Day 63

'Some Place Else', Pen on Paper

Knew I was going to be subjected to a  fairly tight time-scale today as I was heading out straight after work to celebrate a friends birthday so I would have had no real time during or after work to fit the drawing in. I had to then attempt to carve a window of time that I could spend in one place, mostly uninterrupted and with some sort of subject matter in order to make sure to get a drawing done. That specific place just so happened to be actually called.... 'Place' the Architecture and Built Environment Centre for Northern Ireland and it's where one of my house-mates happens to work. The environment and space that surrounds me daily has been a common subject matter in much of the drawings that I've done thus far, although it has usually been the space that I have a more direct interaction with rather than that of someone else. This would be one of the the few places I would be for a fixed length of time today so it just seemed to make sense on a few different levels to incorporate it in the drawing process. After finishing today's drawing it also brought to mind a previous project I worked on when I first started studying fine Art at the Art College in Belfast. It involved looking at other people in a space, the things they brought to it and how they occupied that space on a daily basis, which mostly came about as a result of the limited space that was available to everyone. It was interesting to me to see how people negotiated with the space available and made their own identifying marks to label their area and it was something that I figured would lend itself to more exploration... the only issue with it was that someone else also had almost exactly the same idea. So in the first few weeks the work I was doing altered drastically as I attempted to distance myself from the idea, in saying this though there was a logic to the process and the direction it pushed me in was much more interesting than the initial concept. I went from drawing the people and the space, to defining the space in layers to create layered drawings on translucent paper, from this I moved to begin drawing the objects in the space in the same way de-constructing them and rebuilding them in layers, this then led to using the objects in the space to draw images of the objects in the space to eventually building objects that would create their own drawings in the space.In fact the notion of creating objects that draw by themselves has continued to be a major factor in my art practice and something that I continually revisit. Perhaps from what I've just written it is possibly to incur then that sometimes a choice made out of some element of necessity can lead to something more interesting, something more poignant and something that will continue to affect us in the future.