fine Art Degree Show 2018 – 1984 and beyond

Posted on 6 October 2018 by beckybendylegs

I am a bit late in writing up my thoughts on the MA Fine Art Degree Show which took place at The New Art Gallery, Walsall. The exhibition has ended now, but I didn’t want to remain speechless about an exhibition that inspired me so much and included the work of some very good friends of mine who have now left (and whose presence I will miss about the place as I complete my MA). My excuse for not writing this earlier is work. I have been extremely busy with paid work and sadly, this has eaten into any time for art or writing about art. However, today, lying in my sick bed nursing a delicate digestive system, I have both the time and inclination to write.

When I think back to this year’s MA Fine Art Show one word comes to mind: 1984. I’m not talking about the year I chose my GCSE options, the year of Thatcher’s height of fame, the year of big mobiles and yuppies. I’m referring to the novel by George Orwell of that name. To me, as I walked around the exhibition with my three boys during the opening night, the MA Fine Art Show had an Orwellian feel to it. By this I mean that the themes the pieces covered reminded me of the vision of the future in that book, a vision that has to some degree come to fruition, yet it has also, in many ways, remained science fiction. It is the mix of community-artist interactions and us-them concepts delved into which I felt at the MA Show that gave me this eerie sensation.

Big Brother is watching you

The space itself was an amazing space for an exhibition: shiny black floor, tall white walls, room upon room of well-presented and professional creative artworks. Together it was a delight for the senses and for the brain. There was much to think about and ponder on, including time and space; the contemporary avant garde; self-image; projected image; inequality in wealth; capitalism; community; stereotypes; and surveillance. There was art to look at, art to interact with, art to walk inside and around. I felt as if there were no bounds on the artworks on display, which as I say often is what art should be now. There are no bounds and neither should there be now. Anything goes: from the simple to the complicated, from the crafted to the borrowed, from the static to the moving, from the big to the small. 

What is time and space? Are they the same thing?

I just hope that I can contribute something as good as the pieces I saw at the New Art Gallery in Walsall when it comes to my time this time next year. Watch this space, as they say.

And the highlight of the evening? Seeing the real Gilbert and George and what a dapper, fascinating, couple they are. They are artists to aspire to as for them, anything goes. They are living proof that art is whatever you make it.

The Two Gs

 

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Visions of Science – visions of the future

Posted on 6 October 2018 by beckybendylegs

I have two passions within my art practice which trump all the other passions: drawing and objects. I love to draw. It is my thing. I doodle all of the time. And objects fascinate me. I love my things. I have a relationship with all things that I see as valuable as the relationships I have with people. And I’ve recently become quite intrigued by the concept of intangible objects and the role they have in our lives, as either objects that exist or objects that can be created through art in cyberspace. My current question is: can we have as strong a relationship with intangible things as we can with tangible? So instead of asking whether we can have as strong a relationship with people as we can with things, which was my previous research question, mainly with my BA, it is now whether this strength can extent from solid to the non-haptic. I would like to think that the answer is ‘yes’ but this idea needs further investigation and testing.

When I found out about the Vision of Science exhibition at The Edge in Bath I realised that it was a must for me to see this in terms of how closely it could relate to my art practice and research. 

Bath is a 250-mile round trip from my house and I made this trip yesterday, to the point of exhaustion by 10pm, but it was worth every mile. The exhibition did not disappoint. It included an eclectic, but thoughtfully put together, selection of artworks inspired by science or the digital world. It consisted of many expressions of the creative – two-dimensional and three-dimensional, static and non-static, digital and traditional, and those created by craft and those created by computer. This is what art should be now – anything goes and nothing should be beyond the realms of possibility or the definition of ‘creative’.

