I found myself debating whether I should dedicate the little spare time I had to art or to doing my Portuguese grammar homework, when the solution became obvious, “Grammart”. I have already used a lot of the odd leftover objects in this house for the parallel project. This time a lampshade and a pitcher stood out as perfect supports for my grammar homework. The idea is to merge old items from the house with something personal and present, like my struggle with Portuguese grammar.
This is the result after some hours of homework, enhanced by some scribbles by my granddaughter.
This piece can be strategically placed as a flower vase and allow me to cast quick secret glimpses on the rules during a conversation in Portuguese.
It was an obvious and simple idea, but I am happy with the result. I think the scribbles add a clearly contemporary style to the object, whereas the shape and the rusty signs of ageing are clearly from another time, so the merging of different stories work well here.
For the lampshade, I try my hand at embroidering.
I am a beginner at embroidering, but instead of trying to be neat and look more expert, I am exaggerating my clumsiness. I want the beginners look of the embroidery to reflect my beginners mind with the Portuguese language. Also the lampshade already has machine made embroidered flowers and I want the handmade imperfections to contrast with the machine made and uniform shapes.
The very useful phrase “O gate tem uma chave”, meaning “the cat has a key” was automatically created by the language learning platform, and I just love the absurdity of it.
I chose to keep the piece monochrome and rather spacious and believe the balance between the existing pattern and the embroidered words work well. Also it is again a very clear contrast between different worlds that reflect the gap between the history of the house and what we bring to it.
In several of the rooms, a lampshade is left dangling from the ceiling and some curtains left on the window. In a way, these lonely left over objects just emphasize the emptiness of the room.
This room is to the North and always cold and dark. It has a weird shape and really low ceiling to one side. When I first saw it, it had very much very dark, heavy furniture in it and I can still feel the energy of this dark heaviness lingering. It took me a good while to even clean it out and it is definitely the space I have spent less minutes in.
I will change this by making “an empty room” one of the objects for the parallel project and by using this whole room as my sketchbook to record many of the stories I hear about the village.
Hera I am, ready to start. A whole white room as my white page. And now I need to decide where to put down the tip of my pen.
The dangling lampshade seems to be the center around which the space moves and I climb the ladder to start there.
I start with my neighbor Donna Maria’s account of her first memory from when she was 3 or 4 years old and still little enough to be carried by her mother.
When I switch on the light, I am so happy I chose to start at this point in the room:
I start another story on the wall to the East, about Maria Jose walking to school with her little brother, the 4 km to the nearest primary school.
On the back wall, her granddaughter has a dog called Boss.
I realize that all three stories start with relationships- to the mother, to the dog, to the brother. I decide to leave the Western wall to a lonely figure- Donna Laura from the house on the other side of ours.
Her story is very sad. I will let it evolve around the figure in time.
I have written another blogpost about all the glass I have found, and some of the pieces are clearly from a car. I decide to let other parts of the walls start with stories about the cars from which these glasses came- using this room as a sketchbook:
I prepared several different pens, with the idea of letting fainter drawings lie further back in time than thicker, clearer drawings. I will let go of this though, as I will use the walls more freely and allow myself to grab whatever pen is at hand at the moment.
This is a short video of the current situation:
I am planning to continue filling the walls here with snippets of narratives from the house and the village, until they connect in a web of stories. When the walls are full, I might use a torch to film it in the dark, with just the lit up parts flaring up to be visible- again making the connection to the cave painting. Possibly, I use an IPhone torch, as this is a modern cave painting.
When the walls are filled and filmed, I will probably paint it all white again.
This blogpost is a summary of a tutorial with my tutor Emma Drye that focused on the parallel project and critical review, as well as a beginning research into some of the artists and aspects that came up during our video call.
My parallell project is centered around the changes that we are making in an odd, old house, including many peculiar objects left behind by the former owners. I am using this house as a nexus of narratives about the village and its inhabitants and relationships. As a family, we had originally planned on renovating the house while living in Lisbon- instead we suddenly moved here full time overnight at the beginning of lockdown due to the Covid 19 outbreak and so merged our own story as a family with the place at this peculiar time. While deconstructing the home it is a dissonant place with too many influences. On one hand I am trying to listen to the crazy patterns and angles, on another I am wanting to strip everything down to calm and quiet Scandinavian views, and on yet another impulse, I am gluing eyes and spiders to the walls for the site specific installation.
I was concerned with my parallel project taking off in too many directions and becoming too diverse and becoming difficult to coalescence into one body of work. My tutor encouraged me though to embrace the multiple , versatile aspect of it. She compared it to a family or the movements of a symphony- both images that really resonate with me. The notion of having to achieve something coherent and beautiful is not contemporary any more. Instead I can allow all the different aspects to come forth, it could for example be seen as a series of rooms , one more emotional, the other more rational, the family room and so on and let the artworks speak to each other. So for example an empty room with chairs and cast shadows speak about tension and loneliness, a much more private work . (Shortlink:https://wp.me/pbt6jU-tD) On the other hand, the project took a social turn in a video that I did with my partners family, using many left over items from the house to build a symbolical “home” as a team/familybuilding activity. Emma Drye found the video caring and responsible while still leaving space around what was said in the interviews.
