ANOTHER INCOHERENT RAMBLE: TIME'S REALITY IS NATURE

I aim to explore materiality and its inevitable deterioration through time and interaction with the natural world, and furthering this, how to counteract the results physically and digitally.

I will explore this in relation to paintings, how varnish becomes tainted due to exposure and the paint cracks off and needs filling in. To explore this old problem with a digital context, I will also use Photoshop’s tools that try to generate missing pixels.

Essentially, I will be reinstating lost materiality, or making up what’s not there. Alongside the themes of previous works this does again bring me to the idea of Deities whose realities are subjective to apparitions. Naturally, this leads me to the 18 apparitions of Mary at Lourdes.

A surface that comes to mind when thinking of fading materials is wet paper, how it pills and a printed image can rub off. An occurrence of this outside of fine art is the common method of ingesting LSD whereby the chemical is administered onto blotter sheets which are placed under the tongue and the image starts to rub off until the soggy paper is swallowed. Blotter art has always interested me and I'm often curious at the choice of either printing one image across the whole sheet or repeating the image on each tab.

If I was to go forward with the 18 apparitions at Lourdes as a base for imagery, 18 wouldn't divide up neatly into a sheet as the square root is 4.24. Unless it was 3x9 9 landscape in each column and 3 across to give a final portrait shaped sheet. This would allow me to create photos of each apparition in landscape. Photographs would make a lot more sense than painting these images as then I could use one of the the techniques from Peter Renn's initial workshops to hand print onto a sheet. How I would tarnish it as of yet I'm unsure but there is potential to make this a performance piece in which the images could be licked until the image came away??

The first apparition at Lourdes has the most imagery:

Thursday 11th february 1858: the first meeting

Accompanied by her sister and a friend, Bernadette went to Massabielle on the banks of the Gave to collect bones and dead wood. Removing her socks in order to cross the stream, she heard a noise like a gust of wind, she looked up towards the Grotto : “I saw a lady dressed in white, she wore a white dress, and equally white veils, a blue belt and a yellow rose on each foot.” Bernadette made the Sign of the Cross and said the Rosary with the lady. When the prayer ended the Lady suddenly vanished.

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What do??
Natural world's impact on the painting through time - Photo's impact projected onto natural forms

Mimicking varnish with mud and dirt

Ruined painting of Mary and fill in the gaps with paint

Ruined painting and fill with incorrect collage

Take abstract panoramas to make it difficult for Photoshop

Go through Peter's workshop notes - work out if it has to be film photos or not

Is performance/video performance a stretch too far?