There was one particular highlight for me and that was a video / performance piece / oil painting in action by Albert Barqué-Duran called ‘My Artificial Muse’. This piece was presented in the exhibition as a video of a performance but it encompassed so many ways of expression that it would be restrictive to call it just a video piece. In this piece, he questions whether a muse can be artificial. Can a computer generate a muse, which traditionally is very much the physical and very much of the flesh? It looks into the field of computational creativity, which aims to formulate an algorithmic perspective on creative behaviour and aesthetic appreciation in humans. Given that my last mini-project as part of my MA research was about creating new ‘cyber’ objects in a traditional format (oil paint) based on descriptions that came to me from real ‘flesh’ (people) via cyberspace, this notion of creating a muse by algorithm interests me.

My Artificial Muse in action

I feel that I have now had the spur I needed to rejoin the sometimes difficult road towards the conclusion of my MA Thesis. The subject will never conclude of course, but I need to reach some sort of mini-conclusion and point of exhibition in order to tie the ends up neatly, for now at least. I can continue the road beyond that at my leisure (or as a PhD if fortune shines down on me).

There were many other artworks to inspire me at The Edge but this was the one that will remain with me, including a number of pieces by two people I know in the real world, one of which I participated in in an indirect way at the Virtual Reality Drawing Symposium I attended which was pivotal in giving me direction in my MA. There is much of quality and contemporaneity to see.

By way of conclusion, when I told my son what I was going to do in Bath he looked at me and said: ‘Mother, I know what you are, you are a VRtist!’

The exhibition runs until October 13th.

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Explaining is hard

Posted on 21 August 2018 by beckybendylegs

One aspect of being an artist that I have always found quite hard is explaining myself. I seem to have to do it a lot. I don’t like explaining myself to artists, art students, tutors, my mum, my brother, friends or strangers. It doesn’t matter who asks me the dreaded questions, I am always gripped with fear: ‘What is it that you do?’, ‘What are you working on at the moment?’ or (much worse) ‘What is your thesis about?’ 

My friend Steve just doesn’t get my art

I think there are two issues at play which explain my paralysis. The first is impostor syndrome. Impostor syndrome haunts my daily life. I walk around life feeling as if I am a fraud. It doesn’t matter how well I do with my art, how many reasonable marks I get, how much praise I might receive, how many exhibitions I take part in or how many projects I am involved in, I feel as if I am gate crashing the art world and someone is just waiting around the next corner to shout ‘aha, gotcha!’. In my head, I’m not a real artist. All those others are real artists, I’m not. I’m pretending. I feel as if I actually spend more time working, hula hooping, looking after children, driving children around and day dreaming than I do ‘arting’. A real artist lives, eats, breathes art, surely? I don’t. I can’t. I haven’t actually arted for a month now. So when I get asked ‘What are you working on at the moment?’ my in-my-head answer is ‘nothing at all’ and my external answer comes out as ‘well, erm, I’m kind of doing some sort of research into, well you see, my art practice is all about things, you know, objects…’. By this point I’m lost, they look lost, they frown, I see the frown, my belly flips with disappointment and I find I am trying desperately to think of a change of subject to, err, what to eat for lunch, where to go for coffee or whether they have just had a hair cut or not.

The second issue is that I have always felt there is a missing link connecting my brain to my voice. I know in my head what I am interesting in, researching, thinking about, writing about, drawing (sometimes) but I can’t articulate it in any intellectual way vocally. I can write about it. I love writing. I can wax lyrical for pages and pages about art. I love blogging, I love writing my thesis, I love thinking about art, but I can’t speak it. The words just tumble out in a different order to which they were formed in my head. And once I start to try to explain myself, the spectre of impostor syndrome jumps back up again and takes over and the situation is far worse. I find myself completely lost in the forest of doubt and meaningless words (as you can see I’m still fascinated with metaphors, even really bad ones).

I end up feeling a bit sad and disappointed in myself. Why can’t I just talk about my artistic interests with confidence and enthusiasm? I feel enthusiastic about it but it comes across as extreme doubt. If I look as if I doubt myself, then the ‘other’ people will doubt my integrity. There is also a fear biting away at me that what interests me is extremely dull to others. I worry that they just won’t like it, or worse, won’t get it and they will form a negative judgement on my intelligence, or perhaps even my sanity.