In many of the works, especially the intuitive painting pieces, for example on stripped down wallpaper (Shortlink https://wp.me/pbt6jU-tg) or on showercurtains (Shortlink https://wp.me/pbt6jU-sH) I suddenly see eyes appear. Emma Drye commented on a missing piece from the intuitive markmaking to suddenly eyes or a face. How and why am I including faces? As eyes appear frequently, she encouraged me to look closer at how to draw eyes- looking at Rembrandts etchings for example.
We continued speaking about the Critical Review. Home and belonging are two ideas which overlap and are my first key words that keep coming up. I will start my research around these and look for a question emerging that can become the red thread of the Critical review. We discussed exclusion and inclusion. Emma suggested that the globalization of the internet and modern life might cause an anxiety or sense of threat in some which may make nostalgia and things like nationalism or the local feel safe and attractive. That may or may not relate to the theme, but she pointed out how belonging always is a two sided coin and often has winners and losers.
So far, I have looked at 5 different approaches to Home and Belonging :
1. Landart – directly using the the elements available to address universal, general themes , the immediacy creates a sense of belonging. Artists like Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy stand out here, working directly with the land that is familiar and home for them.
I feel very touched by the art of Ana Mendieta who is often using her own body, and the elements of earth, water, air and fire to connect to nature. She left her native Cuba very young to come to the USA and said “I was torn away from the Motherland- one of the reasons I have gone back to work with nature”. During this course, my own practice has been pushed further away from traditional drawing and painting on paper or canvas. I started using my own body for full body prints and created a Landart installation with sticks as a nest, where I then lie down naked for a photo session, also with my daughter and granddaughter. (Shortlink https://wp.me/pbt6jU-qD) It was a beautiful and highly symbolical act for me to painstakingly build the nest with sticks from the surrounding fruit trees that we had been pruning- connecting drawing in space with this land that has welcomed us, with the fruits of earth, to create a symbol of our staying and feeling safe and welcome- a nest.
There is a quality of touch, a sensual quality to the work, when being covered in paint, or in sand or when scratching the hands on the many twigs of the nest, that becomes an important part of the experience. When looking at the photos of Ana Mendieta’s series “Silueta”, I can feel that same visceral, tactile quality of the work. There is a quest here for a sense of home in nature and in her own body. I would be curious to explore Ana Mendieta’s work in more detail.
2. Home as a subject- when a specific place is recurrent and the main subject of the work, like for example Georges Shaw’s paintings from scenes of the council estate where he grew up or Andrew Wyeth.
3. Home as the place of the work, like for example Jeremy Deller creating an exhibition in his own house . This is in a sense what I am creating here at the moment with my parallel project- transforming the house itself , so it becomes both the place and the subject of the artwork.
4. Artists dealing with the lack of home and belonging, like for example a huge amount of refugee artists. Here I can for example mention Anahita Razvani Rad who came to Britain 15 years ago and is painting war scenes from Iran.
I am also thinking of the three dimensional work “On longing” by Melanie Walker that I saw in an exhibition in “the Carpintarias St Lazaro” in Lisbon earlier this year and that left a lasting impression on me. In this work she has combined textiles with photography so that the images are hanging and the viewer can walk through them.
Walker is using the image of a house as a metaphor addressing themes of longing for belonging, a home, homelessness on the search for a safe home. Her figures are all carrying this metaphorical home on/in their heads.
(my photos from the visit)
5. Excluded even when you are included, here I mentioned my own experience at always being the foreigner, no matter how many fruit trees I plant here and in a wider sense- how modern life and increased use of the internet leads to a general feeling of alienation and isolation.
Emma Drye also sent me a long list of interesting articles, podcasts and writers that could be starting points for wider research. I am starting here to take a look at some of the suggested.
In the article “Art and belonging ; On Place, displacement and placelessness, Alsion Young takes a look at the role of street art in connection to these themes.
These are some sentences I found most interesting as starting points:
“the work of artists such as Ian Strange, Francis Alÿs, and Stanislava Pinchuk, who make art located in displacement, dislocation, and dispossession. How can art respond to the now widespread phenomenon of displacement and disconnection from place? How can street art engage with placelessness? What can placelessness and displacement teach us that we might use to resist the co-optation of street art from place-making to place selling?To pose some possible answers, or to begin a conversation around these questions, I consider here work by three artists. Two have been known in the past as street artists or graffiti writers; one has always been considered a fine artist. All three combine multiple practices in their work. All work in and away from their ‘home’ location; all of them seek to problematise ideas of place, home, and the inhabitation of space In Ian Strange’s work, the home itself becomes a vacant site of trauma and loss; in Alys’s work the mundane acts of urban life such as walking, freighted with uncertainty of meaning, show how we require fences and borders for meaning and order; and in Pinchuk’s work, we see how the places that we take for granted are always about to be overwhelmed by a wave or to collapse into an earthquake or to be destroyed by war or radiation – the things we hold on to are always on the point of being lost. Despite what developers seek to communicate to us about art in urban space as a guarantor of the value of property, these artworks of displacement tell us that in every place we are on the verge of placelessness; in each of our possessions lies the moment of our future dispossession.”
