Some Studio Notes and Thoughts from my First Couple of Weeks in Studio 5.

First couple of days at Porthmeor Studios.

For the month of July I have a residency in the historic Studio 5 of Porthmeor Studios, St Ives. I will upload a couple of journal posts of my time here in the form of studio notes and thoughts in order to help me articulate my thoughts and reflect on my practice during my time in St Ives.

After a break from my practice during the early summer, honestly, being thrown back into the mode of creating art left me rather stuck.

Due to necessity (moving house), and also interest, I have challenged myself to spend this residency making with limited materials. This compliments my nature based practice, though has so far still proved challenging.

To start the month off and to help spark ideas, I went for a walk around the rocks of St Ives island, collecting natural objects (rocks, plant pieces etc.) and making a sample sheet of tiny experiments done on this walk (colour samples from flower petals, tiny sound drawings done with rock etc.).

I found that the act of walking helped me to think more clearly and generate ideas for possible directions to take my work in during July, having my body occupied with the mundane-ness that is walking allowed my brain to better articulate itself.

When sat, hidden amongst the rocks, at Porthmeor beach at the end of this walk I began to explore doing sound drawings directly onto rocks using pieces of smaller rocks, partly due to my lack of materials. This led to the exploration of carving into these rocks with the smaller rock in a slow process mimicking the erosion of rocks and pebbles by the waves. I did these carvings in response to the sound of the waves next to me, translating the sound (waves) of the sea (waves) into physical manifestations and making myself become a part of this natural process.

Before the rock was carved

After the rock was carved

‘Printing’ without a press.

Revisiting my previous technique of rock frottage, I shaded over my carved ‘eroded’ rocks with pencil, laid some paper over the shaded side and then did rubbings on the top of the paper in pencil in order to transfer the contours and relief of the carving onto the back of the paper. This worked really well to create a subtle image which, without knowing the process, looked like an ordinary rock rubbing, even giving the paper a slightly engraved/indented look due to how it was slightly wrapped around the edges of the rock whilst I did the rubbing.

I later continued this idea sans pencil shading after finding some rocks covered in rust orange pigment. I was able to complete the same frottage method after carving into these rocks by simply allowing the orange pigment to transfer onto the back of the paper. This was slightly less effective at transferring the detail of the carvings, though did make for a more natural outcome.

Plaster Casting and Drawing from Casts.

I began developing my rather two dimensional ‘prints’ and drawings into more sculptural forms as what I want to investigate is the relationship between sculpture, sound and acoustics and how a sculptural form can carve or create an acoustic, aural form as a sort of intangible sculpture. I began exploring plaster casting as a method of creating forms both inverted and object-like.

To begin with I made four different experimental casts, using the sand on Porthmeor Beach as my mould in order to give nature a bigger role within my work. For one cast I created a rectangular hole in the sand and then, with more sand, created a small sculpture done to the sounds of the waves next to me within the mould hole.

Though not easy to produce defined detail and difficult to hold shapes, using wet sand for the sculpture was a good use of the limited materials available. I will retry this idea using clay however, being a material that is much easier to sculpt.

For the second cast I produced almost the reverse of the first cast. I created a square well in the sand on the beach and then sculpted into the bottom edge of the well with my hands, pushing deeper into the sand. Rather than creating a sculpted well in the finished plaster cast, this sculpture/mould created a relief sculpture protruding out of the block of plaster, which had the shapes of my fingers quite visibly showing – I had not noticed the inverse shapes of my fingers at all before casting this piece. It had the appearance almost of a crab-like creature.

I then cast one of my carved rocks, in order to make it into a sculptural object separate from the original rock itself, representing the human erosion and the sound of the waves in an inverse version of the original rock. The rock itself was rather difficult to actually remove from the plaster without damaging the cast, some plaster had dripped underneath the bottom of the rock, sealing it into the cast, so I had to almost carve it out of the plaster in a rather ironically similar way to how I originally carved the rock.

I later drew from these casts, picking up on the subtle patterns of the embedded sand, the shadows and shapes of the casts themselves. This worked as an interesting translation of sound (of the waves) into three dimensional, sculptural objects, and then into two dimensional line drawings, simplifying and drawing out the essence of the waves.