#eelyn

📖: 𝑺𝒌𝒚 𝒊𝒏 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝑫𝒆𝒆𝒑 (𝑆𝑘𝑦 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑆𝑒𝑎 #1) 🏹🐻🪵

This portrait has been half finished for over two months, and I'm so SO happy to officially called it done.

5/5 stars

Having agreed the theme of this month’s discussion at the previous session we were all ready to share a project, experience or piece of work in relation to the notion, ‘process as artwork’.

Annette Mees volunteered to kick off the discussion by sharing some questions around her current project, The Almanac of the Future. Annette is bringing together groups of 65 and 15 year olds across four continents to co-create a ‘radically optimistic’ almanac for life over the next 50 years.

Simon Terrill kicked off the second half with an introduction to his commission from the National Portrait Gallery. Simon is collaborating with a group of Yr10 students from a school in South London to make a large-scale photographic work inspired by NPG’s collection of portraits of people with links to Southwark.

By discussing just two projects in detail we were able to take the conversation to great depths, on detours and back to the work again. Here’s a glimpse of a few thoughts that emerged.

Making Process Public - Why Do It and Who For? Annette posed this as a question she is currently grappling with. The process of making the Almanac of the Future is so interesting, epic and multi-layered we spent quite some time discussing it. I mean... as well as 65 and 15 year olds she’s collaborating with Live Futurists and talks about things like, ‘pushing the construct of the future in to a public space’ ....what’s not to like?

With such a rich process, it’s inevitable to have a degree of anxiety around the big book living up to the journey of it’s creation or as Mees asks, playfully provoking her own process, is it merely ‘a MacGuffin’ to entice out the narrative? Watch this space....

Process & Form So if you choose to make your process public what form does it take? Is it a series of photographs, video clips and quotes organised on a timeline on the project website or can it be something more than that?  Is it possible to find a form for the work that honours the process of making it or in some way contains the language of it’s journey?

We talked about Jackson Pollock’s action paintings in relation to these questions. Pollock found a form that expressed the narrative of the making of the work. We see the movement of his hands through the marks on the canvas. The creator is evidenced in the work and the physical act of painting is captured and brought right in to the frame.

Process as Chaos / Mess as Narrative We talked about editing and framing.....If through the edit-decision process we choose to leave evidence of the process in the artwork, what bits stay in the frame? Back to drawing and painting, some of Frank Auerbach’s charcoal self-portraits took him seven years to complete. We see evidence of his process - the rubbing out, remnants of old lines - the work contains the narrative of it’s making.

We often read the messy lines; the torn edges and the distressed as evidence of narrative whereby chaos contains story and history. When designing a process we often leave space for chaos or moments of the unexpected. Is this because we secretly know that here lies the key to discovering a new language? The holy grail of a form that honours it’s process?

Simon Terrill talked about leaving space for moments of chaos when making his large-scale photographs. Public spaces and crowds are often subjects of Terrill’s work. Partly constructed but without the means or desire to completely control the environment, chance actions play an important role in the image.

Bow Cross by Simon Terrill,  2011 © Simon Terrill Process as Artwork Returning to the title of the discussion in it’s purest form we should also ask, ‘can the process of a project be an artwork in itself?’ It could be said that Assemble won the Turner Prize for the process they put in place for Granby Four Streets. The dilemma of what to exhibit in a gallery was easily overcome in this instance as one outcome of the project is the Granby Workshop, a new social enterprise manufacturing handmade products for homes which was cleverly launched through the Turner exhibition. A cultural outcome which could be ‘gallery-ized’ and monetized but rather than lining the pockets of a private art dealer, the funds from the sale of the work are re-invested back in to the Granby community project.

Most of us in the Peer Forum are in the business of designing processes to collect, seed, shape, nurture and challenge ideas. We build structures to journey through and endeavour to remain open to the unexpected. This is arguably the same as any creative process, it’s just that some are more tried and tested and steeped in a tradition. When talking about some of the craft-based processes employed in things like marbling, making tiles and furniture at the Granby Workshop, one local maker says,