So I need to learn to care less. If I care less, the words may flow easier. In the words of Alan Bennett: ‘You don’t have to like everything’. I should remember this. For years, my mum told me to ‘paint pretty things’. She didn’t used to get my art (the good news is that she does get it more now). My brother, also, has questioned what I do. My goal should be to get him to get it. But, now I think so what if people don’t understand what I am doing. It adds to the challenge (i.e. getting my brother to go ‘ohhhh now I see it’) and, ironically, the more confusion I am met with, the more I want to do it to beat the confusion. Who wants to produce art that everybody gets straight away anyway? I’ve written about this before: if everyone gets it, then you fail. If there is doubt and questioning, then you pass.

I love what I do, even if I feel like the biggest gate crasher at the wedding (yes, I have actually done that, once). ‘Who is that person?’ they might cry. But sometimes it is the gate crasher who proves to be the life and soul of the party. Perhaps I need to just aspire to be that gate crasher.

 

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Whose balls are these?

Posted on 15 July 2018 by beckybendylegs

Objects fascinate me. In particular, the idea of who has owned objects and what trace they leave on those objects once they pass on or are lost. This idea has been a constant in my art practice from objects owned by my children to World War I objects to abandoned burst balloons.

Last week I went to Wimbledon (for the first time ever!). Yes, I was exploding with excitement. But that’s not the focus of this blog.

My view at Wimbles last week

Yes, it really was very ace. I will never forget the day.

But while I was there, I acquired some used tennis balls for my children. This wasn’t an easy acquisition but that is a long story involving the kindness of a stranger. I’m not going to tell that story here. But I am grateful to that lovely stranger.

Don’t worry, all was not lost after I saw this depressing sign

When I got home and presented the used Wimbledon balls to my children, they were rather excited. In fact, they were more excited by the used balls than they were by the expensive Wimbledon souvenir tat that I had also returned home with. The used balls have been a bigger hit, pardon the pun, than the keyring, towel, magnet or lanyard. 

Who has touched these balls?

Why is that? It is because of the mystery of these used balls. It is because there is a teeny, tiny possibility that someone ‘famous’ has ‘touched’ our used balls. This idea fascinated my children. I think what interested them the most was that they just have no way of knowing. We will never know. We cannot even try to find out. It is impossible. This sensation reminds me of the mystery of Schrödinger’s cat. You know he is either dead or alive (the balls were either touched by a famous tennis star, or they weren’t) but you just have to be content with not knowing. There is excitement in not knowing because of the ‘might’ element. So the thrill of the chance is the ‘might’ (the cat is either dead or alive). This is enough to make the object much more precious than a random other tennis ball that has only been touched by mere mortals.

Live kitty or dead kitty, you decide.

I found myself getting caught up in the romance of this ‘what if’ idea. I told my children that they could play tennis with the balls but they must not under any circumstances lose them. In fact, the thought crossed my mind that by playing with them, they might somehow ‘rub off’ the trace left by a possible Jack Draper, Rafael Nadal, Serena Williams or Julia Görges (the one with the shoes). Logically, that is a rather strange worry to have. Firstly, the balls we own may not have been touched by anyone of note. Secondly, even if they had, the amount of DNA or sweat they may have left on the balls is going to be minute. Thirdly, even if they had left some trace of themselves on the balls, this is fairly meaningless – what does a bit of ‘me’ mean? It is nothing really, it is just material. It isn’t emotional. Having said that, I like to believe that we do leave a trace of our emotional lives on objects. But this isn’t a scientific fact. It’s purely a romantic notion. This doesn’t make the balls special in any way. They are, after all, just tennis balls that have seen a tiny bit of action on a court.

Still, my children and I are very fond of our used balls. We feel the magic even if it isn’t real. And why not? Perhaps there is a trace of Nadal sweat on one of them, and with that, some tennis luck. Next time I play tennis I might take along our used balls and see what happens. Given that I haven’t played tennis for years that might be a long time from now.

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