'last thoughts': descriptions No.2

Sara Manser: clay form: detail

Sara Manser's studio practice embraces a number of disciplines including printmaking, painting, drawing  and clay works. This cross disciplinary approach allows the 'aboutness' of her work to invoke a sense of self-contained remainders of experience, as if something that the artist has used or referenced previously now lays veiled or hidden within the surfaces of new works. At present Sara's studio practice is at a point of transition with wall and floor space revealing playful associations between clay pieces and a mix of graphite, paint, wax and timber assemblages. I was curious about the incidental clusters of objects and forms that seemed so deliberately ordered either in anticipation of construction or of something having been recently disassembled. This is 'last thoughts'- descriptions No.2. (1-3 detail images from Sara's studio)

2.

1.

1.

teshima departures

of  paper wax ash and clay

carried on a walled flotilla 

each of its single

collapsing moments

a threshold

a doorway

of self as trace

its ascending affect

like wounds of nostalgia

upon a ground of earliest surroundings
aide memoire
a deliberate

measuring of
material absence 

2.

on visitational walls

the residues of habitat

are placed as devotions 

to the deity of fragments

its stigmata of perceptions

made visible at the verge

of uncommon ground

3.

vestiges of age

time change and decay

visible in each of its departures

constant to every place

surviving folds of surface

mapped

fractured corners

each a single limb of language 

that send thoughts falling

like veiled shards of repose

clinging

to whatever they can find

before it ends

4.

placing the remainders

of each performance

against the edge of a wall

shrines of epic drama

now discarded

the remaining scaffolds

like judgements of perception

waiting for collection

a strategy of placements

apprehended in 

lucid obligation.

3.

You can view Sara's work on:
http://sarajmanser.wix.com/sara-manser-artist

'last thoughts' 1

This is the first of a series of descriptions and reflections that engage in a poetic discourse with the works of  visual  artists. The purpose it serves is nothing more than an attempt to find a counter voice to the academic mode of engaging with the works and studio spaces of artists/students within an art institution. Perhaps the word 'counter' is somewhat ambitious. I'm simply interested in writing descriptions of what artists and art students create and the spaces in which they make. 

The process evolves within a number of  visits to the studio spaces and collecting objective descriptions. I prefer to know very little of the artist's intentions.There's a method that signwriters and painters use to mix colours where you have two jars of paint and you transfer the colour from one jar into the other continuously repeating the action until you have  the required colour or tonal value. This is called 'boxing' and its just how this process feels.

 At this point in time I have approached several of my post-graduate colleagues who have been very trusting in allowing me to spend time with their works in the studio. I've chosen to photograph detail images as it's often how I find a way into the work. The following descriptions are from the works of Jude Roberts and her tarpaulin charcoal drawings/imprints that form part of a creative mapping project focused on the Nature Refuge at Bimblebox in central-western Queensland.The refuge is under threat of a proposed coal mine within the Galilee Basin and the project has brought together a diverse range of creative people engaging with the environment. Jude's tarpaulin works evidence the fragile histories and hint at the possible future of the interconnections within the reserves Eco-system. With very little knowledge regarding their 'aboutness'...these are my descriptions. 

     

you as sky /you as Other

canopied gestures of small histories

traced in lamp, vines and mars black

dark anchors colliding like satellites

creaturely escapes

moving across 

arrowed compass ground

the navigations of a child

finding

milk fish (chanos chanos)

and serpent eel

(ophisurus serpens)

caught in your coiled rope wake

you as water

you as land

wounded and black

a butchers floor

bone white tabula rasa

imagined in madder lake red

 wounds now fatal

your moorings suspended in the landscape

sharing gestures 

and just there something repeats

a bird song returning at your very edge

children swimming in your 

leather book pools

as compass ropes pilot each immersion
believing that one day 

one of us would never re-emerge

to lay with milk fish and eel

history made pendant

beast-like bled of its horizons

dripping dispossessed archipelagos

what was it that escaped here?

tailed or winged now flesh

a canopied shroud 

like veiled maps

feeding spaces empty of coastline

the interior

you as sky

you as Other

Jude Roberts: Tarpaulin in landscape. 

bimbleboxproject.wordpress.com

last thoughts...'some kind of poetry'

                               
This may be the ultimate distraction in finding a purpose for avoiding research writing at the moment but I am wanting to write about the art works of as many different visual artists I can find over the next 12 months...a project that is vaguely associated with a trans-continental group of artists/poets who are interested in cross discipline encounters...we have given ourselves the title of  'last thoughts'...currently I am writing/describing the works of post-grad colleague Jude Roberts who has just commenced a series of drawing/print related works on tarpaulin like forms as part of a community arts project in western Queensland...Jude approaches her art making with a deep consideration of possible outcomes but is someone who takes risks with everything from medium to method...I hope to post my descriptions soon...sp.