Extended drawing - third term, week 4

"Research, archive, playing with ideas, experimenting with materials" is on the schedule.  I am lagging a bit behind with all of those; still at the "too much thinking" stage, have done very little that could be called action. Still hoping to catch up, though!

Tonight we move on the "editing, refining".

Last week Mario talked about the work of Sigmar Polke and Mary Kelly, before setting us loose  to play with ideas and experiment with materials.

"Pushing and mixing things", Polke was subversive and political. He responded to and commented on found images.  The two images below are from his 1976 series "We petty bourgois" - the grid hold it all together; it's "almost a pseudo-narrative" and it's up to the viewer to make the connections

 Polke's first works were made in 1964 - are they naive, or simply too plain?

 His work is "Capitalist Realism" - taking the piss out of the East German love of capitalist ideas.

In the Watchtower series of 1984 he gives the same image different treatmnts -

 The work of Marry Kelly shows her process. Postpartum Document 1973-79 was installed in a way that you could see development - it used her baby son's nappy liners, elaborated with text; it's confessional art.

My "idea of the week" was to use text in my Home drawings, somehow. In the spaciousness of Room 406, I used large sheets of paper and ink to play around with text, phrases taken from "Geography of Home" by Akiko Busch, which had been sitting on my bookshelf patiently for some years. Taking forward the idea of "crumpled paper = crumpled bedsheets", I took phrases from the chapter on the bedroom (which is also a way to incorporate Gaston Bachelard's quote about "home is where we can dream" -

Over coffee during the break, someone mentioned being told to "draw" text rather then write it. So I worked upside down, pencilling the shapes and highlighting them with ink in various dilutions -

In its current form - A3 size - the texts look rather like political posters ... which is not what I'm aiming at.

Mario suggested writing them on actual bedding - pillows - or using them as wallpaper. Well, maybe...