Process Art

I see my practice as a continuous process where failure and success occur. I think of my practice in terms of Tomma Abts' statement 'It is an intuitive process of making, where I paint until I feel that the painting can be independent and fend for itself.' This process relys on its materials and how they contextualize the surface of a canvas.

In terms of process I see my works reflex upon the following artist

• Karla Black 
• Eva Hesse
• Ann Hamilton
• Roger Ackling

Karla Black - Continues to find her process through materiality she states "the things themselves are actual physical explorations into thinking, feeling, communicating and relaxing. They are an ongoing learning or search for understanding, through a material experience that has been prioritized over language." I see Blacks practice as experimental and a sense of lightness as she does not want her work to fall into the everyday life of cultural and political understandings of the world, which I am also interested in for my practice.

I really enjoy this quote as Black states in her statement for the exhibition - Open Frequency, "Known rules and techniques are intentionally not learned or adhered to. Instead, more haphazard, individual methods are found."

I think this relates to my focus as I don't want to make an easy path for painting, I plan for the bumps to happen along the way, as my work explores the idea of failure, it is not until I thing that the work can be independent and can control the audience (viewer).  This is through the changes in optical shifts, transformations and transitions.

Eva Hesse - 'prefers to work with shapes and structures that were both organic and geometric at the same time - as if art were a way of making a contradiction in terms of a material thing.'

Hesse states that both organic and geometric are present in one form at one time. In away I see my paintings a lot like what was stated above as  there is a centain push/pull of fluid forms and geometrical forms, but i tend to see the geometrical forms are a connector or an anchor for the painting, so it can be balanced.

Rodger Ackling - "you set up a procedure, an experiment and then things happen. You have limited control. What you end up with you can choose to accept or reject."

Ackling also works with materiality, this quote reminds me a lot of Sigma Polkes quote that I mentioned earlier where thing begin to unfold before your eyes. I see this as a positive as my work can look like one thing and the next only the presence of its underlying colour is revealed. This process in making is to highlight the contingency of materials and how they reveal a sensation both in making and viewing, this is where painting ‘happens’ as it begins to unfold on a surface. This is an artistic perspective both imagined and experienced. The artists selected resemble a close investigation of ways to reveal a work, as Polke puts it, “this ‘happens’ not when you try really hard, but in the moment when you let go. Things can fall into place in a way that you couldn’t have conceived before” (1960, p.101). This is suggestive to the way the work is being made and viewed. It is through this moment that it becomes an exploration of the materials; and how they operate through layers and when exposed to light their detail becomes something other than what it was before.