30/01/2010

Just reading your thoughts has been very constructive to the way that I have been trying to assess our current standing as artists/curators. We are at one of our most busy times at the moment, in an organisational way, balancing numerous curatorial projects at once... but I also feel like I have a river of creative ideas ready to burst its banks. This was bothering me somehow. But. Now I feel like this is how it should be all the time: overflowing and back and forth with curatorial and creative ideas. The more we are working together organisationally, the more creative ideas we will have. This is essentially how we became an artist couple in the first place, so of course it stands that the more intense our organising gets, the more prolific our 'creative minds' will become. I definitely feel this is the case! I feel like a child at the moment; giddy with ideas and bearing an overwhelming energy to make every single one into a reality, without thinking about consequences (for me, this is where the 'child' description came into play). It is this 'giddiness' rather than confidence that informs the playfulness within our work, from my perspective. I am always happy to suggest ideas without thought, like a child, and then analyse them later to find the means of my overall goal, like an artist (an artist, working backwards perhaps). It is this roller-coaster manner of thought that makes me so excited, and which makes each new idea 'sillier' or more sculptural (as this is my 'natural' way of thinking) or more challenging (...to 'the man' or an artistic boundary) than the last, especially when encouraged by a Lois.

You might even say that we are working in a curatorial/artistic 'bubble' created by ourselves where we fuel each other's silly or sculptural or confrontational idea, without thought to its worth. With this in mind, is this 'bubble' dangerous to our practice, making all our work too absurd without an obvious direction (...how many times have I written silly/confrontational/sculptural... all different things?...)? Or is it this 'bubble' that intelligently creates and informs the worthy playfulness and/or sculptural and/or boundary challenging nature of our work (... all important?...), making it integral to our practice (...perhaps by creating such a variety of working themes that just show we are at developing stage of our artistic selves?...)?

04/01/10

The narrative experiment was a good one. I think it helped us eliminate a part of our practice that we were curious about but which did not really reflect the fundamental objective of our work... and it was through this experiment that our real purposes actually became apparent. By splitting the narrative we had filmed into its separate active elements, all of which we displayed on separate looping screens, our work once more became about the way in which we moved within the frame of the screen, the visual duality we expressed around this movement, the minimalistic formality of our movement/selves/setting and the multiplicity of the work's display. To answer the question, narrative was scrapped in favour of the description that has constantly been banded our way, sculptural performance. By this I mean that I would like our videos to concentrate on the formalistic elements of our performance: our movement or non-movement within a defined space, the minimal setting, the synching or non-synching of our motions over time and the layering of these efforts into multidimensional works. As a journey of our own private self discovery, this does not mean that I want to abandon all avenues of personal relation in our sculptural performance as I think there is an important connection between our working relationship as artists/friends and the outcome of our sculptural works and choreographed movements together. I always like the idea of our work reflecting something quite 'silly' or 'serious' (I'm thinking the 'bum jelly' proposal here...) about our relationship that we can perceive and view in our own work, and I guess in that sense that those who know us can share too... but at the same time providing a very formally resolved outcome for an original audience presenting a focus on ourselves as objects rather than ourselves as characters.

I have been discussing the balance/non-balance that I would like to see in our work between ourselves as detached sculptures/forms and ourselves as recognisable personalities/individuals. What do you think that balance should be (a bit of both, just sculptural, just personal)? Or if you feel that there is a more important focus for our work that you would like to bring to the board, what would that be?

15/11/09

I can sense a "yes/no" answer here. I could definitely identify with the idea that I have always been a performance artist in some form or other but this is balanced with the importance of and essentially because of my making installations. In essence, this answers 'how did I get here?'. It was always through the actual making of my installation pieces that I was exploring my artistic ideas. Like Process Art, it was the formation of the art rather than the finished objet d'art itself, that was essentially the artwork. That process; occupying a physical space with my body manipulating a material over a period of time; that process was a performance. That process could be described as Performance Art.

You described me as a performance artist. If I were to ascribe to you that very same label, would I be wrongly pigeonholing you or accurately identifying your practice? Would you find that specific artistic characterisation (or any) to be restrictive or liberating?