The free line screams for help
It was all going so well.....
The animal/nature/artefact series in 2021 had momentum for quite some time. Paintings continued into 2022, in a seemingly steady flow.
The painting above became part of an online collaboration with a musician and a storyteller, and during a live improvisation performance it generated a text:
Equinox I’m here holding on to this piece of grass the moon on my rough skin holding on holding on the oryx looks to the West she’s afraid I don’t know why the snail moves slowly oblivious leaving her trail on fungi on rocks and shells on rusting pieces of jewellery which once meant something to someone Across Womb Waters of The Sea Stories, Music and Art for World Storytelling Day With Dawne McFarlane, Mairi Campbell, Tamsin Haggis March, 2021
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And then, suddenly, there was a revolt:
Goddamn it, said the free line. What the fuck is this? We’re supposed to be free, sailing, running around, surprising ourselves and you. A bottle of ink with a nozzle arrived in my hands.
With the bottle, I had to keep going, I couldn’t think about the image too much, how to render anything, or even where it was going to go in relation to other elements, because the ink was coming out so fast.
After this, I tried to go back to the animal/artefact series, using the wild bottle.
But something had shifted, things wanted to move on. I went back to one of the early fast drawings on thin paper. The thin paper wasn’t designed for paint, but I painted it anyway.
The one below had also been done at speed on thin paper, and I painted this one as well.
I’ve never really done anything since that has satisfied me in the way that the two images above do. They both came out when I was only half concentrating, not using ‘good’ paper; just like the birth of the free line all those decades before onto my cheap Indian sketchbook.
They have a quality that I’ve always been looking for; in the line, in the composition, in the choices of artefacts and animals. But all the qualities here are utterly fugitive if I’m ‘trying’ in any way at all.
I kept going with the ink bottle, and for a brief period the crowding of elements (unconscious Mattancherry inspiration…) became a little more spacious.
But that didn’t last long. A new wave of crowded compositions began, this time with artefacts, ideas from old photos of Russian shamans, and, for no particular reason, mushrooms. I don’t know if that was because I was reading Stephen Buhner’s book, ‘Plant intelligence and the imaginal realm’. I was certainly struck, around that time, by the extraordinary fact that certain plants exist in the world that, when ingested by humans, cause the humans to experience themselves as an undifferentiated field, irrevocably webbed into every living thing around them.
Do you know about the Kogi? I saw a BBC video made in the 1980s about this remote people in Colombia at least two decades ago and I have never forgotten it. The Kogi are led by chosen members of their community who undergo special training and chew a lot of coca. In the documentary they’re talking about why they decided to come down from the mountains and speak to the world, because they were so disturbed by what they could feel was happening to the earth because of our activity. They spoke of what they knew from observing everything around them and were pleading with us to take action (you can watch the video here).
As I was making these I started thinking about how I had always painted my images on coloured grounds, which let me use pure colour in a way that I found more beautiful and subtle than when I used it on white paper. But over time I had noticed that when I shared these images, I always seemed to want to slightly enhance their contrast, because otherwise on a computer screen they just looked dull.
I began a new series of small paintings which started to consciously explore pure colour on the pure white ground of unpainted paper. It was a little shocking at first.
The small paintings were more studies of artefacts; African combs, Egyptian paint palettes, Scandinavian metalwork.
At the end of the year, I made a collage to track all of the changes that had taken place (which seems to also show a bit of what happened next, when I discovered Posca pens…)
It reads from the top right hand corner, down to the bottom, then spirals round the centre piece of the ram to left, and up to the top left-hand corner.
loved this exploration into your art 🥰
These are glorious Tamsin! So wonderful to get walked through this insider’s tour of your images!