#practicalwork

What I wanted to achieve with my Psychogeographical mark-making pieces was practical experimentation - putting what I gathered from my research into action (and in future, hoping to sort of combine together the different blocks of research to create further interestingly-developed practical work). But I admit that taking into account my surroundings and senses when creating artwork is a rare occurrence for me - so to trial something like this was quite unusual but fun to do. 

To begin with, I tested the use of my senses integrated into my artwork with various mark-making forms, such as line, hatching, cross hatching, dotted and a bit of squirkling:

I also experimented with colours to convey perhaps different emotions felt at that moment or meanings such as the use of black to represent the most prominent of my senses which was vision at the time, especially considering the speed of which I was spinning around, where everything around me eventually transformed into harsh black lines (sort of like what is above). Whereas in contrast, the yellow ‘softer’ squiggles mimicking the increase and decrease in sound whilst rotating around. 

The materials I used were a variety to add depth and tone even to an abstract piece as reality is not just black and white or consisting of even lines. So I pretty much just threw in any mark-making materials that I had laying around:

As these were quick sketches, the materials were pre-laid out and quickly picked according to what I believe best fitted my visualisation of the sights and sounds around me. My favourite material to use was probably the pastels, as they covered quite large surface areas pretty quick whilst also being able to make really thin lines when required to. And a close second had to be the Posca pens, simply due to their high contrast with the rest of the materials. 

So advancing from Yellin’s research, I decided to do a bit of my own Psychogeographical work - I admit not on the same level but a few sketches (shown below) to begin with. 

I am hoping to explain exactly what I’ve done here in the paragraphs below: 

So this first quick sketch took me about a minute, slowly spinning around in my room, mark-making in black and white whatever I could see and hear around me, until I completed the full 360 degree turn. For instance, the grid-like object in the middle of the sheet roughly resembles my oak storage unit in appearance, whilst the ‘squiggly’ lines directly above it visualise the sort of static sounds I could hear from my electrical heater as I was drawing. Now with the heater and the storage unit being at opposite sides of the room, the placement of my marks were, as you can see, very much arbitrary due to the speed I was working at, trying to restrict the length of the sketch as much as possible. But the rest of the sketch pretty much followed in the same manner: with the flat lines resembling the bed, the ‘mini tornado’ with ‘lightning bolts’ coming out of it (at the bottom of the page) mimicking my light bulb, and the extra shapes floating around representing the clutter of small objects on my desk. 

This second sketch was done in the same manner, but just speeding up the process of the spinning around, which essentially created blurred lines through vision, and even distorted my sound to seem louder at points and quieter at others, hence the mess above. 

I then repeated the first process but in colour, to sort of distinguish the objects in my room, with the storage unit as the focal point this time (as I started in the direction of it) and everything else stemming from that drawn around it. Again, the dotted mess on top of the unit was my way of visualising the sounds I could hear, of not just the electrical heater this time but the howl of the wind coming from the gaps of my windows. 

The last of my sketches from this series was a repeat of the second process but in colour. Again, with the speed that I was working at, most of the visuals and sound sort of blurred together, which I actually found quite interesting - I realised the best part for me about including your psychogeography in your artwork was the consideration of an arbitrary mixture of your senses, whether they blend together smooth-fully or not, it would definitely result in a fascinatingly unique outcome each time. 

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INIG636SnU4&t=1876s

And now, here’s where it got a little more interesting. So rewinding to my Mohammad Hijab debate mark-making sketch previously posted, I decided to do a few more sketches to somewhat test just how “fascinatingly unique” these Psychogeographical pieces can get. This time reacting to a lighter debate or rather more of a ‘conversation’, titled ‘Islam, Judaism and Christianity - A Conversation’ (time stamps written above). 

Now in this bit of the dialogue, it was the Muslim’s response to a question asking specifically about the holy scriptures and what they mean in the different faiths / how each faith reads their book. And as he was responding, I made some ‘notes’. For instance, when he recalls this social experiment he saw in the Netherlands where they took a copy of the Bible and enclosed it with the cover of the Qur’an and asked strangers on the street to read a verse out of it, the strangers responding with ‘they are who we thought they were’, the coloured yellow square with the red outline was my representation of this experiment - the yellow usually symbolising happiness and optimism (which is what a lot of people try to pose the entire Bible as - disregarding the verses of violence) and the red usually associated with hatred or anger (the reason why, I’m sure, is pretty apparent).

The Imam then goes on to explain the percentage of violence in each scripture (in defence of his religion), but in a quite humorous way to lighten the topic (Old Testament: 5.8% / New Testament: 2.8% / Qur’an: 2.3%). To which I drew a quick sword representing violence, and next to it in orange, a mini paragraph of lines with a word circled and pulled out of context to showcase how distortion of statistics take place very often concerning religion. 

Now how the psychogeography of my room played into it was the blurred sound I could hear in the background whilst trying to focus on the sound of the Imam’s speech, represented by the textured blocks in grey to symbolise slight distraction with the clashing of sounds. Also, the rays coming down from the top right corner of the sheet incorporating my vision of direct sunlight hitting my laptop screen whilst watching the speakers speak. 

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atOJpSzEn2Y&t=450s

This was most likely my favourite sketch in appearance, probably due to the use of text and words being thrown in amongst the chaos of marks. So I was responding to another Speakers Corner conversation between a Muslim by the name of Shamsi and an Ex-Christian questioning him about his religion. It begins with the Ex-Christian explaining his side of why he left Christianity, claiming it was the lack of reasoning and logic for him (hence the words above) concerning the religion. He explains how he got kicked out of an exam when he was younger for asking questions about Jesus, hence the green boxes gradually decreasing in size, from belief with reasoning, to belief without reasoning and eventually to no belief at all, simply because a few fundamental doubts could not be answered (represented with the green dots around the first box).

And again, the grey textured box placed behind the word ‘Logic’ indicates not only background distraction from my side of the screen but also the state of confusion of the Ex-Christian concerning his religion.