The squares really are are back, well, I have been experimenting with them since last summer but in terms of the public eye, they are back. This is the next in a line of several developments for 'Somerset Reacquainted', it's a collaborative book initiated and being put together by artist Nina Gronw-Lewis and I'm really happy to have been able to submit a page for it.
Somerset Reacquainted is a 'creativity in isolation' project initiated by artist Sara Dudman, you may recall seeing a previous post where I submitted work with an artist led group, this is the link if you would like to read Somerset Reacquainted July 2020. Just over 60 artists were/are involved with everyone submitting work to be shown on Instagram and the S.A.W website, we were then able to have a physical exhibition, when lockdown restrictions were lifted, at the Somerset Rural Life Museum in Glastonbury. A really wonderful collection of art, which really felt like you were exploring the local area and the way the artists worked and what it meant to be in Somerset in an unprecedented lockdown event.
I jumped at the chance to be involved in this new stage, it feels like a very special project and I am encouraged to pursue this line of artistic enquiry with my photographic diary and collages, followed by my watercolour squares.
I am often inclined to throw more at my artwork, being minimal sometimes doesn't feel like enough, but I like exploring this avenue born out of time in lockdown and to see where it takes me, which is partly what this project is about. This is very much about time and reflection as well as mark making and it has felt very natural and intuitive.
I have written some text on the submitted page which is is as follows...
''Marks made in lockdown. Instants, moments, days, weeks, months. Photographs, tiny snaps of creativity caught over Autumn/Winter 2020-21. Thinking a lot about time and how it moves and how it's relative. Daily life minimised and remembered in small squares of watercolour.''
I have also been curious about perception of time and when working on this project I decided to read up a little more about it, I felt particularly caught up by this text from the book 'The Structure of Time' by WH Newton-Smith.
"Without meaning to be terribly enlightening we might
truthfully say that time is a system of temporal items whereby temporal items
we understand things like instants, moments, durations and so on. This is
unenlightening since, even granting its truth, we are accounting for the
obscure notion of time in terms of the equally if not more obscure notions of
instants, moments, durations. With regard to these temporal items most of us
are, I suspect, rather like Augustine. In non-philosophical moments all is
clear and the permeation of our thought and conversation with reference to
temporal items is no barrier to comprehension. However, we need only ask
ourselves in an idle moment just what instants are for all to seem totally
obscure. For in general any type of item of which we can ostensively
give instances seems less problematic than any type of abstract item about
which we talk without being able to display examples. Temporal items, in virtue
of being abstract items, seem more problematic than items like events,
processes, occurrences and so forth which we think of as being in time. For we
can have experience of items of this latter sort. If, Hume-like, we call up the
impression of a particular moment, we at best produce the faded image of some
event that happened at the moment. Like the Human soul the moment itself
entirely eludes our grasp. Time, then, in virtue of being a system of abstract
temporal items, is a rich source of philosophical perplexity. Consequently, we
expect a satisfactory general account of time to include an account
of what we are talking about when we talk about these temporal items."
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