On Process, or, Now That I'm Getting Back Into the Studio I'm Sure Am Thinking Too Much and Too Hard!

After some thinking over the last month, I've come to the comforting conclusion these boxes, strips and stitches aren't some kind of shtick after all. I mean I've known that, but you know you have to ask yourself these things (relentlessly).

No these are specific rules I must obey. How many times can I do the same thing over and over? How many different ways? Process is about reinvention, but my specific process is also about navigation. You set a rule, you break it. Over and over. Circumvention around this rule is not just the key- in fact, it is the point.

A few years ago, a dear friend introduced me to The Five Obstructions. It's about a director, Jørgen Leth being prompted, pricked, and goaded by Lars Von Trier into reinventing the same story Det Perfekte Menneske five different times, five different ways. The subject, the figure, and the object are almost catalysts to the process, the medium, and the aesthetic. I learned something about myself through this film. The journey is the point, the evidence is circumstantial.

Are we ever really done? Do we ever really follow through with our ideas as far as we should, excavating them until we are at the core? Josef Albers painted the same squares in different colour combinations over the course of decades. He painted them because he was in hot pursuit. So am I.

This work is changing. Perhaps when I started these they were maps and moments in time, but they're becoming less about location and more about noise; perhaps language can be a map too. These stitches, cells, and lines aren't as much about a trail as they are about the code/decoding of my surroundings. I'm translating an overload of information and noise into something soft and quiet, and I'll continue to decipher until I find the truth.

Process is nothing but laying ourselves bare. It's revealing and uncomfortable. It involves a mixed bag of manic ecstasy and devastating heartbreak and the world will watch and wait while you strip to the bone. You might have to admit you don't have any idea what it means until it's on the wall but that's the risk one takes when one asks the world to see.

Do you find yourself inventing/reinventing/tearing down/questioning? How does it fuel your process or your growth? We are learning together here - a bastardized camaraderie through self excavation.

Undergrowth (detail) 2009