This Blog is to float ideas for my next exhibition which will depend heavily on this year’s journey. It is primarily for KH, but also T, R, K and B so they can input critically for me but anyone else who is interested may contribute. ‘Bundu Bashing’ is what you do when you set off to explore the bush without a defined destination in mind.
MAKING TRACKS AND MAKING ART
I never know how to start making art.
Finding the form to express ideas is always the same struggle. Words may spark ideas but they are not enough on their own. I play a bit with paper and coloured inks and make childish smudges but I find that I can’t draw the things I want to draw.
The journey, this journey is the resource for this art that I am trying to make. What aspect or part of the journey do I want to depict? Can it be done? How? Why? John’s and my journey appears to go direct from one point to another down a prescribed route. Any creative journey especially mine, wanders about and becomes mired down, sets off on tangential paths, follows ‘will-o’-the-wisps’ and then goes backwards for a time exactly as this piece of writing will do.
We all talk about the ‘Journey of Life’ dah dah! Sort of Shakespeare, sort of Zen, sort of Christ stuff, but for John and I in our ‘moving’ Mobilhome, the concept and the reality have merged. It is exciting, challenging, egotistical and humbling.
We aren’t the only people to do this kind of thing – for some it is an ethnic life style though fewer of those people are able to continue being nomads. For some no doubt it is a permanent and private choice to live differently. Nomads and the nomadic life that is another ‘way’ I must follow up.
John and I had not articulated any very clear purpose before we left our village to become nomads. We are just beginning to try and do so now. We are both rather chastened by what we so carefully planned and so thoughtlessly undertook in April. Not that is dangerous or arduous physically, but it is dangerous in that it has changed us. We are now living with different people and have become different ourselves so we regard each other nervously and wonder what we will turn into next. Probably family won’t see the changes we think we see in ourselves and in each other. Essentially I guess that we are still the same, no better than we ever were.
The creative process however, is about change and changing and sometimes even the creative object or product is not fixed but changing too.
Making art is dangerous if it creates changes and changing.
Anyhow as you can see from the rambling nature of this writing it is hard to keep on ‘track’ with creative ideas. Finding the focus takes me down many ‘tracks’ that seem to go nowhere. This confusion is the creative process.
‘Out of confusion comes art.’
ANOTHER TRACK
Immediately the word ‘track’ echoes the idea of the journey.
What is a ‘track’ exactly?
Am I now way ‘off the ‘track’’ of discovering for myself what kind of art I want to make.
To get back to ‘track’. To get back ‘on track’, ‘track’ is a good word. It reminds me of tracking game through the bush, of the tracks I walked down as a child – those winding single file dusty red-brown paths that wandered across the vlei near my home. Those tracks were walked first by wild creatures, then by hunters, then by the settled people from the villages and their cattle. The wild creatures’ logic in finding the easiest, though not the quickest or straightest path, meant that no matter how lightly they passed over the grass, humans could follow. In the wild humans are wisest to follow these faint ‘tracks’ of wise animals. Eventually there is a path, beaten by bare feet that is kinder to use than the straight path macheted from the bush. So ‘tracks’ are at least two things, the path, and the actual marks of feet or paws, or claws that make them.
I do draw from personal experience to make art so these memories are relevant.
A DIRT TRACK
What does the dictionary say about ‘tracks’? Pretty much what I have suggested above with the interesting addition for me as an artist of ‘tracking in dirt’ on one’s feet into inappropriate places like one’s home!
Art is dirt ritualised.
Creative paths follow wild paths and paths made by other artists: they are new when we walk them for the first time ourselves.
BEATING ABOUT THE BUSH
I thought to try another track and ‘stop beating about the bush’ but then John and I digressed onto the meanings of ‘beating about the bush’
John says it is either ‘beating a bush’ to see if a bird or an idea fly up, or it means ‘come to the point and stop ‘beating about’ or wasting time’. I see it as ‘beating about in the bundu’ (bush) when you are lost and trying to find a track to follow home. Perhaps also the birds that fly out of the scrub will be unique and lovely.
ANOTHER TRACK
I need to find the elements that I can use to make my art.
This means returning to the elements that I have previously used.
So I search my ‘track’ record. This might be a tendentious and tedious pun but I start to wander about the daily metaphors that we use that have connections with journeys. However I don’t want to explore that path now though I will mark it for later perhaps.
ELEMENTS
What are the elements that I use in my art?
• Colour and mixed media used as a process.
• Some element of women’s domestic arts like embroidery or weaving.
• Drawing - both abstract and storytelling.
• Installation and conceptual ideas coming out of feminism and politics.
• My personal experiences in life.
So process is important and a journey is a process.
So also is connecting – ideas – concepts – processes and media.
Is a journey about connecting?
Is a journey about joining the end to the beginning?
CONNECTING THE END TO THE BEGINNING.
Is this how we hope to make sense of our individual lives?
ANOTHER TRACK
I need to return down the paths I have followed extracting the significances, the connections, the elements that attract. I am playing but not just playing with words to be clever. I have to keep throwing the ‘bones’, the elements up into the air like a witchdoctor, nganga, until they, bones or elements, start to make patterns and therefore sense of a kind.
CONNECTING THE END TO THE BEGINNING.
Is this what art tries to do?
MAKING SENSE OF ENDS AND BEGINNINGS BY MEANS VARIOUS.
‘Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted. If one’s own experience has no form, if events do not come handily to mind and disclose their significance, we felt about ourselves as if we were reading a bad book.’
Rebecca West ‘Black Lamb and Grey Falcon’
West’s thesis is the opposite of that made by Kurt Vonnegut who gave us the title of our Blog. He said that we all think our lives are stories until we reach sixty years and find out that we are only the epilogue. As I incline to Vonnegut‘s ironic pessimism, I make a different connection between the two sentences/halves of West’s idea.
We may need to believe that our lives are meaningful stories. I personally would love it if my individual life made sense and had value but I rather think that history disproves it. However I think that art is more significant in the face of an apparently meaningless world. Our search for patterns is not ‘a decorative adjustment’ but a human necessity. It is as much an ingrained human need as sex, food and babies, according to my loose translation of some of Camille Paglia’s writing.
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