today

I have started installing in my bedroom at Het Wilde Weten. This work is a companion piece to the work that I completed in one of the "guest" bedrooms at Hotel Mariakappel in Hoorn last week. The installation process was also documented in Hoorn, but I managed to delete the photos entirely from both my camera and from my computer when I returned to Rotterdam on Friday night. Such events leave me with the feeling that the universe is trying to tell me something. I said as much to the artist who coordinates the program at Hotel Mariakappel in an email the following day - the reply was along the the lines of "What do you think that the universe is trying to tell you?" We'll see if the universe can be a little clearer over the next few days ...

Thinking about my work, (as one does, living in a different place for three months, with little else to think about apart from one's practise) I am always uncertain about why I do what I do - and this is one of the things that I have hoped to resolve here - arriving at some kind of clarity about the connection between the disparate elements of my practise, or an idea about how they interrelate.

Perhaps they don't.

I do have this, which is from an email I wrote to a curator in Australia, following a request for information on my work for an application ...

[...] I basically have two lines of investigation – one collaborative, which entails thinking of situations that enable me to investigate the dynamics of a relationship through a shared activity, and through that activity, looking at systems of knowledge and interaction, but in the end it is about the process by which we are all (ideally) co-creators of cultural forms (such as architecture or government); the other includes my figurative drawings, which are intended to manifest ideas about the practice of art and to create a kind of antagonism between sites of production and sites of display –

if the collaborative drawing project I am doing here does something like this: [from a friend in Melbourne]

it makes me think of lots of things, about how successful those welfare economies have been, but it also makes me think about the rise of global conservatism, how those economies are changing and becoming less inclusive. I think it will also remind people of the gap between the certainty we feel about our political assumptions and the lack of knowledge we have about how the political system actually operates and is structured.

then what do the wall drawings do?

Labels: the netherlands