Setting up the MA Show

Private View Thursday 6pm  5.9.13 at Wimbledon College of Art

Snowdonia long drawing 2013

Four day walk drawing - graphite, charcoal, red and grey chalk, carbon pencil on concertina paper
Angle iron table 500 x 27cm and locally sourced wooden tophttp://www.norburyparksawmill.org.uk/viewHistory?select=Sawmill

  

Snowdonia sound drawing 2013

 Thinking and testing out many possibilities of how to present the five speakers in the MA Show. Investigated ridiculously expensive sound domes, considered fashioning some from a mini speaker and bowl, placing speakers on shelves and many other ideas including welding them on top of metal poles but finally realised a humble domestic fire log best fitted the intellectual idea of the exhibition:
 they are appropriate, easily replaceable and links to an unmonumental art philosophy and relevant cultural history.

Sounds are created as I navigate the changing terrain, walking in Snowdonia for four days, my motion is sound and the moments of moving to another place between drawings.

Speakers inform the installation using current technology 5.1 surround sound.

5 firewood logs

Wood is environmentally sourced from a local farm

http://www.sondesplacefarm.com/wood_and_logs.html

 

Drawing from my feet

Art is about recognition, the identification through a continuous act of comparison in what we see, hear, touch. A chance combination can have surprising results and create something new.
Crossing the fine grained sands of a particular Welsh beach, I noticed how the motion of walking is generating an unusual sound. I am wearing thick soled boots, the movement of the fine sand is causing a clear whistle via the two independent substances and activity.

Many years ago I read:
   Joseph Beuys thinks from his knees, his relationship to art was inseparable from his body which he represented through many differing substances, animal and mineral.

In How to explain paintings to a dead hare 1965, Beuys connected a childhood attraction; the presence of something that nobody noticed, together with an intuition of his own history and time. (Art Forum Summer 1991 p.85)

How to explain paintings to a dead hare 1965

(image found in Gardeners Art History Review) 

A moment of pure happenstance

It was exactly this same year my family rescued and nurtured an orphaned hare after seeing his mother killed. Beuys' art is influenced by being rescued and bought back to life by nomadic tribesmen.

Dad and me and Sammy the rescued hare 1965

I walk, I look and occasionally find something unnoticed.

I work from my feet, connecting sounds, motion, terrain. I think through drawing as I focus on an unknown particularity. The act of drawing takes me elsewhere, each individual encounter continues to impact on memory.

  ‘When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back’.

  Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust. 2002. London, Verso- p.13 

A continually changing viewpoint cannot be understood by standing still.

Snowdonia long drawing 14  Graphite, charcoal, chalk, carbon pencil Jill Evans 2013

I move a viewer beyond the role of motionless observer in 

Snowdonia long drawing, continuing the process of its making and exploring the role of drawing as a residual object; it is necessary for a viewer to walk to view.

Here its form is dictated by the process of making but its reality is elsewhere in the mind of the observer.

Each viewer has absorbed and carries with them the multitude of differences of place or situation and frequently encounters these through unconscious reflection, they reveal a link to specific place.

In Snowdonia long drawing the constructed table reflects back into history, culture and place, through the materials used and its presence.

Like a good story endlessly retold, changing and gradually developing, I expect this blog and my drawing to continue on beyond the MA.

Sound Drawing

Sounds carry memories, sound evokes images, sound transports thought to another place.

Sound reflects activity, volume, terrain but has no image, no reality of its own.
Sound has presence but remains abstract.
Sound contains space.
Sound completely belongs to the listener alone. It exists nowhere else.

Susan Philipze:
‘ Sound heightens your awareness of the space you are in’. 2010

Sound relates volume, activity and movement, it contains landscape experiences that colour the unknown. We understand through connecting internal topographies of place, sound, image and knowledge. We navigate this terrain, adding and developing endlessly, our cognition is motion sensitive and site specific.

Snowdonia sound drawing - Jill Evans 2013
I record the actual walking experience of place to construct a sound image of terrain and motion.

The five active speakers allow a viewer/listener to choose their own pathway through Snowdonia sound drawing in their personal real time of listening. The viewer/listener passes through and creates an alternative composition to complete the drawing.

Visual sound drawing 

This image is a sound wave formed by the sound activity of making Drawing 3 in real time sitting beside Ffynnon Llugwy reservoir.

 https://soundcloud.com/sound-out-loud/092-1

 Drawing 3 from Snowdonia long drawing Jill Evans 2013

Folded landscape 1 ink on paper Jill Evans 2013

Drip drip drip, each drop combines to form a chance landscape.