The TATE has a podcast on Art and Belonging that brought many interesting definitions and voices of different artists.
In this podcast, they explore what it means to belong. How can art make us feel part of something, how can it help us to connect with ourselves and others? Here artists, an author and a poet reflect on their experiences of art and belonging:Tracey Chevalier, Lubaina Himid, Andrew Mashigo, Anahita Razvani-Rad, John Hegley, and Corey Samuel.
To belong- to feel an affinity with something
I think I belong in the person I ve become
Belonging- a sense of being at home, of being a part of a place
Lubaina Himid: I came to Britain when I was 4 months old ,(…) and in those 60 odd years in between, I have negotiated ways of how to feel part of this place. But if you are a person who has come from somewhere else, and everyday people ask you where you are from, you develop a script. Of course my script reads that I am from Zanzibar, and it sounds like a movie, it sounds exotic, and other, and then it becomes more important than anything else
Anahita Razvani Rad: Since 14 years in the UK, I paint Homesickness, immigration, identity, memory, dealing with all of that, in order to explain that to myself I started painting from photos what you get in the media here, war, soldiers, women in black tchador. I was living during the war for 8 years in Iran and my paintings still keep me part of it, they keep me grounded, its a kind of homesickness, trying to still be part of the life, the country I left 15 years ago.
To belong, to feel connected and content in the moment. I started looking at my life as the small things that make it all together, like noticing the light in the summer mornings in the north of England Noticing the details, not as much belonging in a bigger political sense, but I think I belong in the person I have become
To belong- to feel a sense of recognition
So in this podcast, several definitions of belonging stand out:
To belong- to feel an affinity with something
To belong, to feel connected and content in the moment
Belonging- a sense of being at home, of being a part of a place
To belong- to feel a sense of recognition
This is a quote found by Emma Drye, (from BEGINNING WITH BELONGING AND NONBELONGING IN DERRIDA’S THOUGHT: A Therapeutic Reflection Author(s): Charles E. Scott Source: Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal , Fall/Winter 1991, Vol. 74, No. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 1991), pp. 399-409 Published by: Penn State University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/41178547)
“The thought I want to pursue is that in belonging together as we do we are also in a situation that I shall call nonbelonging. I mean that there is something about language and tradition to which we cannot belong”
The Cambridge dictionary defines the meaning of belonging:
the feeling of being comfortable and happy in a particular situation or with a particular group of people. to feel a sense of belonging
I am really quite surprised by the “happy” and “comfortable” that seems to be associated with belonging in the more common defintions, as I am sure you can feel belonging to a very ugly and uncomfortable place for example and not be happy about it. Also, I believe a catastrophe or an extreme and terrible situation like a war would bring people together with a sense of belonging that is neither happy nor comfortable.
I continue my research with an exhibition about Psycho buildings at the Southbank centre that Emma Drye recommended, and which luckily, The Guardian did an “in pictures” for:
This exhibition brought together the work of artists who create habitat-like structures and architectural environments that are perceptual and physical spaces as much as psychological ones. Visitors were invited to immerse themselves in ten atmospheric and unsettling installations that explored and questioned the way we relate to our surroundings.
Artists included: Atelier Bow-Wow (Japan), Michael Beutler (Germany), Los Carpinteros (Cuba), Gelitin (Austria), Mike Nelson (UK), Ernesto Neto (Brazil), Tobias Putrih (Slovenia), Tomas Saraceno (Argentina), Do-Ho Suh (Korea) and Rachel Whiteread (UK).
Ernesto Neto
Neto’s installations are large, soft, biomorphic sculptures that fill an exhibition space that viewers can touch, poke, and walk on or through. They are made of white, stretchy material—amorphous forms stuffed with Styrofoam pellets or aromatic spices. The shapes and the sheer scale of Netos work is really impressive. There is something very organic to them, a little like walking inside a living organism.
Michael Beutler
Beutler takes existing architectural elements and transforms them into constructions that evolve into installations. These compositions, in turn, inherently unite a dual function that is both architecture and sculpture.
For the above exhibition he arrived with a huge amount of tissue paper that he then installed directly on site.
Los Carpinteros
“Show Room” by Los Carpinteros was made from Ikea and B&Q furniture, painstakingly taken apart in a mock-explosion and hung from thin steel wires. It looked like a massive and impactful installation, like stepping into the midst of an explosion.
It reminded me of Cornelia Parkers “Exploded shed”, which I found more subtle , also in the way it worked with light, and in a way more effective as it touched something more personal.
(Belonging through recognition)
Another work by Los Carpinteiros that I found interesting is a shelf of drawers in the shape of a hand grenade, also in between the familiar and homey and the dangerous.
