Major Project, - building ideas, standing on the shoulders of giants....

Last week I created some simple paintings which were based on watercolours, and and painted very quickly as representational ideas of the gnome.

The progression of the idea for the disappearing object, as in "Things Left behind", has led me to experiment a little more with the notion of Heidegger and broken tool.

I have also been exploring the idea of mimesis, and the paper entitled "mimesis as a mode of knowing". This academic paper explores how vision and movement in aesthetic practice of Jean Painleve, which was written by Anna Gibbs, of the writing and Society research centre and digital humanities research group, within the School of humanities and communication arts, University of Western Sydney, Australia 2012.

In Gibbs is paper she likens the idea of mimesis, which she terms as corporeal copying and communication involving the sharing of movement and form in which affect ways a significant role. In essence what Gibbs says in her paper is that there are a number of different ways of conceiving affect, which she has written about outside of this paper, which I need to try to find and study. Gibbs argues that effectivity is a major component of the characteristic responsiveness of all animal wife, whether human or nonhuman. She gives examples such as smiling, and how both in humans and I believe in chimpanzees and possibly other apes and primates this visual cue is in itself an affect which can be copied by others nearby as a mimetic response. Other human behaviour can also create this copying of an affect which she calls "mimetic contagion".

My choice of the visual image of good gnome I believe also creates a mimetic contagion in many in order to respond with a smile. My idea of the gnome object and its facial translation into a disappearing memory, or notion of an object that is left behind disappearing as a memory, is an animated trigger which has the desired effect that I'm looking for.

I have therefore created further plaster of Paris moulds of the original gnome, but this time, once they are set I intend to fragment them, in a similar way to the broken statue of the original figure. This breaking up of the gnome is an allusion both symbolically and metaphorically to Heidegger's theory, and the notion of being which he later wrote about in his paper "Art and Space" (1969). Whilst Heidegger talks of art and space his original works have been built upon with further emphasis on the importance of temporality. Art space and temporality is intrinsically linked with my investigations of objects and memory.

I am intending to create some two-dimensional relief images, which are in fact on closer scrutiny, three-dimensional. When the plaster of Paris mouldings are dry, I will set to work on a series which combine the blue of memory with the fragmented objects memory together.

Conclusions:-
I'm still convinced that I must pursue the notion that Heidegger and his writings have planted, both in terms of art space and time (temporality) discussed above, with the concept of his theory of "being" and Heidegger's broken hammer.

I must create works which trigger appropriate emotional responses through affect, but must not be entirely obvious to the viewer. There is something still quite out of place in the images of gnomes that I want to continue to explore and will do so for the remainder of this term I suspect.