Essay by Anna Kouvelas for Contextualising Practice
Acknowledgment
I would like to begin by acknowledging the Traditional Custodians of the land on which I live and work, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, and pay my respects to Elders past, present and emerging. I recognise their continuing connection to Country and culture, and I honour their enduring legacy and ongoing contributions to the arts and its community.
Prologue
I was a competitive dancer for fifteen years. As a child, I spent countless hours in primary school gyms and council recreation halls, blistering my toes until my performance was stage-ready. From an early age, I learnt that good work is hard work. I remember how it felt to train, and performing those routines was like a ritual. I became deeply attuned to the language of physical expression and attached to the fluidity of motion. Performing was all I knew of meditation. When I left dance, the self-fulfilment that came with the discipline left with me.
Essay
In many ways, my experience at art school has been reminiscent of early childhood memories in dance class. The parallels between the demands of an audience and a university lecturer have shaped my understanding of creativity. Learning to nurture my craft under the constraints of deadlines and assessments has unearthed a deep-seated craving for perfection that has sometimes hindered my journey of self-discovery and reflection. I am learning to break free of these restraints in my art practice. Through repetitive crafting and a prolonged engagement with materials, I am investigating the relationship between self-satisfaction and materiality in a contemporary art world where aesthetics can often be confused with integrity.
Early in my art schooling, I was completely obsessed with the aesthetics of my work. Striving only for visual perfection, I would redo sketches, rebuild sculptures and scrutinise every detail with a critical eye. John Berger (1972:101) describes this pursuit with reference to realism, noting it “did not need to stimulate the imagination. If [it] had, [it] would have served [its] purpose less well’. When focusing on the desired outcome of a work, I felt as though my practice and method of making had no purpose. I would subconsciously remove anything that wasn’t good enough, no matter how long I had spent with it. In fact, the very act of erasing had made it impossible to feel any connection to my materials and compositions, and I just wanted it to look good. Though technically sufficient and submitted on time, my work was undoubtedly dull – the same charcoal portrait on a different sheet of paper. It’s as if I was afraid of the materials. Fear of doing the wrong thing or not getting it right away kept me from exploring new compositions and techniques (Hagman 2017). Unsure of how to break this never-ending cycle of dissatisfaction, I considered my approach when making art that was not up for assessment. The most vibrant artworks to me were imbued with an energy that could only be generated through experimentation and repurposing. This essay will illustrate the personal reflections that have unfolded through my study of materials with reference to a specific artwork.
25 Circles (see Figure 1) is the outcome of an iterative art process I began in my second year of art study. It is led by and a manifestation of my intuition. In an increasingly manufactured world, it takes immersion in materials to unlearn idealism and welcome the other. The post-minimalistic era of art heavily influenced me over the course of this project and its complex reintroduction of personal expression. According to Anderson, an emphasis on process marked post-minimalism, the physical properties of materials, and the artist’s hand, blending the tangible qualities of materials with abstract concepts (1990). Work from this time can be characterised by its use of unconventional materials such as fiberglass and rubber, to explore themes of impermanence and physicality. There is a strong emphasis on the sensory and tactile experiences, inviting viewers to engage with the work more intimately (Anderson 1990). Additionally, what I find most relevant to my practice is the involvement of repetition, accumulation, and the exploration of space, which blurs lines between art and labour. Specific to 25 Circles is the study of repetitive crafting.
There is a long, practical history to the art form of binding. What was once merely a meticulous process of joining materials now has the capacity to foster a profound sense of self-engagement through meditation. Philosopher Henri Bergson’s concept of “duration” provides a useful framework to interpret this aspect of binding. He describes duration as an indivisible and continuous flow of time that is experienced subjectively (Bergson, 1910). Binding, with its repetitive and continuous nature, embodies this idea of duration, capturing the flow of time in a tangible form. In the making of my work, I begin by choosing a composition to repeat, ideally one with no predisposed connotation or context. In the case of 25 Circles, by studying and repeating the shape, I got to know my composition by touch rather than association. When I began binding the circles together with nylon, I started to understand the physicality of repetition. There was a rhythm in how my arm moved and a comfort in my posture that mimicked the practice of journalling or meditating. Like both acts and through what can be acknowledged as the practice of everyday life, repeating the same process in solitary forced me to engage with my own thoughts and surroundings. The self-reflective aspect of binding not only enhances my artistic practice but also contributes to my overall wellbeing.
