I’ve been thinking a lot more about owls of late.
Owls have a long tradition of featuring in the work of Artists and within English folklore. As it is customary for me to develop a visual dialogue that mimics introspective psychological practice, thinking about owls has taken me in various directions, including revisiting surrealist works by Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst.
I personally feel that there are different deliberations happening whilst in the studio, inhabiting the space with the developing artwork . There is always something new to explore in the dyadic relational space between myself and my emerging work. This ‘space’ changes and becomes a fluid process as the work progresses. This process is informed by personal recall and retention of accumulated knowledge yet is subtly different to recollection alone.
In “A Small History of Photography,” Walter Benjamin postulated the idea of an ‘optical unconscious’ that is revealed through Photography (1). Developing this notion further, Benjamin also expounded that any understanding of art and artistic technique is interconnected with the contemporary context of the viewer (2).
These conjectures bring in additional layers to any interpretation of an artwork itself. I would suggest that this creates a constellation of possible viewer elucidations which are supplementary to the creative artists original intentions. These ‘speculative spaces of possibility’ allow the observed artwork to have an existence that is both transpersonal and altered by the observers own experience and cultural preconceptions.
References
1. Benjamin, W.1972. A Short History of Photography, Screen, Volume 13, Issue 1, Spring 1972, Pages 5 - 26.
2. Benjamin, W. 2008. The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction (J. A. Underwood, Trans.). Penguin Books.
Bibliography
Elizabeth Fisher and Rebecca Fortnum, On Not Knowing How Artists Think (2013) Black Dog Publishing. Pg 70 - 87.
Kastrup, B. 2019. The Idea of the World. A multi-disciplinary argument for the mental nature of reality. Iff Books.
Jung, C.G.1991. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Collected Works of C. G. Jung). Second edition. Routledge publishers.
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