WEEK 2: Monday 19th - Friday 23rd

Ha ha! Back again, so we are now up-to-date with current events on this residency in which I am exploring the tools once more, this time being heavily influenced by my grandfather's workshop of which you saw some images from on my first post here. I am aiming to make prints from the images taken and tools on that farm hoping to capture something of the place, my feelings, a connection to those objects that I couldn't necessarily achieve from photography or presenting the actual objects alone. I suppose that is an interesting debate and would require more space and discussion than I have consideration for on a Sunday, but I do wonder if it is possible to find something more, a greater 'truth' through representation of these objects than it is through just looking at them. Can you find a truth through a lie? I think this is something I have always, struggled with, I naturally love to paint, to draw, to make which sometimes I think might not be the best ways of communicating what I want to say, but none-the-less I can't get past wanting
to just make work (and it doesn't have to be 'good' work but more of an expression of oneself).

Currently, therefore, I am indulging by creating by making more over sized prints of tools and working into the previous one to add to the mark making already there. Increasingly, mark making is becoming a prevalent factor in this body of work and I tend to adopt an intense crosshatching/scratching form of mark making which probably says a lot more about my own psychology than it does about tools. This is fine, but if I'm honest isn't what I intended when originally I intended to represent the history and marks on the tools themselves. Hmmmm....I seem reluctant to accept that my work is and has always been more about me than I explain it being all about the tools. I don't know why, but can only speculate that maybe its because I am a more private person than I appear to be.

And could you blame me! I have been scared pretty much to death on this residency!!! You see it is so quiet in the studios and I mean quiet, you can go the whole day without hearing or seeing anyone in there at the moment. So when someone, anyone does decide to pop their head round the corner into my space it scares me half to death! Other than that its fine and I'm usually glad to see most people but that doesn't do my heart any good and might be why I am more reclusive than I first thought.

Where do I see my work progressing next you ask? There are plenty of ideas of which you're just going to have to wait and see...