Making a mark

Mark-making is not a new thing in my work. (…is anything ever, really NEW…?) Like so many creative endeavours, it is an old thing that is being remade, renewed and recycled, as I circle back around to it with different eyes and synapses, reworking it again in recent art explorations.

Re-marking.

The repetitive mark has threaded its way through my practice since I began making art.

If you really want to pull that thread, and take a journey through the past, you can see how the mark has manifested across the years in my practice - through my text-based works; in my drawings; and in my more recent textile works.

So, why the recent renewal?

I've been thinking about bodies. (Don’t make it weird…)

 What does it mean to inhabit a body? How do we experience and learn through the body, from the body, as an embodied thing? 

Or, more distinctly, how is our experience shaped by the body, and not just by the mind?

This preoccupation with embodiment has made me ponder my approach to making all over again (not for the first time), and I feel like that curiosity, the ‘what if and why’ propositions of the body have led me back to the mark-making.

Creating a mark is such an elemental and primal thing, in the sense that: making a mark represents a direct link between your brain, through your body, to the world.

You, yourself, are having a direct impact; your thoughts are making themselves manifest IN THAT MOMENT.  

This is the key to one of the magical properties of mark-making - it holds and encapsulates a moment of lived time.

Mark-making makes time tangible. 

One of the first comments I get from people in response to artworks that show evidence of mark-making is along the lines of: ‘it must have taken SO LONG’.

People can literally SEE the time it takes. They can map out every gesture, they can viscerally feel the process of making. Mark-making makes time visible in a work. 

Some art forms, like music or film, are experienced IN and THROUGH time. They play out in sequence, and the linear arrow of time needs to be followed to find out what happens next.

Paintings, drawings, textile works lack that time-dependent characteristic: they exist ‘all at once’. These works need to harness other methods to capture the essence of time, to map sequence and story through space.

Mark-making is one of these methods. 

Mark-making aligns me with time.

The repetitive gesture of making a mark anchors me in my body and trains my focus on the here and now.

It can be very meditative. I say: CAN BE meditative; because that meditative quality, that FLOW, is the sweet spot.

However, if I’m in an unbalanced state, if I’m distracted (never) anxious (who me?), resentful (pah!), the repetition of mark-making can be brutal.

I’ve noticed, particularly with the thread works, that as soon as my mind starts wandering or spiralling into stressful thoughts - BAM - immediate knots and tangles of threads. The marks reflect my state of being, and when that being is cranky, my materials will grouch right back. 

The beauty of the process IS that the very act of doing it can help create the calm state I’m after. But it requires a certain willingness to give in to the process.

I’ve got to SURRENDER. 

The repetitive gesture creates a small time-cycle, a protected bubble, like a teeny tiny Groundhog Day. In this right state (not distracted, anxious OR resentful…), time slows down, both condensing and expanding. I’m perfectly in sync with the work and the action; there is nothing but the making of that next gesture, the drawing of the line, the sweep of the brush, the plying of the stitch. 

In some of my previous works, there was such a programmatic system to the mark-making, such a rigid code, that I used to joke that it was like I had turned myself into a giant ink-jet printer, spitting out one small dab of paint at a time, dot upon dot, row upon row.

However, even this could be meditative, sometimes even more so; submitting myself, working away on the assembly line, making my contribution to the greater system of the painting. 

Mark-making is a trace of embodiment.

Mark-making is a visible trace of each gesture of your hand. It’s what is left behind after your body makes its move, and it has a living vitality through this. It is such a fundamental act, to make a mark, leave a trace. 

In a time when AI is everywhere, the act of making a mark with your hand (that is attached to your brain and body) becomes a bit more of an overt, even political, statement. As technology creeps into all corners of our lives, the value of something that is NOT mediated by a machine increases.

I could write SO MUCH more on this, the juncture between art and AI, what a hand-made object means in a world of NOT JUST mass-production, but mass outsourcing and AVOIDANCE of the brainwork, the bodywork and the friction-filled journey of creativity. What the possible impacts of this might mean, and why it is scary and potentially a loss as big as any possible gain. This comes back to my thoughts on embodiment… but I feel like all this deserves it’s own blog post, not just as an part of my mark-making thoughts.

Watch this space…

Mark-making is a paradox.

The hand-made mark is both infinitely human and individual, yet can yoke your hand (and soul!) to a brutal regime of mechanical, eternal repetition. 

While the mark-making certainly manifests some zen-calm meditative, qualities through its connections to embodiment and time, the purpose my mark-making currently serves in regards to COLOUR and my paintings has some potentially less calming (but still very buddhist-adjacent) connotations.

The mark-making is assertive in it’s material qualities, it is tangible, physical, lumpy, solid. The texture it builds on the surface is tactile. It also serves the purpose of fragmenting and breaking up colour. And nestled within this materiality, the fragmentation serves as a reminder, a symbol, a metaphor for a fundamental, underlying impermanence.

In my work it seems important to me to constantly remind myself of this UNCERTAINTY OF LIFE. Visually, my preoccupation with fragmentation, the interruption of any kind of continuity, a tendency towards over-complexifying (yeah, I’ll make it a word…), stands in recognition of some kind neurotic compulsion to learn over and over again (until I really GET it) that there is no stable ground to be found, not really. Everything is impermanent. Life is transient. Get with the program.

The Buddhists were/are all about this. The practice of Buddhism includes building this awareness and acceptance of impermanence - the essential instability and changeability of existence. And to NOT resist it (yep, that is the the tricksy part…).

In previous paintings all this uncertainty was chanelled into the form of the work, the splinters and layers of patterns clamouring and tumbling against each other.

The flat, opaque hard edge colour I used then functioned to balance this fragmentation out, to create some rest for the eye and soul. There is really nothing that screams CERTAINTY more, than a flat plane of perfectly applied, perfectly even, unmarked colour.

Now my patterns and forms have shifted and merged, coalesced and….settled. Clarified. This (relative) calm of form allows me to shift the focus of uncertainty to the colour and surface. This (I think) is some of the purpose of the marks.

Mark-making is my zen-buddhist nature (trying) to make itself seen, in all it’s tricksy paradoxes.

Mark-making is intelligence (gathering).

Lastly, the technique of making a mark IN THE PAINTINGS serves as research for my thread works.

As I’ve remarked before, everything leads and bleeds into everything else. Interconnected, interwoven.

So, I feel like I am being drawn towards the mark-making, in my paintings specifically, as a way to further my knowledge of what happens to colour and form and and pattern when it is created in this way.

The creative ‘what if’ proposition of the textile works is exciting, but also slow to make and thus slow to LEARN FROM. The paintings, while slow, are not AS slow. I can test, trial, explore, find out and RESPOND with a lot more agility.

In this way, the mark-making in the paintings is experimental, it is a process of gathering and accumulating hours of mark-making, colour and pattern intelligence, of embedding this in my brain and body, so that I can then adapt and apply it to my textiles.