Hackney Downs 2006 - 2009

words

HACKNEY DOWNS WORK
May 2009

My current work comes out of an activity, begun ‘on the side’ in 2005, of making memory drawings, residues of my bicycle trips across Hackney Downs on my way to somewhere else. It had occurred to me that these repeated incidental crossings were important.

The work I was doing from 1997 to 2006 was also concerned with a particular place but my interest was specific and concentrated. I was interested in the Devon landscape only in so far as it served my pictorial purpose. With HD my interest was inclusive and diffuse. I had no purpose, artistic or otherwise, beyond jotting down memories. Paradoxically, to have no purpose became a purpose. There were conditions attached. From the start it felt important to stick to the moment of noticing - no stopping my bike to check, no going back, no filling in the missing bits, no analysis, no system; no 'looking for' only finding. The directness of the experience seemed best served by using the manner that immediately occurred to me and the odds and ends of materials most directly to hand.

In 2006 the Devon work abruptly came to a stop. I could envisage knowing how to do it, therefore it no longer interested me.

I turned to my heap of HD drawings but anything I tried to make from the drawings destroyed their directness and became meaningless elaboration. For a year or more I floundered. I had come to understand that the point of the HD drawings is to snatch an experience of noticing as far as possible before it attracted any ideas, but how do you make something out of something whose nature is to be without ideas? In all my previous work a germ of an idea informs the making, however intuitive the method. I now found I was being hedged about by a prescriptive interest in a subject matter which had a lot to do with my ordinary life but which seemed to preclude most of what I understood by art making. I concluded, after about a year of ‘why am I making such absurd difficulties for myself’, that this was precisely the point. I had hit on a way of working which made it impossible to continue as before.

Somewhere along the way I made a sign – ‘BEING IN THE STUDIO WITH HACKNEY DOWNS’. For the time being working is simply defined as what happens in the studio. *1

I found that an overall process had taken the place of ideas relating to particular works. The process itself became the idea.

This process at first related only to noting memories, making corrections in the interests of accuracy, not wanting to make art decisions. Now I realised I was inevitably making formal art decisions but that I could just ignore it, trust my hand and not make judgements. The distinction in my head between noting memories and making art became irrelevant.

Gradually things began to be made further to the drawings. Conditions have evolved for the post-drawing making process which are analogous to the conditions attached to the memory drawings. The drawings are responses to a memory of crossing HD, in as direct a manner as I can manage, guided only by impulse. The ‘further’ works are responses to the drawings likewise guided only by impulse and resisting the desire to improve (organize – make sense of). In practice this means a rather abrupt and spasmodic behaviour, I am constantly interrupting myself as I notice things I might do in the studio. My Devon method felt like a kind of attentive inattention, this is more like A.D.D. (attention deficit disorder)

The first things I made were paintings. These pieces are not developed / built up towards a resolution, they are more accumulations than compositions, as if I were to do the drawings on top of each other. *2

However the existence of the canvas edge implies a separation. Previously to become separate was an aspiration. I wanted each work to stand on its own feet outside of my feelings, ideas, preliminary drawings etc, to be solid, separate and contained. Deciding the shape and size was the first step in establishing this ‘otherness’, a magic threshold into the picture space. I no longer wanted this. I wanted the relationship to be altogether more casual - as if the image had just sat itself down on the nearest support in a provisional sort of way, here in the studio. If the edge was a problem the ‘background’ was equally so. In the Devon paintings activating and integrating the whole surface even if unmarked was what it was about, but this was inimical to the HD process.

I began to use unstretched and/or cut-into canvas – in retrospect an attempt to blur the distinction between real and pictorial space. *3 At the moment I am making three dimensional objects. Replacing a neutral stack of cartridge with disparate odds and ends had already given the drawings an unexpected object quality - something between ready-mades and drawings. The earliest object is made of several drawings glued and stiffened, you can prop it. *4 The papier-mache drinking fountain is the earliest completely three-dimensional work. *5 Later things are made of wood, string, trellis, garden canes etc, stuff that happens to be around and that I notice. The recycling aspect pleases me. *6

I’ve never been able to make three-dimensional work before, the transforming from three into two dimensions was where it happened for me. Working in three dimensions I lacked a threshold into otherness, I could only make models. Sculptures have to be both here and elsewhere. These various materials I’m using are becoming like paint - magic.

Separateness also implies completion. As I continued with HD I realized that this is a process continuing in time. Changes on the Downs - new seats, fallen trees etc, made me curious about changes before my time. Photocopied maps and postcards from the Hackney Archives became sources alongside the drawings – as always governed by impulse not system.

Likewise the work in the studio is ongoing. Pieces come to a halt but I do not want the HD things to be final statements. They are more like pieces of evidence thrown up by a continuing story - some quite substantial, some very scrappy. The story is both out there – the history of HD and my crossings back and forth; and in the studio – the work as a trace of an ongoing process of attending to impulses.

As a way of making the unwieldy, growing heap of drawings available to me I began early on to sort them according to subject, a kind of archiving. *7 I have to keep doing this with different categories because my view of things keeps changing. These archives, partially demolished as they are superseded, become part of the story. *8 They provide an overall structure to what is a very baggy period of work. I see this work as a sort of ongoing installation with detachable bits. I am reserving judgement on whatever formal value the bits may have. At the moment I am just concerned with holding on to the connections, keeping it all alive. *9

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