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September 07, 2007
preoccupations
This morning I'm visiting a friend's drawing class to talk to her students about my work; she's introducing a project focussed around obsession in art-making, and wants to show them artists whose work is obsessive or speaks to obsession or obsessive behaviour in some way. In order to get my thoughts together for that, I'll try to write a little bit about that aspect of my work.
I have restless hands; left unattended for too long they twitch and flutter, pick at things, tear corners off paper and roll them up and down, up and down, open and closed. It distracts me and I find myself paying attention to what my hands are fiddling with and tuning out other things around me. And so I knit, giving my hands a mindless, repetitive task to occupy them so that my mind can be occupied elsewhere. I knit on public transit and while waiting for it, I knit at meetings, in restaurants and bars, at artist lectures, in class. All of the little spaces in between being places and doing things I fill up with stitches.
In my printmaking work I tend to shy away from empty spaces on a page in the same way I avoid empty time (by which I guess I mean unoccupied hands time). I print over and over until a page is completely covered, until parts of an image are buried beneath others, mere shadows looming up from under a blanket of ink. I print the same images over and over, keeping the same wood blocks for years, layering time within the layers of ink. During my undergrad studies my main adviser, Daniel Dingler, would periodically take prints away from me, prints I considered unfinished; he always told me that I didn't know when to stop. He probably still has a few of those prints lying in his drawers. Unfinished.
Although never the one factor that governs what I do in my work, frugality has always been a part of how I operate: while an undergraduate printmaking student I couldn't afford a lot of paper, so any prints that were messed up were saved to print overtop of later. I buy secondhand sweaters and unravel them for knitting yarn. I have knitted a garment, worn it for a season and then unraveled it and reknit it into something new (this sweater, for instance, made from a shawl that I wore during my first year of grad school, which began as a thrift store turtleneck pullover). This year I cut up hundreds of (finished and unfinished) prints, most made during my first two years of grad school but some older ones as well, and began binding them into small books to be used as my daily sketchbooks. In these books, over top of an already sometimes dense fog of printed imagery, I draw the same things over and over. Here is where obsessive documemtation first came into the work: I date stamp each page drawn, scan the pages and assemble them all into a web page. Similarly, I date stamp the garments every day that I wear them, and document the wearing with a photograph. I photograph each change that takes place in the clothing, and have also begun documenting these changes in print form as well, by printing onto paper the ghost image left behind on a woodblock after a garment has been printed from it, and offset printing the newly-printed garment onto paper.
This post isn't about why I make my work; that's something I'll write more on later. This is more about process, and understanding how my lifelong patterns of mark-making and stitch-making have expanded into this current project. My clothing becomes like my prints, new imagery and new ink laid down again and again until what was originally there is completely obscured by something else (or so I hope; I want to see what will happen when there is nobody to take the work away from me and tell me I'm going too far). And at the same time, this preoccupation with constantly making new marks out of old marks, on top of old marks, filling all of the spaces with a dense mass of marks, becomes my identity (costume).
For a little more about how clothing is connected to all of this, please see my old artist statement, written at the time that I was applying to graduate schools. Later on I'll plunder some more old writings to help illustrate the connections I've always made between clothing and textiles, hand work, printmaking and the body. Because plundering my old work for new uses is what I do best.
Posted by jodi at September 7, 2007 08:23 AM | categories: the rules