December review (2): siting/practice

The dissertation draft and notable tutorial 3 (Research) notes give details of the Body of Work as it was envisaged early in the year.

The intervening months have added further work and allowed for some reflection of how the work is organised, structured.

I made a series of notes for how to revise and update the dissertation structure (and thus what would fold into the body of work) in the absence of the stair:case as site for the work (and exhibition).

The relocation to Germany in September added a further rupture and I have now begun to explore the work that I have been making since and how this work relates.

I seem to return to orientating the work (practice/research) around practice and site.

Original conception (March 2020)

Initially, Herz/Stein was a series of works that would move across the three ‘sites’:

• verge/weed
• stair:case
• drawing|encounter

— of these, only the staircase is strictly a site, verge/weed is a movement practice (somewhat linear but also discontinuous); drawing|encounter is a relational practice but each sited in particular locations.

There are a number of reasons why I still want to call these sites, and also don’t consider them places >> I will return to this later, the discussion around stage/screen has made this clearer to me, it has to do with the manipulation, the deliberate handling of what makes the context of each piece, encounter; it also has to do with modularity, discreteness of each piece, that it is specific, originating in a particulate location/time/relation/material but does not bear the entire history and weight of what we want to consider as place; it is, possibly contentiously more modern than that; and then in its encounter and presenting thoroughly post-, yet again.

Covid Loop revision (August 2020)

To amend the quadrants of the glossary to include also:

verge/weed and stair:case as sites

and

Herz/Stein and Maraprilay as practice

December revision (December 2020)

I now add

Stromverteilen as site, and

Drei Nuesse/ Tree of touch as practice.

(there remains an omission that the first site is arguable the pontoon bridge in Northern Greece)

I then continue to wonder if drawing/contact can be reconsidered as practice/site or site/practice.

Herz/Stein and Drei Nuesse are the most material, tactile works: they are effectively handling collections or enquiries that result from touch.

Using the space I hired for a week to review the work, I lay out the four works and discover that they all organise a site, a screen, a stage for the smaller work to organise within. They create space, they remake the sites in a space all by themselves and it is within this space that the practice of Herz/Stein and Drei Nuesse can unfold, along with a series of portfolios that activate the sketchbook materials, quite possibly around a series of drawing/encounters as initially started in Spring 2019.