The Dives 2020

How the Dives arrived! 2019

I thought to draw with expanding polyurethane foam contained in pressure cans – three dimensionally as it is sculptural when it expands. But it wouldn’t stand up. So I tried it in polystyrene beads and viola! 3-D drawing (sans printer) is invented.

I wanted to scale the resulting shapes more to the size I felt better suited the materials, so created a deep suspended cloth vat filled with polystyrene beads. It was bright red and too deep for me to reach the bottom. I had to go in. Hence the white coverall, and as the fumes are enough to prevent you ever having children and dying with your lungs lying in front of you, I wore a mask and snorkel – the snorkel connected to the hose off a vacuum cleaner. And with two ladders I climbed into my vat of beads. I dived, unable to breath I rose again flaying about and cursing my surface crew in indistinguishable gurgles – who calmly advised they had unkinked my air hose. Shit. Horrible experience but eventually I completed a blind drawing, allowed it to expand and harden however it determined to do beneath the surface, then hoisted my 3-D drawing out of the depths.

It resembled a hippo’s alimentary canal, but later, when suspended with fishing line and slowly turning, it had more the likeness of an other-worldly cosmos all its own. Suspended, as opposed to plonked trophy-like on a plinth, it was more at home in this kind of floating space that was more akin to that in which it had been born. Still, it was a mere object that didn’t particularly excite me.

But like most actions in the studio (99% of which are ‘failures’) insight comes.
For me, I realised that this artist hadn’t placed his materials on the end of the stick and dabbed them on a piece of fabric; this artist hadn’t hit his materials with a hammer and chisel, nor heated them and rendered them to liquid before catching them in the frozen form.

This artist had compromised his natural environment and dived amongst his materials. Blind and drowning he had become in some respects subservient or at least acquiescent to them. And what was interesting was not the result but the process, and luckily I had had my long-suffering assistant continuously document the whole process with the mantra ‘keep taking pictures of everything’. The photographic results were far more intriguing as they focused on what I was doing and not another (bloody) object! They raised more questions; questions that seemed pertinent; questions that started with ‘What if…’ and what else all this might suggest?

Dive #2, 2020

More prepared and greatly experienced by comparison I entered the white light pool. Light, in surface and weight only, but dark beneath the surface. Like swimming in a lake about the surface is pleasant, but always the threat of the choking deep. By contrast to a water body, the deep is warm due its insulating properties – until the addition of icy water is spread across the surface and trickles down to freeze my body below – the water required to assist the foam expanding and setting. The drawing now has wrapped around my body and I have an uncomfortable hour’s wait until it hardens about me. The artist now trapped in their materials.

Appreciating then that I was unable to exit as I had entered, I determined to break my way out of this suspended womb. I imagine I am a chick pecking from inside its egg. Progress was slower than expected and more like the chick I had to rest. My breathing became increasingly laboured and it dawned on me that each breath fails to clear all the air in the long ex-vacuum tube. I was suffering oxygen depletion and the ‘re-birthing’ became more desperate. Eventually I could move forward, extend a leg outside and then in a final push crumple out of my soft egg; its contents about me – the afterbirth. With me comes my drawing – a growth about and stuck to me. Now I am a product of my materials or at least we are a part of each other.
Is this what AI might mean?

Alternatively the materials might start to emulate civil form. Exotic and new processes have a way, a habit of doing that and eventually ingratiating their way in before taking on their own truth to their characteristics or, in contemporary parlance, before they ‘own it’. I can see myself doing the bidding of my materials. Could they be masters?

Looking back at the trajectory of this work it might mean the next step would be death by materials! But that’s not me and acting it out would be fake. The Dogma Manifesto forbidding superficial action comes to mind.

Postscript:
Recently I listened to a program titled ‘Planning for a Problematic Future’. It advocated ‘scenario planning’. It appeared to me to propose actions one might take if one engaged with Black Swan Theory. It talked of seeking what was possible as opposed to probable; plausible but not based on historic data.
It also spoke of not only appreciating that there are things we don’t know, but also being aware that there are unknown unknowns – the things we don’t know we don’t know.
Perhaps my practice fits within this mix?

The Third Round, 2021
By this time the bath had become full of the detritus of 3D drawing; like a filthy settling pond. Ingress and egress were problematic – and besides, how could I see myself rising out of my materials like some marsh wraith, or as a new product of the process. An electric hoist was fashioned above the bath – and so the video was created – where the protagonist, hardly wraith-like and clutching at all his precious drawings ascends from the bath and continues upwards as all he clutches drops away, and he is lowered again, only to do it again and again. Sisyphean in all respects, or is it the artist’s constant futile search for a (meaningless) recognition?

The next Round – still to come. Post 2023