David Hammons. Untitled (Body Print). 1974. Five colour monotype on white wove paper. 64.8 x 55.9 cm
13 March 2025
READING: The Second Body (2017) by Daisy Hildyard
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The title of this book intrigued me... after the feedback on my knot/rope drawings from Unit 1 was associated with the ideation of the body being entangled/in-meshed. And so I read it and found many open-ended insights into the internal complexity of what the body could mean:
The first body is a physical one that we experience every day. Made of flesh and bones, it feels, communicates, and digests the world around us. The second body is our footprint or traces on the environment through our lifestyle choices and activities... the second body diffuses. Hildyard emphasized that we don't experience the second body at an individual level daily, like our first body, which is very physical and "present." The global presence of the individual body. Outside, it is imagined as an entity shared and distributed across every aspect of the human biosphere.
Blindly reading this book, I did not expect to learn about the ecological factors of the body. However, it was interesting to read different perspectives of this second presence: from Hildyard's childhood encounters with animals alive and dead, a butcher's point of view of handling dead matter daily as a craft to create food for their community, a once zookeeper turned environmental offences investigator who handles the exploitation/violence of living beings, to scientists who try to make sense of life.
Although these comparisons in the various essays did show an open-ended outlook on the footprint of living bodies might mean globally and individually, I felt more connected to the idea of the second body in the last chapter of the book- which was on Hildyard's experience of her home being affected by the winter floods in Yorkshire and seeing an aerial footage of her house and how small the flood looked on television. She talks about her time waiting for the flood to recede and cleaning out the home during holiday time, having to throw away most of her possessions. Though most her neighbors' felt sympathy of the situation, Hildyard felt catharsis in the act of putting her once lived in belongings in the bin: the sense of relief was located in my spine, it felt as if my vertebrae were spacing themselves further out, as if my body was growing longer and more loose... My second body came to find my first body when the river flooded my house. The idea of the flood being part of the second body intrigued me, not only from the environmental climate factors of humans' footprint, but also this collective wave of nature being entangled with the convoluted impact that is out of our reach. Yet, nature being unpredictable and out of our reach, the act of throwing away a once evocative object (once shared personal memories with), is gone under the control of an individual's act of decision.
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My main interest throughout this book was what this second body might look like. To visualize, I thought of David Hammon's body prints. For some reason, the imagery of an uncomfortableness, almost looking like the body might disintegrate into nothingness, in grey matter, being on the cusp between the boundaries of something internal and external, felt like the second body to me. Maybe it is the visceral textures of where Hammon's pigments of his skin seems to transcend onto the surface of the paper.
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Noted pages:
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pg. 108- a vision of an individual body that is very personal, but also overpopulated with other [peoples'] organs
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"The nicely constructed sense of distance between their bodies and the bodies of others is broken into."
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Belkis Ayon: Sikan Illuminations
@ Modern Art Oxford (2 November 2024- 9 February 2025)
7 March 2025
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The MA Drawing and Printmaking cohort had the opportunity to go to Oxford to visit the works of Belkis Ayon (b.1967-1999), and her fascination with the Abakua mythology, through the medium of printmaking, particularly collography.
Abaqua was a Cuban secret society, predominantly a male-only religious group that originated from the tribes and ritual traditions of West Africa. Heritage of the Abakua is explored, Ayan focuses on the myth of the female protagonist, Sikan, a woman who accidentally found a fish that had the spirit of the god Abasi, whom the Abakua people worshipped, as the fish granted an extraordinary power of the 'sacred voice' to whoever found it. The Abakua society wanted the fish and its power to themselves, so they let the snakes scare Sikan into dropping the fish to have Abasi's sacred voice, but Sikan managed to take the fish home and show it to her father, whom warned her to remain silent and keep it a secret. The myth supposedly ends tragically when the information is shared to Sikan's fiance, Abakua's enemy tribe leader, and he exiled Sikan to a death sentence along with the sacred fish.
I've seen some of her works at the Tate Modern before, but seeing a whole collection of Ayon's works alone in one exhibition space was very powerful. Her vastly scaled black and white collagraphs set a vibrating presence to me, seeing the white figures, some faceless and some with almond-shaped eyes, contrasting against the dark patterned backgrounds of graphic symbols and animals surrounding these figures. The idea of silencing seems to be a major them to Ayon's work, as most figures did not have mouths, just eyes staring directly to the viewer. I felt a sense of passiveness, delicate and rigorous simultaneously, and I really admire the consistent drawn quality of her collection, with extensive visual storytelling in each individual work. ​
Process of Collography:
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Because Abakua society itself had so little evidence of visual representations of its myths, Ayon's visual storytelling in the printed collagraph images felt open to many different types of interpretations, both to the artist and the viewer.
