The following notes were made during the course of the year it took to create "Her Room". They are part of my private digital research record. I have chosen to record them here as they add a more intimate and reflective context to the work.
Update on Text-based Practice 22/09/2014
The actual text as it appears on the fabric at present is very legible on the household face – that written by black ball point while the writing on the reverse done in HB pencil is less legible as the trace of the pencil is softer. The lines are staggered as much as is possible so they don’t really overlap although the rows are not consistent but vary as unguided writing does. I write on a table surface with a positioning guide fixed to the table but there are no ruled guide lines to follow. The ball point side is written first as it is more robust to further handling than the pencil side which is delicate and easily smudged. The finished work is rolled up as it is done to keep it stabilised and protected.
My evaluation of this:
The liminality of the everyday is expressed in the selection of the substrate media – the fabric – with its porosity from face to face, allowing the symbolic ‘read’ of the external and the internal reportage.
The diaristic content explores how my ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ world as a working artist and main household caregiver are connected but distinct, private but public, unique but universal.
 |
| Pen Face. Text-based Diaristic Practice. |
- Pencil Face, Text-based Diaristic Practice.
The level of consideration of the mundane required for this practice is more intense than that required for the making of the assemblage diaries with their symbolism. This is partially a time thing – the text-based practice taking considerably longer to engage with the making. There is then, of course, a discussion to be had about the complexity of visual language as opposed to written symbolism.
The essential reality of this text will be that unless the observer chooses to examine it carefully, there will be a high degree of difficulty actually reading the content. This creates a mystery – The fabric is obviously covered in a random kind of graphic pattern made of letters but what?, why? how? To me, this speaks of the way we don’t ever really know each other, and especially we don’t really know details of mundane existence as they are not worth observing or sharing. Most of the thoughts I have about my mundane remain private for me except as they direct actions of which there is evidence.
- Both Faces of text-Based Diaristic Practice.
As part of this text-based practice I have been maintaining a written record of the making – not the content but the time spent:
- Time record of text-based practice.
The theoretical elements of the mundane that were under special focus with this aspect of my research practice were the way we ‘perform’ or work in our mundane – we do things habitually and we do them driven by necessity. This research was covered earlier (May 26 summary) but I need to recheck it against the actual expressive practice now I am in an execution mode rather than an experimental mode. As a literate adult the action of writing as a mode of recording is habituated in my life. It predates my training in most other aspects of my mundane, or in my studio practice. Apart from the spoken language it is my principle form of communication. The maintenance of a written format diary either as a stream of consciousness or as a pragmatic record and evaluation of my daily existence has been part of my life episodically for many years. The use of writing to process life is habituated in my life. From my personal perspective this practice should have been very easy.
Issues have arisen:
1. The decision to not use specific people’s names has had a significant impact on how I record. One day I was very tired while doing this practice and I constantly slipped back into the ‘natural’ way of naming the people I was writing about. It took an enormous amount of focused effort to make sure this didn’t happen.
2. The actual nature of the script that is on the substrate is not anything like how I personally write but in this format this is how my hand flows and shapes the letters, without concentration or sustained focus. I have never been trained to write like this either. Very strange.
3. Because of how the actual letters are shaped, the capital ‘I’ is large and overflows between lines. This has made me incredibly aware of how often I write ‘I’ and has had the effect of making me desire to find other expressions rather than the fall back ‘I’ so the sentence structure has shifted and the vocabulary more wandering. What remains unknown is if this would happen if the writing was not going to go on public display in a possible readable environment, or if it would have happened if my hand had settled on a different actual shape of writing that did not use the flowing capital ‘I’.
