PART 4 CURATING AS ART – studio work
My website is now up and running including a blog. www.patricia-farrar.co.uk
Studio work continues the search for ‘sound’. It is interesting that since the garden is beginning to fall silent with the change in the seasons the search is for a deeper sense of listening.
Listening involves a stillness and a connection with what’s happening around us. This connectedness with the natural world creates a different kind of awareness. Simply looking with our eyes places the viewer outside – an onlooker – to the natural world, whereas listening, feeling, smelling, waiting allow for a deeper sensory perception to happen.
So listening to the sounds of the natural world and what it is saying to us brings about a new relationship. There is a dialogue! My expectation is that this connectedness with the earth will bring about an awareness of a world beyond our field of vision, resulting in a higher sensitivity to the earth’s needs.
This level of connectedness is what I search for in painting. Sometimes they are pure abstraction, sometimes they hover between abstraction and representation. I don’t think that matters.
This searching has brought me back to rethink my process for the work. Words have consistently been an integral part of the process of bringing forth an image and I’ve struggled with this. So often the words come first before the image takes form. I’ve been thinking of how to place the written word and have experimented with all the obvious ways – on the painting itself, around the image, as an aside to the image. But somehow that doesn’t fit with me. I love writing the poetry and the words draw out deep feelings and memory but I don’t want the words to stand alone, in a way as an explanation for the image. It has become clear that the words are actually part of the process of bringing forth the visual image. Somehow, they are part of the dialogue that happens…
Here are examples of my present process…
