Herbal tea for inner calm....chain smoking for intense anxiety.

Feeling rather pensive, I had an excellent elective this morning by the ever dashing Dr. Dan Smith, on Material Culture, which plagues and delights and defines us as a society, within the realm of material culture the whole of expression falls (or so I've heard). Mind boggling stuff....but anyhow I feel like I need to take a big old step back and work on understanding my relationship with the world around me, rather than biting off more than I can chew, which I am in great danger of doing if I continue with this train of thought.


Ok so instead of dealing with the objects (places/music/conversations/people..) that make up my life, I am going to look at the body, more specifically my body, as a form of expression...I should at this point say that I have been reading Christopher Bollas's "Being A Character-Psychoanalysis and Self-Experience" which is dominant in my theoretical thinking right now.....which hopefully explains why I sound a little on the airy side.


So anyhow I have indeed been working with ceramics, the fragility being a trait of the medium that I adore, and tried to do some body casting a couple of weeks ago, which didn't really pan out (which is a big old source of anxiety in my world right now....no physical work to speak of!), so here is my plan for the following week:


I am in the planning process of a performance piece that will hopefully be happening on 03/11/10 and the following 3 days in room A119 at Chelsea, I am still a bit uncertain about how I want to go about this....


The idea that I had was to use stoneware ceramic slip which is an incredible liquidy gloopy texture to begin with and hard and brittle when dry, as a forms of covering my body, layering it and allowing it to dry, while remaining as still as possible, the idea being that when I do begin to move the ceramic will crack, creating all sorts of interesting results, I do stress that this project is in the initial stages, and therefore I haven't really had time to deal with the implications of this on any kind of level, but hopefully I will get something from these experiments that will lead on to other ideas and other pieces.


The form of documentation for the performance is something that I have debated with myself about. I have decided that for the experiment I will have the help of a lovely art student called Jodie Gooch, who will be strapped with a digital camera and a normal SLR with film to document the results, but I do think that I may be more comfortable, having seen the results after the first performance to actually perform to an audience....this remains to be seen.






I shall post the results on my lovely blog.....


ps. if you want to know more about the collaboration with Emine I will write about that tomorrow.