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Collographs are made from everyday materials collaged on a printing plate. At the exhibition, a video clip excerpt shows Ayon working in her printmaking studio, primarily carving patterns, cutting out the stencils of figures and background, and inking up large sheets of cardstock in different weights, sandpaper, and carborundum to create her images. I was amazed by the impressive tonal variation she achieved in her prints, from ghostly translucent white, aquatints of grey, to pitch black. A 'simple' printmaking pencil, yet in Ayon's work seems so complex, labour-intensive, and time-consuming.
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Bringing a drawing-like style into printmaking interests me and could be something to consider in my future works from Unit 2 onwards. I like this idea of working with positive and negative spaces, the act of erasing, creating ambiguous tonal value to image, and the transferance of materials onto paper.
images from top left to right: La Familia (The Family), 1991.,
bottom left to right: Sketches of Belkis Ayon's works, Documented video clip of Ayon in her studio putting her collagraph into the press.
References:
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Modern Art Oxford- Belkis Ayon activity/information sheet:​​
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Modern Art Oxford- Belkis Ayon Glossary terms/Interview with Jaime Sarusky (4 Feb. 1999)
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Video: Belkis Ayon at Work., c.1998 (video by Modern Art Oxford)
11 March 2025
Gallery Hopping around London with Kim Pace and Sarah Woodfine
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Kim and Sarah organised a day of visiting all sorts of exhibitions and artists showcasing their work in London. It was definitely a very informative trip that made me consider different issues, themes, and mediums these artists use in their practice, and to see how their work is curated and set up by professional galleries and organizations. However, I was overwhelmed to see 4-6 various artists within multiple galleries presenting their works all within one full day. Usually, one or two art galleries would be more than enough for me to see, think, and reflect on for the day and the upcoming days... so I'll say that my mind felt a bit cluttered and tired out Nonetheless, I'm grateful that I got to see all the exhibitions; below are some of the artists that I resonated with the most, and some learned thoughts on their works:
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Barbican: Citra Sasmita- Into Eternal Land
...Working fluidly across painting, sculptural installation, embroidery and scent, Sasmita will invite visitors on a symbolic, multi-sensory journey through the 90-metre-long gallery to explore ideas of ancestral memory, ritual and migration.
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https://www.barbican.org.uk/our-story/press-room/citra-sasmita-into-eternal-land
London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE
Jonathan Baldock 0.1%’
Drawing on the rich history of the Bloomberg site, home to the
ruins of the Roman temple of Mithras, Jonathan Baldock’s 0.1% explores myths, legends, gods, rituals, and their influence on our lives. The artist uses natural materials like hessian, wool, clay, wood and metal, taking influence from folklore and paganism.
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Although I liked Jonathon Baldock's works and how he intertwines his own family history with the Bloomberg site, I personally found the archaeological finds of Roman Londoners and potential Mithras worshippers (dated back to approximately 40- 170 AD) displayed on a cased wall more interesting.
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14 March 2024
Drawing the Unspeakable @ Towner Eastbourne
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image below: notes of thoughts taken while looking around the exhibition
(The photographs of artworks taken above were some of the notable drawings that I found very interesting and resonated with in relation to my own drawings/practice.)
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Paula Rego, Studies for the Families (1987)
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Emma Talbot, The Tragedies (2024)
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Louise Bourgious
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​Eric Ravilious, Curtains (undated)
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Jessica Wolfson, Mourning Drawings: Slipper (2017)
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Anna Dowker, Drawings from Strange Children (2005)
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Leon Kossof, Peggy and David (1955)
The show made me consider ways of showing a collection of an artist's work; seeing the drawings of an artist on one wall space allowed me to see and feel the characteristics of the artist, it was empowering to see how much the act of drawing can transfer the emotions felt in the time the drawing was made, and how temporal time could be in a life/observational drawing. I guess that's why the title of this show was called Drawing the Unspeakable. Each room navigates different themes like war, disasters, mental and physical illness, displacement, loss and grief, birth and family, memories and imagination. All life events that are out of our control sometimes and are dealt with on an everyday basis, positive or negative, are happening all around us. The exhibition proves that drawing is a universal language.
Even the conditions in which the drawing was kept and archived made me realize that I should consider treating my own works and sketches better and more carefully because one day, they could be something to savour and reflect on.
In this exhibition, I spent four hours looking at and returning to look again.
Going to this exhibition felt essential to think about my own work moving forward to Units 2 and 3.
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24 April 2025
Artist Talk: FAY BALLARD
​resources: https://www.fayballard.com/
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To be honest, I was speechless. There was so much she shared that I resonated with. Here are some notable points I got from Ballard's talk:
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Drawing is a conscious and unconscious act. An internal and external practice
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