17th October 2024
Week 3 – Uncertainty
Louisiana Channel - How We Make Sense of the World
Password: CSM
Uncertainty
Unfolding
Emblematic – emblem = serving as a symbol of a particular quality or concept
Questions – with Martina, Roz, and Oi F Ho
Are you comfortable with uncertainty? If yes why, if not why?
Uncertainty and undermining, two conflicting voices of Roz and her mother discussing her work: “Just get on and make something!” versus “but what if no one likes it?”, a self-reflective hesitancy about making work.
Oi F Ho likes the flow of uncertainty towards an outcome you could not have predicted and would not have achieved without diving into that uncertainty.
There is a need for uncertainty in an art practice that is hard to allow. Martina felt that there are good uncertainties that lead you to experiment and discover something new, and bad uncertainties that lead to self-doubt.
Uncertainty is all I have really felt in my life over the last 8 years since I came out as transgender, and so I hate it but it is also what informs my art practice. I’m not sure what my art practice would be if I had not spent so long in a pit of uncertainty.
How do relate to the idea of uncertainty in your own art?
Not knowing what came next drove the direction my work went in, what I was animating next as my personal story but also what other works I created along the way in response to more problems life threw at my journey of affirmation.
“Uncertainty offers me flexibility. Space for something else. The space in-between/on the frayed edges. A curious humouring amongst other feelings. Reconciliation through learning something new.” – Dionne Elizabeth
I really liked what Dionne said so it gets put as an official quote. I very much feel that my life, and therefore my practice, has existed in the frayed edge of life. A place that does not have to be acknowledge, you can see it there falling apart and struggling to hold on, but you do not have to help it. However, the uncertainty is also reconciliation for my art practice because it is what has driven and guided it over the years. Where for most uncertainty is hesitancy and unknown, for me it creates structures as it goes on.
How do you respond to words like ‘unfolding’ or ‘emblematic’ – how are these useful for thinking about art?
Emblematic – certainty and strength, authoritative and needing guards to support
Uncertainty – gentle and hesitancy
Deborah Roberts Interview
Either by the hawk or by the dove, 2018. Mixed media collage on paper.
Large male hands on children’s bodies with children’s faces, speaks to the sexualisation of children by men. The work and the scale increasing over time.
Displayed on a white background, having the work move through a white space that is very glaring. From 2020 as her work evolved, the girls in the artwork grew to take up that white space in a powerful way.
“The work was asking more of me… I think that’s something that I listen to when the work tells me that… I follow what the work wants me to put out into the world.”
Questions – with Martina, Roz, and Oi F Ho
What is your work asking of you?
My work, and my practice as a whole, asks me to confront and process the traumatic parts and celebrate the joy and milestones of my journey in transitioning.
Roz’s painting is asking her to dig deeper, be angrier and more volatile. Channel Earth’s anger and molten lava, as well as her own tenseness and reserve through life as a career. Portray her own body holding everything in in that same way, where underneath a thin crust there is a big red bubbling mess.
It asks her to be vulnerable, and Martina is not sure whether she does not want to be or does not know how to be that holds her back. The work never feels finished or complete.
What challenges do you face in following your work?
It can be quite mentally challenging to follow the way my work calls, as it is not often a celebratory topic, or the celebration is so belated it is then tainted by a sad reality of it shouldn’t have taken this long to happen.
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