Timelines
By Melanie Jackson
Recently work has focused on the space of the single screen partly in response to the increased dominance of the single screen in our daily lives in lockdown and in restricted socialising as source of research, broadcast and communication. It is a space of dynamic exchange and a space of received prerecorded viewing. The idea of the single screen performing conversation, shopping, tv, email exchange, art - and in my case often simultaneously with a cascade of open windows and software - has allowed me to forge a new relationship with it and explore this simultaneity within a single screen rather than splitting action between different architecturally located spaces or screens. I always loved Breughel because the paintings don’t memorialise or narrativise in a single direction but absolutely invest in the multiple actions, intentions, activities, agendas, perspectives of an assembly and are rich with this complexity. Though are what I would celebrate as diagrammatic in that they point towards ongoing or continued action, future as well as past - acknowledge cyclical and unfolding patterns of nature - human and nonhuman. They do not draw us to a singular moral or narrative conclusion. (Diagrams are not always open of course - they can absolutely territorialise and inflict violent stratification - but they do allow us to think about image operating beyond the mimetic or representational and merely visual and indicate a different relationship with time and action). In Breughel assemblies there is generosity humour and affection, theft, brutality and violence, artisanal skill, lust, devotion, mimicry, absurdity, pomposity, humility, climate change and anxiety, love and destruction co-existing in every frame.
Like most I’ve been forced in to a different relationship with time and space and social life this year and I’ve started drawing and painting and sculpting a set of little known historical characters to act out and assemble as my proxies in a series of animated scenes. Timelines are on my mind but the beauty of timelines on editing software is that they are mutable - sequences can be swapped around reversed mirrored and duplicated, layered or deleted. Unlike an editor working with sequence and timecode to pursue a narrative gambit, I hack away at my film with my razor tool until they are the right shape. I have many sequences animated, and sketches and possibilities in my notebook before I edit but I have to find their order on the timeline by letting them vie for time and attention according to how they behave in relation to each other. I do not want to draw attention to a narrative conclusion or a looped action - I want to bring their complexity and differing drives to the fore - I want them to continue to have a presence in the imagination even when their moment on screen is over. They are not disposable characters that exist to provide a pivotal narrative arc but persistent forces that act contra and in confluence with the whole assembly. In my drawings each line works in relation to the one that precedes and follows rather than directing us in a singular direction and I think of moving image like that. When I edit for too long though I dream in timelines - life as if in meta software where I can still characters in my dream, mute them take them away, or still them whilst I get on with something else. The tendencies to world build can be generative and emancipatory as every artist, every player of sims and minecraft, every parent, homemaker and businessperson knows – but it can tip into autocracy and fascism once controlling that world becomes the imperative. It’s always a sign that I need to step back and get my hands dirty for a while and get lost in time.
Bio: Melanie Jackson is a UK-based artist working with modes of non-fiction storytelling through assemblages of sculpture, writing, and moving images. Recent exhibitions include Speykng Rybawdy, MattFlix 2020, The Undersides of Practice, APT Gallery 2020, Deeper in the Pyramid, Banner Repeater, London, Grand Union, Birmingham, and Primary, Nottingham (2018). The latter is a multi-faceted project of sculpture, moving image, performance lectures, and a publication, involving an ongoing writing collaboration with writer Esther Leslie. Previous solo exhibitions include The Urpflanze (Parts 1 and 2) with Flat Time House, The Drawing Room, Art Exchange, and John Hansard Gallery, and with Matt’s Gallery, Arnolfini and Chapter. Selected international shows include MOCP, Chicago, Art Gallery NSW, Australia, DRF Biennale Osaka Japan, A1 Contemporary Art Space, Hong Kong, ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany. Jackson is represented by Matt’s Gallery and is currently a Tutor at the Royal College of Art, London. I’ve long worked with moving image and text and have battled with lines - timelines, storylines, storyboards because my mind does not perform in a progressive accretive linear direction - it just doesn’t work towards a narrative conclusion. Instead, it is occupied with simultaneity and paradox, and multi-dimensional perspectives. My interest in moving images is as influenced by television, computing, gaming, and phone histories as by film, and the object of the screen and the way it is positioned against the other objects and events of our lives. I’ve always worked with moving images but as multi-screen installations with a significant focus on the materiality, and spaces in which the screen is placed. There is an emphasis on exchanges between screens, and how they engage with the motion and experience of the viewer in the architectural space of the event and energise and are dialogic with the objects and sculptures in the space.
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/melanie.jjj/
The full video can be seen for the next month on…
https://www.mattflix.video/jackson
https://www.procreateproject.com/product/melanie-jackson-spekyng-rybawdy/
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Field Notes for an Emended Cartography
Alexandra Huddleston is a photographer and writer whose work features in the collections of the British Library, the Smithsonian, and the Library of Congress. She holds a Masters of Letters in Fine Art Practice from the Glasgow School of Art.
