The following paragraph was written in an email to a friend recently, and it summarises the position I have been in since returning from Berlin.

To be completely honest, when I arrived back from Berlin I was exhausted. I haven’t created any work so far. Since coming back to the studio, I have been collating everything together: feedback, responses and the work as a whole and sitting with it all- contemplating where to from here. I have organized everything into a visual diary and created a wall of images from 10 artists that I love and more importantly, who work in a way that has some relationship to the ideas I am trying to talk about for the MFA. From there I have been writing and writing and writing. Questioning everything and questioning what it is that I am trying to say; finding the assumptions, and flipping them in some way. Some of my feedback in Berlin spoke about a disconnection between the work and the theoretical ideas I am proposing. I have to agree, and it was something I was thinking about before Berlin too. So I am trying to find that connection…

It's funny because my work is meant to be about connection and here I am trying to find the connection, and at times I feel blind to any form of connection at all – so this I guess is the most significant challenge I face over the next 11 months. In all honesty, I only started to create some form of “work” on Thursday (as in last Thursday 5 October) and primarily because I had a meeting with Jean Marie on Friday and this post was due on Sunday. I appreciate the privilege of taking time out to think and don’t see a problem with it but what I realized during the process was that my biggest problem in creating new work was ego. I had decided I wanted to create large scaled charcoal drawings that then incorporate a form of light drawing over the top in some way – and the thought of this paralyzed me. Facing this scale became overwhelmingly intimidating…and I froze. I remember a quote I read somewhere that you can tell the ego of the artist by the scale of the canvas which is a funny lens to look through when going back through the plethora of art history – da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is tiny for example.

Anyway, out of a moment of contemplation what I decided to do was a series of small charcoal drawings and to project the drawings to the scale that I wanted – problem solved… and in the process, I realized that by doing this I was still actually drawing with light.

From the drawing projections, I decided to continue experimenting with moving images as a way of visualizing the movement of air. This was something I started to play around with earlier in the year and had fun with it so decided to try it out again. The following is a selection of those experiments:

The images below are a series of stills taken while playing around with projecting the charcoal drawings and experimenting with the moving image.