Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Poetry + Myth...Artist Talk



Just a note to say thank-you to everyone who was at the gallery for the 'artist talk'...in reflection there always seems more one may have spoken of...but I think the very nature of this work is to allow its sense of meaning to rise of its own accord...for those who were unable to be there...I spoke of my connection to process...or what I consider is a state of naive detachment from the things I make...the thought that if the sense of 'knowning but not knowning' remains with me then it will remain that way for the viewer...it requires a complete trust in both process...the making...together with that moment of heightened experience (the intuitive response if you like...but at times it seems such an inadequate term)...I talked of myth as that form of knowledge that is by its very nature non-theoretical...stories or self-narratives that may seem quite inconsequential yet invoke a certain capacity to enter the realms of  myth...of the mythological...capable of forming a more complete connection between identity + place...the poetic is simply the expressive form of making these narratives visible...the poetic for Keats was what he referred to as 'negative capability'...the notion of giving over to uncertainty...free of continuously grasping for fact or reason...the word 'liminal' entered the conversation...the thought of a liminal space as a threshold...a point of both departure & grounding of consciousness...I spoke of a quality of pensiveness...of these works having a sense of thinking for themselves... surfaces & fragments triggering a mechanism of associations...but ultimately beyond the poetic there is a questioning of place that is enigmatically connected to addressing relationships between Indigenous & non-indigenous Australians. 



3 comments:

  1. Really enjoyed the talk Glen, and wonderful to have the words to read too...am very interested in the concepts of 'negative capability'(there was an interesting small doco on Jane Campian, direstor of the 'keats' movie talking about it, liminal space' and the 'pensiveness' of the work. Excellent!

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