Scary. One year has passed by...and I haven't used my blog since then.
What to write? How was my year?
No idea. Busy...discomfort, depressing...finished my MA...I haven't been painting for so long now...and I kinda doubt that I am able to do it..again.. 

concept-

 This is another exploration I am doing with wool.
That's related with my research into materials.
The concept behind this first approach was on the concept of doing knots that represents the link between my life (years) and all the people who are inportant to me. In this way I would create a map of my life experience. The physical act of doing knots would keep me away from an attempt ro represents. I am still exploring though what kind of surface I should apply the wool.
This is still a rudimental idea that needs to be developed.

Tápies- materials my attempts

http://www.fundaciotapies.org/site/spip.php?rubrique65

Antoni Tápies is a painter who was part of Art Informel during the '50s. From the Surrealist movement he got interested in the use of materials. He states that he often does not know what he is painting or that he is not aware of the motivations that bring him to paint, nevertheless he adds that the history of art is the reflection through the visual impact of pure senses of the material forms.
He also says that working on a blank sheet, and looking at his hand working on it, will produce an order-disorder that at the end will say something.

Encrostat i cifres, 1974

Palla i fusta,1969 Straw and wood

Armari,1973

Porta metàl·lica i violí, 1956

documentary

Poetry in painting

Anselm Kiefer-Your Golden Hair, Margarete
1981 (320 Kb); Oil, emulsion, and straw on canvas, 130 x 170 cm

Escapism

The tendency to seek distraction and relief from unpleasant realities, especially by seeking entertainment or engaging in fantasy.(Oxford Dictionary)
There was a time in which the engagement with fantasy for me meant reality. There was a time when my life was unconventional, out of the "social laws", or using Victor Turner's term in a liminal phase.
I "experienced" a reality that was absolutely different from what I had learnt since from my family and the enviroment in which I had grown up. Of course mine is not an open-hearted confession, but an attempt to define more clearly what my practice is about.
During that period fantasy (books) meant reality. Living in a transitional phase, where I wouldn't know where this will bring me, without knowing or feeling time and space or place, but with my background experiences and memories in that very moment(s)...books saved my life. Through books (where reality was restricted into the simple act of turning pages), I kept myself connected to the outside world.
Reading hundreds of books helped me to keep on formulating questions, to create and keep a dialog with myself and the other me and the otherness, to keep my consciousness alive.
If my "reality" was so unbearably real as I was dealing with it every single day and it wasn't for the others so real because it couldn't fit with their idea of conformity, reading about places where the rain was made of flowers, or women ascending to the skies, or red giant ants were capable of eating babies, it would not sound so unreal to me.
This is reflected daily in my practice. I believe there is always a liminal space, or a place in between that does not deny the presence of the other one in terms of reality. What is important I guess is the dialog I engage in this particular time, space or place.

In his keynote speech to the 2005 Art Association of Australia & New Zealand Conference, Nicolas Bourriaud explained:^[1]

"Artists are looking for a new modernity that would be based on translation: What matters today is to translate the cultural values of cultural groups and to connect them to the world network. This “reloading process” of modernism according to the twenty-first-century issues could be called altermodernism, a movement connected to the creolisation of cultures and the fight for autonomy, but also the possibility of producing singularities in a more and more standardized world.

Books on dialogic and liminality. Borders, boundaries. Multi-culturalism
Liminality : Victor Turner...
Homi Bhabha
Most of these books are available on google scholar.

Halberstam, Judith ” In a queer time and place: transgender bodies, subcultural lives”

Melucci, A.” Nomads of the Present”

Volcano, Del LaGrace, “Artist Statement”

Bakhtin, M “Speech Genres and Other Late Essays”

Bakhtin, M “The problem of content, material, and form in verbal creative art, in Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays”

Bakhtin, M “Toward a Philosophy of the Act”

Bakhtin, M “Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics”

Research- Kendell Geers

 

Fucked face, 2005,                                                               tw inri, 1994