4. These awareness raise the arguments around self censorship. This last month I have spent a lot of time absorbing Lejeune’s collection of essays on diaristic practice. He talks about self censorship in depth but he also describes his practical experience in reading other people’s diaries which is his academic speciality. He observes that even if the diarist does not deliberately self censor, the way of writing is a coded description of what has occurred as it is impossible practically to record everything. So even if there is no conscious filtering process the reader comes to the diaristic record without the lived experience that has informed that record and it is very hard to fill in the gaps, imaging the unspoken contexts and histories. This, Lejeune claims, also explains why for the diarist themselves rereading their own old diaries is like reading about someone else doing something that is different from the retained lived memory. At the start of this part of the time-based art practice for recording the mundane I made the conscious choice to be as honest and uncensoring as I could be whilst making the respectful decision not to name others involved in my world in this ‘permanent and public’ observation. At times, during the act of writing, I have felt like not writing something that is really on my mind or that has occurred and is not a happy or proud thing to record, but I find these observations of Lejeune’s supportive in enabling me to be direct and non-screening of the topics I cover.
5. There is such a repetitive element in the everyday that a lot of the writing echoes as cyclical and repetitive in content as I perform it but then there is also the aspect of problem solving and processing difficulties which have been given outcomes through this reflection and observation.
Having reached the decision on the media and the execution of the text-based practice the issue of the presentation of the work had to be resolved as well. My mundane that is underpinning this research is a domestic, home based everyday. The idea of the home as the site of the everyday is pervasive in most of the reading I have undertaken but I keep looking at more ideas to see if ‘Home’ can be more clearly defined. Coolen & Meesters, (2012) explain a construct of people-dwelling relations to analyse complexities associated with the idea of ‘home’ from a built environment perspective. They talk about the difference between an environmental object and the affordances attached to it. This phrase ‘The affordances’ refers to ‘the meanings attached to the house, as well as …the process of homemaking. ..’Home’ is a complex, multi-faceted and multi-layered concept whose different connotations are often used interchangeably and/or simultaneously’. (Coolen & Masters, 2012, p. 1-2). Rapoport (1990) looks at the home as a dwelling in a systems approach where the systems include eating, sleeping, and socio-psychological functions such as family life, safety and privacy. As the locus for these systems to be performed, the dwelling assumes the importance of a primary anchor in the total environment. ‘The term primary anchor indicates that a dwelling is the operating base that provides shelter and concealment, and the place from which most people undertake activities, explore and experience the world and where they return’.(Coolen and Masters, 2012, p. 2) This dwelling is considered by some researchers to be set in a dwelling environment which includes those ‘settings that afford functions which the inhabitants want to be realized in the immediate vicinity’. (Coolen & Masters, 2012, p. 3). Other researchers consider ‘home’ to reference the social aspect of family or household or common community rather than a physical construct. But the variety of interpretations of ‘home’ is endless and reflects the complexity of the concept for each of us as individuals. There is however widespread support for the belief that the everyday or mundane aspects of our lives are anchored in the ‘home’. Home as the dwelling will hold our objects that we need to perform the activities of our existence as well as objects of non-physical value – emotional or spiritual objects. My personal take on what the home is, is complex, modified by having been a migrant, and I want to take a separate space to explore this but for me home is increasingly focused in the dwelling, whereas when I first migrated home was source nation. The realisation that home is increasingly focused in my dwelling, especially as my children have their independent lives and my parents are dead or in care the creation of a room form rather than hung wall panels seemed to be more resonant with my mundane.
Reference
Coolen, Henny and Janine Meesters. “Editorial Special Issue: House, Home, Dwelling.” Journal of Housing ad the Built Environment 27, no. 1 (2012): 1-10.
Coolen, Henny and Janine Meesters. “Editorial Special Issue: House, Home, Dwelling.” Journal of Housing ad the Built Environment 27, no. 1 (2012): 1-10.
Reflections on text-based practice up to 08/11/2014
The past three weeks have had a significant impact on this project. Firstly I needed to visit Auckland for nearly a full calendar week, removing myself from my normal domestic mundane and its locus. I made the decision that I could take the project with me and use it to record the everyday as it was in Auckland. I did this with no difficulty and it was a breakthrough for me as it was the first time I had moved the production of the work from the setup site. This was brilliant in that it triggered a redesign of the work site at home to provide slightly more stability to the fabric’s passage from start roller to finished roller. So that was very positive.
