Chanting and disappearing

 I thought that perhaps the solution to the ash flocking piece was to just do more.

 

So a couple of more days were spent facing a wall, and I resisted with all my might heading out to the Al Enatsui exhibition at BAM or the Woolfgang Laib and Dieter Roth at MOMA. The more-is-more approach however drove the work closer towards a decorative feature wall, and still I would look at it a think "So what?".

A different possibility emerged whilst listening to Gregorian chants during music class. Drawing whilst listening I came up with this solution to the composition. It bares no visible likeness to Medieval music and in fact its syncopated chaotic ups and downs and its polyphonic patterns seem more Jazz like, but in some loose way my expanding knowledge of music is providing a pathway to opening up methods of patterning. I was excited about re-working the design and rushed back to the studio to start masking, painting, drawing and radical destruction.

Out came the white paint and I began erasing sections of the pattern and then... there it was, the problem had not been the design or composition of the work but the work itself. Whilst painting over the flocking I began thinking about the Wabi Sabi idea of all things 'emerging from and disappearing towards nothing' and I found a comfort in the possibility that the ash flocking was being erased before it was finished and that this process of erasure was a process of construction, so i kept painting, covering the wall and trapping the work between the wall and new layer of paint. It was there but dissapearing towards not being there.