Snowdonia Long Drawing construction

Materials for Snowdonia long drawing

• Three 6 metre lengths of 25 x 25ml angle iron
• 4 metres of sustainable wood
• Four day walk drawing - pencil, charcoal, red and grey chalk, carbon pencil

Task 1. Measure, cut, file, drill, weld and construct table - H. 80cm x L. 400cm x W. 27cm

 

Task 2. Source sustainable wood, prepare, cut and fit
After hunting through reclamation yards, ebay and wood recycling projects I remember:

Norbury Park sawmill collects wood from the site of Druids Grove (detail below) and Along across, around and about the River Mole long drawing. 

  



detail TQ 15807 53205 2013



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Ancient Yew 2013

 

 

 

This local sawmill uses oak, pine and other soft woods from the area of these walks and Surrey Wildlife Trust's own sites. In many cases these are heathlands where Scots pine is being removed for the revival of threatened wildlife, perfect.

 

 

 

The sound and sites of drawing and walking

Distant England, cover image

Introduction

In the following words I shall tell the story of walking in Snowdonia over a four day stay in Capel Curig. I set off with clear intentions to experience walking in this remote landscape with the possibility of a diversion into somewhere unknown or a chance occurrence. As I move through this terrain I will look, listen, notice, respond, connect and explore the impact of walking, drawing and memory. I will examine how drawing might enquire and communicate the little differences I find that could reveal a link to specific place.

As I travel along this path I will be discussing my reasoning and purpose in more detail through a gradual expansion into a wider culture, returning with knowledge of elsewhere.

Soren Kierkegaard goes for a wander at the optimum pedestrian pace of three miles per hour he considers this to be the speed the mind functions well at.

But unlike Kierkegaard being ‘so overwhelmed with ideas he could scarcely walk’
I hope to bring this story back to the individual reader.

To continue reading see pages - The sound and sites of walking and drawing

Walk On, passing through an exhibition

Exhibition - Walk On: 40 years of Art Walking, Pitzhanger Manor House

The Walk Book and CD, Janet Cardiff, 2005. Walks in Paris, London, and New York.

I am sitting on a park bench in Ealing and switch on Janet Cardiff’s narrative. Instantly I am connected to her reality, she is sitting on a park bench, in the very different urban environment of Central Park, New York. She describes children on bikes passing by and exactly at the same moment children cycle past me, here in London. I listen to more descriptions but wander off in my mind as a cat has just approached and a group of people gather round to stroke it. A choir is practising: she explains’ I am very bad at linear working; I use an open ended narrative, skipping from one thing to another’. I listen to more fragments as she passes through the streets of New York and begins to distinguish memory from perception. ‘In pure memory the temporal sequence of events is shattered’. I agree with that but start to lose interest. No longer able to connect to her continuing observations, I realise that listening to this narrative is displacing me from being here, now. Police sirens pass in the distance, was it here, or there in Central Park? 

Janet Cardiff would like to ‘move a whole room like a time machine from London to New York’. I think she just moved a park.

Simon Pope, A Common Third

We meet walking artist Simon Pope, we cross the park and chat without really noticing what's around. He escorted us out of the park as his contribution in 'Walk On'. We re-enter and admire the blossom and trees on the way back. We sit at the kiosk, eat ice cream and people watch.

Walking and Drawing in Snowdonia

Four days, walking and drawing on remote mountains in Snowdonia, focusing on the rhythmic sound of walking and sounds of the surrounding landscape through the Zoom mic headphones. I first notice how easily I climb the steep gradient to the lake, listening has changed the emphasis, drawing attention away from the usual dominant visual clues of distance. Walking in silence with a new focus on listening has created a different atmosphere and altered my experience of the landscape. Confusingly, it has become internalised and at the same time a vaster space. It is quiet, sounds are distant, the mist occasionally lifts over the ridge and sun glints through from behind it. I stop and draw at a rest point

Up towards lake

My focus shifts; switching from listening to seeing, the steep incline of the path becomes more physical, more demanding. By focusing on the rhythm of walking I hadn't noticed how quickly I gained height, the remote mountain ridge now dominates. I try to respond with quick drawings of the ever changing mists that cover and uncover the varied contours ahead. I recognise Turner’s problems and how he used the advantages of a misty effect to accentuate distance in his work, confusing altering and denying form he develops his idea with and in the mist. His structures do not merely describe what is underneath it.

Walter Thombury, The Life and Correspondence of JMW Turner

 

Drawn from the National Gallery- pencil on small sketch book Jill Evans