Gelitin
An artists group from Austria, they are known for creating sensational art events in the tradition of Relational Aesthetics, often with a lively sense of humor.
For this exhibition, they created a boating lake complete with dock and three small wooden boats, installed on one of the Hayward’s sculpture terraces, where visitors could row around.
Rachel Whiteread
Rachel Whiteread’s installation for this exhibition was made up of 200 doll’s houses from her personal collection, assembled over the last 20 years.
In Tate shots; I wanted to preserve the everyday, I wanted to give authority to some of the more forgotten things, stopping it in time and casting it in something solid
A thoughtprocess that has been illustrated by sculpture
Looking at the domestic in terms of realtionships with people and the relationship that people have with their homes, relationships people have with their furniture and trying to bring all those things together ( see Daniel Miller, the Comfort of things)
and quietly talk about some of the darker things
cast from the space under the bed (shallow breath) in plaster, later in Amber in rubber
House 1993, I am very proud of it, its a real sense of achievement
quite extraordinary sculpture that touched people in many different ways
mummify the air in a room, solidify
Mike Nelson
contemporary British installation artist. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2011
Nelson’s installations always only exist for the time period of the exhibition which they were made for. They are extended labyrinths, which the viewer is free to find their own way through, and in which the locations of the exit and entrance are often difficult to determine.
His major installation The Coral Reef (2000), was on display at Tate Britain until the end of 2011. It consists of fifteen rooms and a warren of corridors. In 2019, from March to October, he transformed the Duveen Galleries in Tate Britain with his new installation called ‘The Asset Strippers’, a collection of objects from post-war Britain that framed his childhood.
Emma Drye also provided a lot of possible background philosophy etc if I want to look deeper into the ideas that we discussed. Here I am doing a quick search, which is not an in- depth referenced research, just an overview to choose what to research further:
“So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Moslems and Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab–Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world. What we have, instead, is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world, presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression.
— “Islam through Western Eyes” (1980) The Nation.[43]”
The person who loves his home is immature
Jacques Derrida on being alone and knowing other people
deconstruction
“there is no out-of-context” (il n’y a pas de hors-texte).
relational aestetics, we do not belong to anyone
Judith Butler on being more than one thing at a time
who you are is fluid, it is not a rigid notion
Stuart Hall on the diaspora and being away from home
Community/ cultural cultural entanglement hybridity
Miwon Kwonon place and site
a Korean curator and art history educator. Her work focuses on contemporary art, land art and site-specific art. She is the author of One Place After Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity,
Daniel Miller on making a home
A set of portraits through collected objects- essays , see Sarah Sze collecting household objects for her installations
I am currently reading the book “The Comfort of things” which makes very poignant and interesting connections between things and relationships to people
Portait 1 “empty” , p. 8 “There is a violence to such emptiness (…) There is a loss of shape, discernment and integrity”
Portrait 2 “full” p.31″from this family one learns the artisanal form of love, care and devotion, performed with such subtle grace, creativity and imagination thatbthe ways persons become objects of care and objects become subjects of relationship blend imperceptibly with each other in the overall fullness and artistry of these lives.
In art :
Nicolas Bourriaud – relational aesthetics
seeks to offer different criteria by which to analyse the often opaque and open-ended works of art of the 1990s. To achieve this, Bourriaud imports the language of the 1990s internet boom, using terminology such as user-friendliness, interactivity and DIY (do-it-yourself).[12] In his 2002 book Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, Bourriaud describes Relational Aesthetics as works that take as their point of departure the changing mental space opened by the internet
Bourriaud explores the notion of relational aesthetics through examples of what he calls relational art. According to Bourriaud, relational art encompasses “a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space.” The artwork creates a social environment in which people come together to participate in a shared activity. Bourriaud claims “the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever scale chosen by the artist
Clare Bishop – participatory hells
Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (2012) is the first historical and theoretical overview of socially engaged participatory art, best known in the U.S. as “social practice.” In it, Bishop follows the trajectory of twentieth-century art and examines key moments in the development of a participatory aesthetic.
Her 2004 essay titled “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” which was published in October, remains an influential critique of relational aesthetics
Artists mentioned:
Nicole Wermers
Wermers creates sculptures, collages and installations which explore the appropriation of art and design within consumer culture. She lets objects speak hinting at personalities.
She is interested in how physical infrastructure determines social infrastructure.
Infrastruktur 2015- a series of chrome chairs with fur coats. The coats have an extra new lining, incorporating the chair into the jacket.
Very fleeting, temporary observation you can make in a cafe or restaurant when somebody puts their jacket on the back of a chair in order to claim that little bit of public space, they can privatize it for themselves.
