



AN ARTIST TRYING TO DESCRIBE WHAT THEY’RE MAKING, MOSTLY TO THEMSELVES.
May 2025

AN ARTIST TRYING TO DESCRIBE WHAT THEY’RE MAKING, MOSTLY TO THEMSELVES.
May 2025
These days describing what it is that I want to achieve creatively, is pretty tricky.
I’m aiming at something that must be relayed through artistic gesture because words do not suffice to describe it.
Pulling elements together using(what I hope is) intuition, even I - the maker - don’t know what I am making until the
Regardless of the ‘what’, a successful result - some kind of assemblage of physical, sensorially experienced datasparks a deeply buried recognition.
A remembrance of a primal knowledge that is not quite an
I have nearly always worked in a way that risks failing. Most artists do. At least the ones that interest me the most.
Ideas hold me long enough to pursue them, but I have never known how to tell whether the idea, once realised, will be ‘Art’ or not before actually pursuing it.
The making has always been the only way to know whether materials + effort have been justified
In this case ‘justified’ meaning worth putting in a gallery (or placing publicly elsewhere) because someone might get something out of it.
The difference now is that I don’t only want to know what the thing is once realised, I am also pitching at why it may or may not be successful as this kind of mysterious ‘resonator’ operating in sympathy with its audience.
The feeling, the vibration
its action on and in the body gradually subsides and rises slightly into a kind of resonant knowing. A knowing that has come without transcribed information being relayed but instead through this strange recognition. And with it comes a deeper and more stable sense of self and a myceliumlike oneness with much of everything else. It is a feeling not unlike déjà vu; the familiarity in personhood, circumstance or geography that logic says you’ve not experienced before and yet…
I suspect the vibratory response is a kind of primal consciousness (maybe gentler but still relative to the kind that can appear as religious ecstasy or that is accessed through ayahuasca ceremony), but exactly how to deliberately trigger what I have just described with an artwork, I don’t yet, and may never, know. Maybe I don’t want to ever know.
Except I do.
But it is my favourite thing to experience as a viewer (rare, although less rare than you might think) and I started this process without even considering what I was doing. I just needed to start doing it.
Since writing the bulk of this I have been thinking about a couple of artists I know whose work may have influenced this process, so I returned to the middle of these words to name this up before fingers get pointed. But after some lunch (celery sticks dunked in a tahini and date syrup dip, soda water, a big coffee) I’m reverting to a footnote .
1
1 I had a show in 2014 with Mish Meijers, called The Pickup Artists that had come about through discussing the problem of trying to find (and grow) your audience, and in frustration, the show became us both ultimately turning that search to the non-human; Mish to alien life and myself to the spirit world. Mish combined objects and images in a similarly random and curious way; hoping through the sheer number of combinations that they might hit on the right formula to create the antenna required to reach the target interplanetary audience and receive their feedback
1 Rob O’Connor’s 2022 show Infinite Regress has also haunted me Here though was more order - if you want to look at infinity surely you need order to staple it to, yeah? Order in form - a wall of portrait-hung, rectangular paintings of identical scale - Paintings that appear to be of collages that themselves are made up of familiar but random images. Rob made the show in collaboration with some matric art students handing the control of the content over to the teenagers - in this day and age, natural meme makers - with no need to fear his own ability to paint the outcomes Robs a great painter
Both examples tickled my brain - not by producing the resonant vibration I’ve been talking about, but by exciting an intellectual consideration about sense and nonsense and function and ornament and who gets to decide which is what and how mistaken we are to think we might have any kind of command over the universe when, on balance, we actually know so little about it And then we behave like dickheads on top Both examples also inspired some envy I’ve done a lot of art school, am slow to reset and seemed to have been stuck in a mode where I expected to have to explain myself at any minute. And at that point lets pick things up again with images at page 13.
You may think I am being deliberately obtuse and to tell the truth I sometimes have a sense of embarrassment around my failure to describe what I am doing; that in the end I hazard best-guesses at what works ‘are’ once they are complete. Sometimes I even suspect myself of deliberate obfuscation; of creating a convenient fiction in the manner of a short story by Borges or Lovecraft that hinges on a thing-that-cannot-bedescribed and a convenient way to escape having to be accountable for my actions. Except actuallyit’s inconvenient.
If it was of benefit to funding applications or other opportunities then this might make sense but it is far from that. When I have sat on funding panels myself, I have found it hard to support a project that I couldn’t first visualise and then develop a desire to see realised. So I get it. How can I expect to compete for funding when I can’t describe what exactly the funding is for other than ‘Art’? Certainly my attempts to describe it persuasively have been mostly unsuccessful as far as sources funding are concerned
In moments of what could be overconfidence, I fancy that if I continue to ‘follow my nose’ - the description of my practice that I currently use to introduce my (non-committal, intuitive) experimentsone day I may spot the pattern that reveals the method that, in turn, separates what works from what doesn’t, and from that point on I will be able to structure and plan and pitch, just like the people who have the money to give, want need. me to do to be successfully funded for my labour. More importantly, I will know that a n idea I am pursuing is unlikely to be a waste of my time.
COVER IMAGE: ‘NOTHING’ (STUDIO SKETCH)
Studio sketch
Inkjet print on watercolour paper, ink
PAGE 2: STUDIO SKETCH (LANDFORM OVER THE LIME KILN)
InkjetonpaperhandmadebyRuthRees,the artistsmother,gouache
Booklets are printed materials with four or more pages, containing details about a business, event, product, promotion, etc. They are also known as catalogs or pamphlets, and are usually created to communicate a message to a wide variety of audiences.
Booklets are printed materials with four or more pages, containing details about a business, event, product, promotion, etc. They are also known as catalogs or pamphlets, and are usually created to communicate a message to a wide variety of audiences.
Booklets are printed materials with four or more pages, containing details about a business, event, product, promotion, etc. They are also known as catalogs or pamphlets, and are usually created to communicate a message to a wide variety of audiences.
Booklets are printed materials with four or more pages, containing details about a business, event, product, promotion, etc. They are also known as catalogs or pamphlets, and are usually created to communicate a message to a wide variety of audiences.
Booklets are printed materials with four or more pages, containing details about a business, event, product, promotion, etc. They are also known as catalogs or pamphlets, and are usually created to communicate a message to a wide variety of audiences.