On returning from Auckland I became incredibly ill and was unable to do any real making at all. Over the days that I was most ill, all that I could manage was a rote type of writing of the day and the fact that I felt sick. I was basically unable to do any other activity so there was nothing to record on the studio reflections side. I made the decision to leave it bank. This of course generated a glaring shift in the appearance of the fabric but I want this piece to be as close to ‘true’ as possible.
Once I started to write both faces again I was reflecting on this break in the flow, break in the life, really, and I also noticed that the content of my mundane writing about the practical world had shifted with time. I am now around the 60+ day mark in this undertaking. The comments had become increasingly introspective and personalised. This had not been my intention at all and was not the concept I had had for the work when I planned it and started on making it. I reflected on this and decided that I was going to re-focus the recording away from this onto a more pragmatic, dogmatic technical type description of the actual undertakings of the day – minute details of a task could fill the day’s space allocation. This would be far more helpful to me in considering what it is about tasks of the mundane that I could show has value. This is what I want people to read if they choose to read this work, not my personal generalised stuff.
So I am now back to being able to create my double surfaces and it will be with this sharpened focus in the mundane.
The other thing I notice as I write is how limited my vocab is. Often the same words appear in about the same place on sequential lines of text . The word ‘I’ dominates and causes me to try and rephrase the text as it is irksome and seems to be really evidence of navel gazing which is not what the piece is about.
I am not far off finishing the first wall which will have the doorway in it. These first three panels will be rough compared to ones made later on in the year as they have had teething problems.
I want to set up a hanging wire like we plan to use for the gallery in my office and hang these sections once they are finished so I can check and see what is happening and record that and think more critically going forward. I realise that I had become uncritically uncontrolled on this project in terms of content and I need to keep the process of assessment and refinement going all the time or the work will be crappy at the end.
The permanent link to my Exegesis in Scholarly Commons is http://hdl.handle.net/10292/9755.
References:
On returning from Auckland I became incredibly ill and was unable to do any real making at all. Over the days that I was most ill, all that I could manage was a rote type of writing of the day and the fact that I felt sick. I was basically unable to do any other activity so there was nothing to record on the studio reflections side. I made the decision to leave it bank. This of course generated a glaring shift in the appearance of the fabric but I want this piece to be as close to ‘true’ as possible.
Once I started to write both faces again I was reflecting on this break in the flow, break in the life, really, and I also noticed that the content of my mundane writing about the practical world had shifted with time. I am now around the 60+ day mark in this undertaking. The comments had become increasingly introspective and personalised. This had not been my intention at all and was not the concept I had had for the work when I planned it and started on making it. I reflected on this and decided that I was going to re-focus the recording away from this onto a more pragmatic, dogmatic technical type description of the actual undertakings of the day – minute details of a task could fill the day’s space allocation. This would be far more helpful to me in considering what it is about tasks of the mundane that I could show has value. This is what I want people to read if they choose to read this work, not my personal generalised stuff.
So I am now back to being able to create my double surfaces and it will be with this sharpened focus in the mundane.
The other thing I notice as I write is how limited my vocab is. Often the same words appear in about the same place on sequential lines of text . The word ‘I’ dominates and causes me to try and rephrase the text as it is irksome and seems to be really evidence of navel gazing which is not what the piece is about.
I am not far off finishing the first wall which will have the doorway in it. These first three panels will be rough compared to ones made later on in the year as they have had teething problems.
I want to set up a hanging wire like we plan to use for the gallery in my office and hang these sections once they are finished so I can check and see what is happening and record that and think more critically going forward. I realise that I had become uncritically uncontrolled on this project in terms of content and I need to keep the process of assessment and refinement going all the time or the work will be crappy at the end.
The permanent link to my Exegesis in Scholarly Commons is http://hdl.handle.net/10292/9755.
References:
[1] Michael E Gardiner, "Bakhtin's Prosaic Imagination," in Critiques of Everyday Life (Taylor & Francis Books, 2000). 52. Quoting Bakhtin 1993: 56-7.
[2] Janet Holland, "Timescapes: Living a Qualitative Longitudinal Study," Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research[Online] 12, no. 3 (2011).