Ceramic tear off notes, heavy , at the same time white- devoid of content. oldfashioned way of communicating
private space vs public space
These are ideas I would also like to look further into.
the materiality is a major part of the work, the materials used and the process become the work
documenting overlooked objects from famous places
the exploded shed
Cindy Sherman
Literally changing identity when acting out different characters in her self portraits
inclusion-exclusion
Jeremy Deller
Here we spoke about the “the Battle of Orgreaves”, reenactment of the minors strike- lead to international fame and later the Turner prize. Public involvment, performance
“social cartographer, psychogeographer, catalyst and Turner Prize winning artist, participatory projects “We are here because we are here”… a real personal impact on the viewer
Graffitti from the mens toilet in the British Library exhibited on the walls of the toilet etc, it spread around the house
from 1996 working with the public, getting a brass band playing acid /house works together with other directors
Strong and stable my arse
reenactment of the battle at Somme
No object left after the event, but it is documented by the public and spread through social media. Deller is not actively partaking on social media, but is very aware of the use of it and how the public will spread awareness of the work through social media. Also the work exists in peoples memories
Social surrealism, Social movements and music and how they relate
the play between the public and the work
Sarah Sze
creates large scale installations with a wide array of objects, she explores the edge between life and art, how something very familiar becomes unfamiliar. the viewer sees every day objects with a sense of dicovery
In the Venice Biennale – US Pavillion 2013- household objects, scale in relationship to my body
Paint- how paint behaves in the space
Improvisation is key
Andrew Cranston
I really enjoyed discovering the paintings of Andrew Cranston. I am always drawn to works that contain a narrative, especially when it is quite subtle like here and remains a little mysterious or dream like. I also liked that he uses old hard cover books as supports- the painting becoming an object and is more intimate, you can imagine holding it in your hands.
the whole family of the artist participate in a sort of soap opera filmed in various IKEA showrooms- it looks like home but is a simulacrum, a false version of something that is supposed to be important, consumerism
I find really interesting in this work, that Guy Ben Ner manages to tick all of the 5 points that I listed as different approaches above- 1.he is using the objects around him directly (Land/Houseart), 2.the subject is the home, and it is 3.made at site, but then it is also a 4.non-place and a simulacrum so 5. all the feeling of belonging falls away and we are just waiting for the security guard to appear.
It is quite hilarious, to see the action among the furniture with dangling price tags, and passers by entering the scene unknowingly. At one point, the son asks the father what private property is. ” It means that this house belongs to us. We are the only ones who have the right to use it. And most important- we have the right to exclude others from using it. -Exclude? – Exactly so, you can claim something as yours the moment you kick others out of it. Private property creates borders, son. The conversation then goes backwards from one owner to the oprevious until the daughter adds, that it started with hunter and gatherers, and suddenly someone claimed land and the others had to pay rent. Strange, as she sais. Further the father explains inheritance and how it holds the property from leaking out. Love is the only thing in the world that does not have a price tag. we can not buy or sell love. Love is what holds the family together. And we hold the property together avoiding it from leaking out, concludes the daughter What about sharing? asks the daughter Father: Sharing is so primitive honey. Animals share.We evolved, do you want to live in a herd? We evolved and rose on our two feet so we can free our hands and point on objects and say- this is mine, we freed our fingers so that we can count Time is a way to calculate an objects value Daughter Children of the future release yourselves from the shackles of the past
In the tutorial, Emma Drye also reminded me that I can centre the Critical Review around my own work. “Remember you can use your own work and circumstances. For example, “a family arrives: notions of belonging and home in my practice” is an open question which you could then support with case studies of other artists you could compare your own experience to. You would need to define hone and belonging, describe and evaluate your practice and make a case for the various elements of your definitions of the two terms in your work. “
Here I take a look on how my own work fits into the different approaches I defined at the start of this post:
1. Landart
The Nest, using raw materials directly from the land // Ana Mendieta
2. The home as a subject- my whole // project centered around the house and the different narratives connected to it- also through the left over objects
the social aspect (the video)
3. Home- a site-specific artwork, A modern cavepainting- the sketchbooks on the walls, site specific art work, merging 2-3
4. Non place, sense of isolation or non belonging
the chairs as a symbol of loneliness
5. excluded even if you are included, expressing the lack of felt sense of belonging
What does home and belonging mean to me?
I believe that after a long detour looking at artists working specifically with ideas of the home/house or homesickness or belonging in a clearer sense, I have come to realize that what I am most interested in exploring is the felt sense of it. What art does strike that feeling of recognition with me? I had looked more deeply into Rachel Whiteheads art and am blown away by the genius of casting the space under the bed in “Shallow Breath” or the massive and ingenius project of “House”, which raise many questions around the everyday, the overlooked, the home, but it does not feel like the questions I am asking myself.
So I started out with focusing on the parallel project and this definition:
Belonging- a sense of being at home, of being a part of a place
But I have arrived at being more curios at looking at
To belong- to feel a sense of recognition
There is a sense of recognition when I look at the work of Ana Mendieta. A search for belonging that I can understand. Where home and belonging would be coming home to my body and feel the elements around me, rather than identifying belonging to a house, or a country.
