ask questions.
a question is open and receptive,
yet articulating – it invokes.
this is the art of divination.
amidst all possibilities, it reveals a subject of concern,
curiosity, attention, attraction.
it reveals a prayer – the desire for a meeting or
an answering that reveals itself only
in the act.
it is revealed IN the working.
Bricolage. The word embraces me. It has the graceful awkwardness of my long limbs. It describes the curious jumble of thought, aesthetic accumulation, fragments, the bit of stripe, the ragged graphic, the pencil cursive interrupted, torn. It accepts the enchanting ordinaryness of my life. All of it worthy. All of it rich. All of it in dreadful disarray.
Look how that irritating shred, that meaningless utterance, goes just right there and sings.
Bricolage defies the tidy. Bricolage is collapsed sculpture. Bricolage is image in three dimensions. Bricolage is askance and askew with asymmetric angles. Inclusive. What else can i say? Depart.
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There is a sense that things simply arrive or else have been there, waiting for me. There is a rhythm, each thing to its place. These elements of ephemera represent pauses; a place where I bent down for a closer look, an irrelevance that became relevant beneath the caress of my primate thumb. A place where the world stopped me, where stillness reclaimed me.
I want to be willing to allow it to remain a mystery, the reason for this absurd marionette, this playing-at-god: fragment- suspended between idea and material. How does this peace utter the particularity of a wound, the mission of this insignificant-essential Atom?
That is the nature of the split in me. by nature i am dream-oriented. irrational, wordless, quiet, unformed. but i am also compelled to examine and explicate; it is also my nature to want to know why: to find meaning as the cliche goes. of late, i regard this latter aspect as a most certain liability – the compulsion of one who can’t stand emptiness: the inexplicable void-splendor-terror of being.
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Practice is a frame into which I pour my mind. It is a method of alignment, a point of orientation. My practice sessions have a score: I mark the edges, define the area of inquiry, lay out aspirations. Yet an equal measure of unguarded territory is necessary. A door must be left ajar for unexpected visitations. In every session, I reserve time for improvisation. Improvisation is where seeds of the best work are dropped. When expectation is abandoned and agendas are replaced with listening, waiting and attention, this is when beauty that I could not have planned emerges. (From Voicings from Underground; The Slow World p 60)
About a mile and a half down the path from my attic rooms, (home since March) is Grey Matter Books, a maze of a used bookstore. I am feeling for threads, listening for the emergence of the voices that will guide fresh work, as winter descends upon the aftermath of my frenzied graduate studies.
The art section that I thought I was headed for is two rooms deep past multiple corridors of books, but I barely get past the register today.
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...Collage presumes a non-linear interpretation, as well as simultaneous and circular imagery that creates, "shocks". Collage emerges from the point at which desire and freedom hold sway [...] the sense of beauty that is sought is that defined by the surrealists: a break with past conventions and with rational thought.
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Listening to an On the BlackChair interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xM6cHlBfgxU with Orion Foxwood (a Southern Root Magic and Appalachian Conjure Man) as I re-work an incarnation of the painting I call Soul Retrieval.
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