Matereality

One of the outcomes of my conversations with the compost is a subtle shift from the act of illusion in painting towards a sense of directness, participation with place. This was consciously a goal for me but I hadn’t quite imagined the reality. The shift seems to have rooted itself in materials, which I had anticipated to be little more than an operational decision (a course requirement?!) but has become something I sense as real, a conversation with something that is alive.

What I enjoy about the source material being literally the material, rather than a stage in translation, is the sense that time is embedded in the experience of making. I can’t really prove it, it’s just a feeling. Tubes of paint seem so presumptious to me now, their conception and production is elsewhere and belongs to someone else, at a different time and place. The interactions with compost are temporal, specific to the now, indexical, they seem to have less to do with myself than painting does and this part is difficult to rationalise. Not as an ego struggle, but wondering what my role as artist is, do I even have a role to play? Or is it all Verity’s doing…

The word translation seems significant, making into something else, artistry, crafting from one thing into something else. In some ways what I am making in the compost drawings isn’t really art as it isn’t really becoming anything else, no real transformation has occurred. The compost continues its busy ways whether in a heap or on the grass or in contact with paper, which is kind of the same thing anyway.