When I look at the paintings by Karin Mamma Andersson, there s a different sense of recognition. There is something deeply Swedish, resonating with the dark deep forests of my Northern childhood memories, even if the narratives of the paintings are obscure. There is a certain darkness there that also feels like home. I have watched several documentary movies around the work of Karin Mamma Andersson, and it would not be possible to pin down her narratives to any specific subject, she seems to be very intuitive in her choice of very different imagery that inspire her, and has collected an impressive image bank to work with. Despite that there is a note in her work that sounds like a distant home for me.
I just watched an interview with Karen Mamma Andersson on American television Twilight talks. The interviewer also points out that the paintings are very Swedish, to which Andersson just laughs. But she goes on to explain how the surrounding dark, with the long winters that you start feeling in your body even at the end of June when the days get shorter, of course influences you to the very core.
A very different artist: I have recently discovered the work of Nijdeka Akunyili Crosby and find it fascinating how the layers of how she identifies herself flow into her work. She uses her family album, her own experience, plants from Nigeria and plants from America and wants to talk about that space between being a Nigerian artist in America. I come from a very, very different background, but there is again a sense of recognition in the multilayered complexity of being . The artist creates individuals that are multifacetted, like a woman with an oldfashioned hairstyle from the countryside but a high fashion dress that speaks to cosmopolitan life in Lagos and the setting might be modern architecture in New York, but with a TV set from the 80’s, so it is impossible to put either the character nor the setting in a clearly defined box- because it doesn’t exist. What you see makes sense but you don’t know what you are looking at because it doesn’t exist.
There are more and more people who for various reasons live in many spaces simultaneously at the same time and this is where Nijdeka Akunyili Crosby wants to get with her work, to these multilayered spaces where you slip in and out.
Maybe being Swedish- German with a half Lithuanian daughter and half British- half Swedish/German/ Lithuanian granddaughter and Portuguese partner and having lived in at least 30-40 places all over Europe, Australia and Asia before quite suddenly arriving and trying to settle in this very odd and also multifacetted house in the Portuguese countryside, there is a confusion in the narrative that I recognize as home.
So where does this leave the question for the critical review?
I believe i have lost the key word “home” as it has become less relevant than the felt sense of belonging. The “home” is still very present in my practice as the work that I am doing is happening around the narratives connected to a specific house. But it is really this deeper recognition that is interesting here, and how someone else can sense it from a very different place or being.
Becoming part of a narrative- Notions of belonging in my own practice and looking at other artists.
Belonging as a sense of recognition in my own practice and that of other artists
Five aspects of belonging with examples from my own practice and looking at other artists
(coming back to the list at the top of this post)
The deconstruction of a house- exploring a sense of belonging
How can I express a sense of belonging in my work?
How can my work make me feel part of something, how can it help me to connect with ourselves and others? Connect with a place?
In many of my works for the parallel project, I have looked at how our history in the house, which started when we moved here abruptly on the day the Covid 19 lockdown started, intertwines with the story of the house or the objects in it.
We ended up spending 3.5 months in the house with my partner, daughter and granddaughter and our friend Tom.
My partners parents and sister with family were now coming to visit us and see the house . This was the first time that we all met after the long isolation brought by the pandemic.
I wanted to include them all, and connect them to the story of this house that I am exploring through various artistic projects. I initiated a “performance” or “happening” where I invited everyone to collect various bits and pieces of left over objects from the former owners, to collectively build a symbolical house. I was aiming at deepening the conversation around what home and belonging means to us- a subject I am exploring for the Critical Review. After having spent weeks confined to our respective homes, these feel like very relevant questions. Also what it would mean to NOT have a home, as a homeless person or a refugee.
It was an extremely hot, windy and dusty day and I was truly amazed at how enthusiastically all of them joined in and played along!
This is our final “home”:
And here we are proudly posing for the groupphoto:
It is harder than it looks to build something as simple as this shelter!
After the action, I did a small interview with every member of the family separately and created the below 5 minute video:
My main objective here, was to include this side of the family who were new to this part of our story with this peculiar house. This worked wonderfully- everyone participated eagerly and all mentioned how they had felt the team spirit while building.
The film got very “nice” and positive and everyone had nice things to say about family and being together. In this sense, I believe the action was a success. In truth, like most families today, this is a patchwork modern family, with many differences and the harmony we felt on this day, was quite exceptional. It was not the aim of this action, nor of the movie, but I would be curious to also explore how we all, despite having homes and families, struggle to feel belonging.
Our latest interventions with paint pots and brushes has brought a sense of transformation to some parts of the house. We are slowly taming the wild patterns and pipes and colour explosions.
We are joking that we have moved from a Pedro Almodovar movie to one by Lars Norén. Two left over chairs appear in the room, and the cold white/grey surroundings with a single lightbulb hanging transform the scene into an interrogation room.
I am walking past this weird random scene in different lights of the day, and start documenting the different atmospheres.
Stepping out from the kitchen into this new reality really highlights the contrast:
Take the walk with me:
I am still savoring the trip of going to our wild bathroom for a little longer- before our Scandinavian sparsity will creep in here too.
