The other night I attempted my first entry. And yesterday morning I managed to delete it! So here I am today – third time lucky!! Time, wrote W H Auden, watches from the shadow And coughs when you would kiss.
A friend recently made the constructive and I think far too knowing suggestion that I begin a blog. We had been skyping about websites, my work and the very actual possibility that I will never get myself organised to make a website. As people close to me know, I am a techno-cretin, and so this level-headed approach towards my ambivalence struck me as very good encouragement and a very good idea. In fact I was so excited by the proposition I instantly opened one, and so it was 2months later I found myself taking the first hesitant steps towards putting something up.
This blog is going to be about my artwork and writings over the past several years.
What I have come to realise that by taking up this blog I am in fact creating a space of reflection for myself. In the two months of hesitation and thought that preceded these first entry attempts I begin to see how time and distance affords us new experiences - even of the things we make. How memory and perspective are constantly in flux.
Curiously perhaps the proposition now is one of a rediscovering.
For as I have begun to look over works for starting this blog, I have been reconnected to themes or concerns that have slowly begun to diminish as central to my practice, and I start to see in these older works another me. It is a bit like looking through old family photos: where you see your self. It is an uncanny experiment for in the act of taking up the photo you regard not the you that is reflected in today's mirror, but a shadow of you. Yet, simultaneous to identifying with this former shade, you are thrust back in time able to re-connect, re-experience and feel the thoughts, the joy or pain of the you in the picture. Looking at old works, at old writings prompts a similar ambivalence: of connection and separation. Of both nostalgia and the desire for the now, or the future.
