Alive with a different kind of energy
Artefacts and ancient images
Two weeks ago I was looking at the images that appeared throughout 2020, the year of the pandemic lockdown. In the second half of that year, mysterious paintings started to appear which contained ancient human-made artefacts, usually made from stone or clay, which in the paintings were connected to animals and birds by a curious sticky plasma.
The artefacts were new. They had poked their heads out just once before, in January of that year.
A couple of months later, these two stone-age figures appeared. I talked about them in a previous article; here they are in a digitally-coloured version.
Some time later, the figures placed themselves in this surreal landscape:
I played with different elements for a while…
… until eventually I began working in a sketchbook, with randomly selected texts and artefact-derived images (in a sketchbook nobody can hear you scream…).
I began to look at artefacts and images of all kinds, from India, Egypt, South America, Greece, central Europe.
I was still basically using my free line; there were no preliminary sketches, no plans. Later I felt that the flow of steady making gradually caused the line to become too safe, too accurate, but for now I was just enjoying exploring the forms and experimenting with colour.
When this next one appeared I thought, ok, out of the sketchbook now, I want to see these on a wall.
From time to time I would wonder about what I was doing. Wasn’t I just being derivative, copying things made by other humans in the past, instead of having my own ideas? I told myself that my personal contribution was in the choosing of the images, and how I arranged them together. I wasn’t at all convinced by this; it seems to have been a way to try to soothe the enculturated ego which still thought it had to find ‘its own’ vision. In fact I knew that I wasn’t doing the choosing, or the arranging; I was just exposing myself to endless images, letting the artefacts choose themselves and arrange themselves in whatever way they felt like. It was an opening, a receiving.
It’s only now that I see how this way of working made sense in relation to the original impulse to get away from personal vision, and the yearning to connect up to energies that were deeper and wider than my own cultural and individual experience. I felt like I was bringing sculptors and image-makers from the past into the present, honouring the responses they had made to the vastness of the world, to their own fears and troubles and jubilations. Their art seemed to be alive with a different kind of energy to what I was used to seeing. None of these makers cared if an eye was enlarged, a mouth expanded, or a torso reduced in scale. There seemed to be no interest whatsoever in sticking to shapes and proportions as they existed in actual time and space. What mattered was the idea of an eye, the feel of a gaping mouth, and the overall effect of the final image on the nervous system of the audience. The artefacts held everything I had been looking for.
When I look back at this series, I see something that I was unaware of at the time, a kind of sadness, a sense of loss. I see the artefacts as the records of human culture over aeons, ideas and movements rising and falling, until now always continuing on to the next iteration. I feel humans and the natural world previously co-existing, but now a sense of everything being under threat. Some aspect of humanness that has moved from being focussed on placating the forces of wind and rain, praying for crops, celebrating a safe birth, that has transformed into relentless desecration of the world without care for consequence.
I must have intuited all of this, because towards the end of 2021 I made these two paintings; a lone human dejectedly balanced on a tiny island of land surrounded by birds and sea, and a ruined church, peopled only by artefacts scattered on the lonely ground.
Thanks so much Miriam, for reading and for taking the time to comment. I'm delighted that they resonated with you! It's a special series for me, which sadly came to an end, but it's lovely to be able to show them here...
Tamsin. This was such a pleasure to... I was going to write "read", then I knew that wasn't right, but neither was "see", so I'm going to go with "drink".
I absolutely loved drinking in these beautiful washes of figures and postures and assemblages of artefacts. Thank you for spending time with these images so that we could experience them like this :)