Drawing on music for Assignment 3 opened up a desire for more spontaneous and intuitive drawing that I continue exploring here. After drawing on left over shower-curtains, I discover a new interesting support in the wallpaper that I pull down from the ceiling of the living room.
Our living room has fake wooden wallpaper on the ceiling and one pink wall behind an industrial set up of pipes, pared with our sparse, last minute quarantine thrown in furniture, besides the ever present wild tiles of course.
It is a relief to start steaming and pulling down the fake ceiling.
While doing so, I am thinking of all the stories these walls and ceilings have heard, of all the laughter and tears during the many years in this house. When I realize that I can pull off rather large chunks of the paper at a time, I see how this can become an interesting support for drawings:
It is the lockdown of the Covid 19 that brought us here so quickly and intertwined our history with the ones of the house. Tom Woodfin, my dear friend who is sharing this time here with us has made me aware of the composer Marcus J Buehler who has translated the DNA structure of the virus into music:
Viral Counterpoint of the Coronavirus Spike Protein (2019-nCoV) by Markus J. Buehler on #SoundCloud
This piece is roughly one hour long. I will use the old wallpaper as a support for intuitive drawing while listening the the music from the Covid 19 virus structure. In this way, I connect the many stories absorbed from the house, with the beginning of our story here.
I tape the stripes of the wallpaper to the wall of my studio:
I find they look like ancient scrolls and decide to use only Indian ink for my marks, curious to see what spontaneous new story will emerge.
After one hour of loosing myself in the lulling sounds of the virus, combined with a breathwork mix by Tom Woodfin based on the above musical piece above this is what emerged:
As well as connecting our own presence to the house, I was curious to really feel into and listen to this musical interpretation of the virus. It is something so difficult to grasp on a conscious level, and I was hoping to find this way of feeling into what is happening.
What came out of this listening, was a feeling of overwhelm and tiredness. There was no feeling of threat or danger, I saw more a cry for help. There were many tears cried by many eyes and more water than that, some boats and many drops.
This was a fascinating way of exploring how I felt about the Covid 19 virus, which on a conscious level brings up more questions than answers. At the same time, it was an interesting way of connecting our story to this support that has soaked up so many stories told in this house.
Among the many treasures of old left over items in the house that I am using for this parallel project, were two shower – curtains left hanging. I decide to approach the same process of painting to music using these two very different large curtains as supports.
I start with a curtain with a plastic feel and a maritime theme with sailboats and seagulls:
I choose Portuguese music- Fado- with lyrics about the sea and longing. Fado is traditional Portuguese music and it is full of feeling and tears and sad lovestories, that I can very well imagine associated to this village close to the sea. The Portuguese word “Saudade” meaning “Longing” has a special place both in the language and in this type of music.
I was imagining starting by just closing my eyes and moving to the music, but I immediately got drawn to let the seagulls carry loveletters and started adding a letter to every bird.
I could feel tears building up and let some large sad movements with blue acrylics follow the birds and drops (tears) flow.
I felt the drama building up and grabbed a large brush with burning yellow, followed by white using my whole palms.
As the story became denser- figures started appearing, calling out, clinging, longing, running, reaching.
Different tones had different coloured marks, and I let the layers build up.
This is the final painting on the shower curtain:
This painting is again more a story about process than a final, finished piece, like I experienced with Assignment 3 as well. I felt that starting from a patterned cloth, rather than a blank page conditioned the story too strongly. I was already caught between the lyrics of the music and the motive of the existing curtain, which directed my imagination strongly.
The second showercurtain is in a plain blue grey colour with a silky finish. I feel relief at starting without a print.
I choose to listen to Fado again- traditional, very emotional Portuguese music. Again the theme is unanswered love and longing.
This time, I close my eyes and just let the pen dance over the fabric in movements to the music.
I realize that the touch of this fabric is very sensual, and decide to continue exploring that by painting with my hands and fingers, emphasizing touch.
There are some sharp, painful moments that I see in red:
After approximately 45 minutes of listening to Fado, I have really reached a point of saturation. I step back and see if I can recognize a motive in the musical marks.
It requires pushing the imagination, but I decide to see the face of a lost love in the marks, and bring it forward with black acrylic paint.
The final portrait on the shower curtain is not so convincing- but this process of painting to music brings forward an incredible amount of different marks and layers. It allows for a freedom of marks and use of different media that feels very liberating.
This richness of marks and layers that this free and intuitive approach is adding to the drawings is definitely something I want to continue exploring in various contexts.
In some of the rooms, a solitary lampshade was left dangling when we arrived here. I have collected them and planned to use them both as a support to paint on and as a subject for still life.
They first appeared in Part 3, Project 2, Experiments with mark-making:
And I used one as a support for a fun way to close my rather dark drawings with masks in 2.3 Narrative:
I am now arranging the lampshades in various ways for still life, piling them up instead of hanging them to take them out of their context.
Pencilsketches A4:
Sketches in Payne’s grey and Titanium White acrylics, A4:
I like these shapes and see that they have potential, but it is when I imagine to include the figure that I really start getting excited about this subject.