When working on 25 Circles, I had a lot of unresolved internal conflict and was generally dissatisfied with my overall quality of life. I had this idea of where I should have been and what I should have been doing. Although I was aware that these expectations I had set of myself were harsh and unrealistic, not once had I considered tuning into my own needs and desires. In my experience, creating and living during the digital age has set unrealistic expectations of adulthood and artist culture. The act of binding in this artwork and my art practice is a commitment to spending time with myself. Each piece of textile bound onto the composition unifies it and documents seconds through to hours of time and labour invested into the work. The relationship between my materials and their decided compositions is a conversation that can be translated through material consciousness. In his book The Craftsman, Richard Sennett proposes that by labouring over and actively engaging with materials, we as artists integrate a sense of authenticity into our work that is not replicable by technology and not present in mass-produced goods (Sennett 2008). Something as simple as a stitch repeated throughout a piece is a nod to the artist’s hand and appreciation of oneself and their efforts. Being able to step outside the studio and see documentation of time that I’ve spent on my art and nothing else contextualises my practice. It fills me with a satisfaction that a good grade or gold medal could never give me.
Not only am I grappling with my own contentment, but I am also grappling with an underlying concern with the sustainability of an art practice that does not consider material consciousness. The sociocultural implications of material awareness act on both an intimate and broader scale. Globally, as Papastergiadis, notes waste produced by discarded art materials contributes to the climate crisis and perpetuates damages of the Anthropocene (Papastergiadis 2010). Where consumerism is dominant and artistic perfection is rewarded, it can be easy to discard and restart work until it is up to standard rather than labouring over the original material and leaning into its agency. By reclaiming materials and their agency, a greater appreciation for the hidden beauty of the physical world can be cultivated, fostering a more sustainable relationship with the spaces we occupy and the materials we use (Sennett 2008). I often use old sculptures to create new compositions to commit to an iterative and more sustainable art practice. In my work Threaded (see Figure 2), I stripped back all the binding from my original piece (Figure 1) to rediscover the sculpture’s raw materiality. I then threaded each circle onto a piece of found copper wire and dragged the work around the room in what I now see as an attempt to reconnect with the performer in me – the drama of it all. After spending such a long time with these circles, it felt wrong to throw them out. It seemed logical to keep wrapping them into new spaces and push myself to find new ways of repurposing these objects. I still have all twenty-five circles in my room at home, bound back into their original form (Figure 1). Having this work of mine in a mundane space is a constant reminder of why I make art. It helps me put an image to the way I felt during the process of making and connects me to a part of myself that would otherwise be lost to the hands of time.
‘It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it’ (Berger 1972:7).
At the beginning of my art practice, I had a predetermined expectation of what kind of work pleases the eye and what I should be making. My work was not physically or environmentally sustainable, and I experienced burnout. Once I embraced the act of making itself, I embraced imperfection. By intimately studying my materials, I’ve fostered a unique connection between my work and psyche. I think a lot about what my past self would think of my sculptures now. I know she would not understand why I would present twenty-five wobbly circles wrapped in t-shirt fabric over a meticulously crafted oil painting. Although similarly, she did not understand herself.
Reference List
Anderson, L (1990) Minimalism and Post-Minimalism: Drawing Distinctions, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College.
Benjamin, W, 2008 (1936), The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproduction, in M W Jennings, B Doherty & T Y Levin (eds.), E Jephcott, L Livingston & H Eiland (trans.), Harvard University Press, USA.
Bennett, J, 2010, Vibrant Matter a Political Ecology of Things, Duke University Press, Durham.
Berger, J (1972) Ways of Seeing: based on the BBC television series with John Berger, British Broadcasting Corporation.
Bergson, H (1910) Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, George Allen & Unwin, London.
Papastergiadis, N 2010, Spatial Aesthetics: Art, Place and the Everyday, Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam.
Sennett, R (2008) ‘Material Consciousness’, The Craftsman, Penguin Books, England, pp 119-146.
Shouse E (2005) ‘Feeling, Emotion, Affect’, M/C Journal, 8(6), doi:10.5204/mcj.2443.