17th -30th June 2020 NYSS Sculpture Marathon with Jilaine Jones

How to access the deep, (hidden?), inherent knowledge of a material, the inherent paperyness of the paper? What propels something into the realm of the profound, whilst maintaining its ordinariness? What types of things help us to dismantle the heroic and question the monumental? 

Process as method:

Listening and watching closely to enable us to hear and see the voice and activity of materials.

Meditating on the life of material itself.

Guiding matter’s true nature to reveal and unfold itself.

Methodology of material play:

Materials need not service an idea.

To working alongside materials, rather than continuously imposing ideas ‘onto’ the materials.

Allowing matter to have the final say in a composition.

Forcing a movement to allow the life of each work to emerge.

Repeating processes multiple times to different degrees.

Incremental changes to materials or process, revealing the differences in how pieces are working.

 

How does the vitality of a material transmit phenomenologically?

Through sculptural play: the artist guides the presence of the materials to come to the fore.

Through sculptural presence: its composition and the way it gesticulates through space.

Through the entangling and pulling on objects with a cheerful irreverence, rather than a fearful sanctity of materials.

Through a respect for rawness and the manufactured qualities of materials, letting them ‘hang out’ and not closing them off.

Through the anthropomorphosis of materials. Elements of the sculptures ‘sit up’ ‘lean against’ ‘reach towards’ ‘push away from’. 

 

How is it that these materials can give out a sense of empathy with the human experience?

Can our bodies affect artworks without necessarily implying that human perception is at centre stage?

The artist often has an innate desire to organise, a need to assert a feeling of completeness.

The need of a painter is often to subconsciously balance and order composition.

Perhaps we sit with an uncomfortable encounter, with a set of materials that confronts or even affronts the senses. What can boring materials tell us?

Silent meanings exist in the work when materials seem to mirror back a relatedness to our everyday experiences.