One advantage with the Covid 19 lockdown, is that my daughter and granddaughter have time to model.
Pencil sketches A4 in sketchbook:
Sketches on the walls of “Parallel project- empty room, modern cavepainting” ( see separate post):
A4 sketches in acrylics with Indian ink:
From here, I took a big leap to starting three big (100×120 cm) paintings in oil on canvas all at the same time:
This is unprecedented. What is happening here is that I am making a very clear and loud statement to the universe that “I am going to paint!”. I spent the last 20 years doing very sensible things before finally starting, so I am not ready to stop. Being in a household where very suddenly we do not have any foreseeable income at the moment, could bring up different ideas, but no- I will food garden and renovate and babysit and work- and I will definitely paint- on big expensive canvases in oil even 🙂
Letting my daughter and the little One wear the lampshades on their heads is a way I find to speak about a lot of the feelings coming up in these times. There is the feeling of not seeing where we are going, or even standing in front of a wall. There is an element of hiding as well. In one motive, my daughter poses nude, emphasizing the vulnerability of the now. In the other, where I photoshop my daughter and granddaughter together before painting them, they are wearing the soggy casual sweatpants that I see almost every day.
I start by covering a white canvas 100×120 cm with a military green acrylic coat.
Once starting in oils, I struggle for a really long time with the background. I have the idea to use a camouflage pattern, but then smudge it, so it is a camouflaged camouflage pattern.
I try this is many unsatisfying ways.
Finally I cover up the whole background with a rather monotonous military green in oil, similar to the acrylic background I started out with 2 days prior. The red stripes just happened, after I listened to a podcast about statistics on Soundcloud, which had similar wave patterns.
I am using a big flat brush all along for the figures, to avoid overworking.
This is the final painting.
I call it “Spring Summer 2020” like a fashion collection. I really like this painting myself. It shows the mixture of humor and fear I feel at the moment and I have captured something very personal in both my daughters and granddaughters postures that make them recognizable to me even with their heads covered. I also like that this painting connects us and our unplanned time here all together with some of the odd old elements of the house that I connect to this parallel project- the lampshades.
The second painting is a nude with lampshade. I choose to paint this much more carefully and try to achieve the right flesh tones. I find that the more careful approach reflects the more vulnerable feeling of this painting.
I placed her in the corner, feeling trapped or without direction. The walls are crashing down on her, there is no spaciousness. I hesitate long about what to do with the floor, but decide to paint brick coloured tiles similar to the ones that are really here, to have a solid floor, instead of letting her hover in something more grey or non distinct.
These brickcoloured tiles could also be outside, which maybe brings more confusion to the painting, which I like.
This is the final painting:
I am happy with the motive and the feeling this painting transmits, but I was too careful in my choice of colours and precious little brushstrokes. I enjoy a bolder approach more.
The last painting does not exactly belong to this post, as it has lost the lampshade. I place it here though because it is a part of the same experience and just a few photos before the one that I chose for this painting, Ria was actually wearing the lampshade, but I prefer to paint her longing expression.
In all three , Ria is also wearing the same slippers and socks- an allusion to this time closed in the house.
I have started this last painting on a linen canvas that I have stretched ( also a new experience.)
I will post the painting here once completed.
At this point, I am just starting on Part 4 of the course, and can see how these lampshades may reappear in the project of Installation or maybe be used for the site specific artwork fro Assignment 4.
I also want to experiment further with using the lampshades as supports.
Since coming to this house, we have had good laughs about the horrible tiles, the crazy layout of the rooms, the low ceilings- which all seemed really funny as we were planning all the great renovations we would do- move walls, open up glassdoors to a wonderful deck, change the whole kitchen and bathrooms of course.
A couple of moths later, due to the Covid 19 virus, here we are all of us safely tucked away without any income. Suddenly we will just have to love the house as it is!
While still believing that it was very temporary, I had some fun painting the kitchen
The bedroom closets
This week, already in quarantine and it dawning that this is not so temporary- the door to Tom’s room:
A couple of chairs:
The door to my room is next 🙂
This is already a very crazy house, but there is no reason to stop now! I am already looking at everything as a potential canvas.
This is how the orange door turned out:
And the door to the gas bottles:
My little assistant is happily painting along with water for now, but she will probably soon discover that my palette is different…
I have used various glass panes as supports for a series on drowning around the well. Now I am considering how these pieces of glass already tell a story of their own. Especially, there is a couple of triangular pieces of glass, that tell the story of coming from a old car. I started out by imagining what narratives I would paint on these pieces of glass, when I realized that just looking at them, the imagination of the viewer could already see so many different stories around this car.
Maybe the pride of driving it shining new all those years ago, a kiss, a road trip, shopping, an accident…
I let these pieces tell their story themselves, by simply placing them in different spots on the entrance driveway or outside the garage.
I am using “the empty room” that I describe in another blogpost as a sketchbook and include two small drawings on the walls about this car:
(my photos from the visit)
Clara's Drawing 2 