Process Note:
“Field Notes for an Emended Cartography” is a work of text and photography created after walking The West Highland Way between October and March (2017 – 2018). The West Highland Way is a 96-mile (154 kilometers) trail that follows a series of valleys in western Scotland, connecting Glasgow in the southern lowlands to Fort William in the north. This piece suggests refinements to our Cartesian cartography by considering the line of the trail in parallel and intersection with countless other lines that mark the landscape, traces of both human and non-human forces, ephemeral and enduring.
How a body moves through the land affects both what is observed and the meanings derived from it. Walking, in particular, forces a direct confrontation with the human and non-human forces that form the weft and warp of every landscape. This confrontation opens the senses to a deeper conception of how geologic, seasonal, and atmospheric forces intertwine with histories of faith, art, desire, culture, and community to pattern both the land itself and our cultural attitudes towards it.
see more of Alexandra’s work here…
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Expanding the line of possibility
Resident Artist and Writer Michaela Hall
The line is something that often signifies direction, instruction, or a trial. So what happens when artists play with line compositionally for reasons that allow the viewer to explore different possibilities, to expand the possibility of the line in its idea or physical space.
One of the pioneers in expanding the line to be more than just a two-dimensional element is Bridget Riley. Riley developed the ‘Op Art’ style of the 1960s in which line and colour are compositionally structured to disorientate the viewer’s optical perceptions and play with ideas of movement, space and pattern. A simple line in these images is manipulated in such a way that it expands its beginning into something much more, something disorientating, three dimensional and alive. Thus, expanding the multiple possibilities that each viewer can experience with each piece. In ‘Blaze’ (1964) the variation of line depth, width and orientation results in a dazzling composition that makes it very hard for the eye to focus on a single element of the piece, without other parts appearing to flicker or move in a circular motion. Similarly, in ‘Cataract 3’ (1967) line is used in a directional manner to create an overwhelming optical effect of movement and static which is reflected in the title, that references the eye condition that has symptoms of clouded and confused vision. These pieces don’t only expand the possibility of line in a two-dimensional format but also expand the possibility of line in the viewer’s mind, bringing the work to life.
‘Blaze’ 1964
‘Cataract 3’ 1967
Alternatively to Riley, Jim Lambie works towards expanding the possibility of line in its physical space to be an architectural element. Perhaps Lambie’s most famous work is an ongoing series of psychedelic, colourful and striking floor pieces under the title of ‘ZOBOP’. Lambie uses everyday materials that others may throw away or disregard to create his works and in this series, he uses symmetrical and precise lines of coloured vinyl tape side by side to directionally map the architecture of the space on the floor. Within each venue that Lambie creates these installations, the line is used as a starting point to map the space in a specific way and reflect its surroundings. However, these lines aren’t always as predictable as one would assume with following the architecture of a space. Lambie uses an element of play and unpredictability in juxtaposition to the clean-cut lines of tape to create interesting shapes and compositions within his floor pieces, thus expanding the possibility of line to be something sculptural.
‘ZOBOP’ Tate Britain, 1999
‘ZOBOP’ Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Gardens 2006
Despite their differences in approach, what both of these artists do is use the line as a starting point for the imagination to explore possibilities within the space in which they exist, whether this is on a piece of paper or on a floor in a museum reception. In all of these works, the line is ever-expanding in its possibility and definition with each viewer’s interaction with the work- each confused and disorientated viewer staring at Riley’s works and each viewer walking along the candy-coloured sculptural lines of Jim Lambie. This endless possibility for a line to be more than just a line is what allows the viewer to have a living relationship and conversation with a line in these works- an experience for whoever will themselves give the line the chance to grow and immerse them.
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Drawing Thoughts
by Zelga Miller
On paper, in wood, through Lino. By laser, in sand, by hand. Of mind, in voice, in body.
Drawing is my method of massaging a knot in my mind. It keeps me lucid when all else is in chaos. It anchors my day; liberates my spirit. It releases the head of steam building.
Drawing has become my way of seeing, of being. It is how I search through the trees to find the wood. I draw to sound out my thinking, to formalise my day, to let the music out.
Drawing started with pencil from life, moved to charcoal, ran across sand and jumped through spray paint. Drawing pooled in oil, shot through moving image and landed mindfully between the lines of woodcut, Lino and mono-print.
Drawing heart, like drawing breath and drawing water, is what I hope to find.
Drawing is fundamental to my work – it is the foundation on which I builds, the basis on which I am able to explore. The root through which I make sense of the world around me.
It is anchored and yet unresolved. Drawing calms yet stimulates. Drawing is feeling. Something. Drawing is seeing. Everything. Drawing is letting go. Drawing provides meaning.
by artist Zelga Miller. https://www.instagram.com/zelgamiller/