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Not Writing, Drawing
The work by Susan Timmins
presented at Crescent Artspace this September bears the
deceptively prosaic title ‘Not Writing, Drawing’;
indicating – at least on the surface – a parallel
between processes of writing and drawing and hinting at
their innate similarities and differences. Both
activities consist of mark-making and are subject to the
inevitable unpredictability of physical execution, which
counterbalances the preordained procedure inherent in
Susan Timmins’s work. Certain factors may be
predetermined – for example, the employment of grid or
text as a premise for individual pieces or groups of
work; orange fluorescent marker pen or paint on paper as
the materials of choice. The physical execution then
takes over, which in itself may involve highly
structured or repetitive actions which follow the
‘rules’ of grid or text.
The use of the grid in
contemporary visual arts is not new and can be traced as
a modernist device associated with 1960s
Minimalism – offering freedom from compositional choices but also restriction
through its characteristics of repetition and
uniformity. The use of text also features amongst the
devices of modernist and post-modernist art. Like the
grid it is a double-faced device which can, by way of
cultural circumstances and conditioning, both allow and
deny access to ‘reading’. The duplex nature of the grid
or text is compounded in Susan Timmins’s work by her
choice of fluorescent orange, triggering a retinal
interference which simultaneously attracts and repels.
The colour is, quite literally, eye-catching but is of
an intensity that is uncomfortable and hinders or blurs
perception.
There is a sublimity in the
artist’s work which derives from the mathematical, and
gives a sense of overwhelming or vast phenomena,
confounding comprehension and evoking feelings of awe
and perplexity. This sublimity is phenomenological
rather than mimetic (representational); the grid depicts
nothing but itself, but neither is it strictly bound by
limits of its physical scale, or by precision or
exactitude. The irregularities of execution can be
translated into infinite and unseen variables, sensed
rather than perceived, which mirror the complexity of
natural phenomena. That is not to say that the artist’s
actions are determined by laws of nature or cause and
effect. On the contrary, there is a spontaneity in the
work which arises from what
Kant refers to as the causality of reason- following autonomous and
spontaneous order as distinct from pre-given (external)
natural laws. This sense of ‘the sublime’ is also
evident in the artist’s use of text which brings it
closer to a ‘post-modern sublime’, replacing magnitude
with complexity; a notion fuelled by the computer
technology of virtual reality. We move constantly
within, between and across cultural contexts enabled by
technology – which engenders a deceptive sense of common
ground – through virtual reality. (The term itself
suggests something of the sublime complexities inherent
in the concept). ‘As generic formatted screen space
becomes more prevalent, I am curious about how we ‘read’
or compose anything visually. In the West, we presume it
to be from left to right; this is mirrored in how text
is written, yet there are many ‘alphabets’ – such as
kanji characters or Islamic text – that are written and
read in the opposite.’ The physical presence of the
work is inevitably a significant factor, in that it is
neither virtual nor computer generated; rather it is a
trace of the artist’s own hand (or signature) which
imbues it with a human scale, regardless of whether the
individual work is fragmentary and intimate or extends
beyond the field of peripheral vision. Stuart Cameron
August 2010 Further reference: The Virtual Sublime, C.
Francis ©1999
www.armageddon.org/~sanvean/sublime.html
Stuart Cameron, Director, Crescent Arts
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