Sophie Ashdown

Recently I’ve had two one-to-one sessions with Jonathan which introduced me to new concepts and challenged my thinking about myself and my art practice.

There was too much to put all into one big blog so I’m going to break it down into sections.

One of my favourite discussions was when Jonathan described a story about a forest full of tall, straight trees, but where one tree is wonky and grows differently.  We talked about how or why that tree would be shaped differently against all of the others. 

How and why has that tree had to adapt to its environment differently than the other trees?  Maybe it grew around a rock or it had to reach sideways to catch the sunshine. 

I think the point was that the “imperfection” is actually the result of adaptation, which can be beautiful in itself, even when surrounded by seemingly “perfect” trees.

This felt like a useful metaphor for thinking about my own work. I tend to get overly focused on whether something appears “correct” or perfectly structured, when perhaps I should really be thinking about what the work is doing or saying, how it is responding to the canvas or the paint, and the importance of what is around the structure rather than just the structure itself.

This made me think about how irregularities can draw your attention while highlighting the order of everything else.  Can I still create structured, ordered works of art such as my data pieces, but introduce or include something unstructured to draw attention and highlight the meaning of rest of the work?

I think I have done this without realising when experimenting with including people and objects in the “windows” of my blue data piece. Amongst the strict interpretation of the data points, the inclusion of the animated windows creates more interest and provides an intriguing contrast to the order of everything else.

This requires a lot more thought and certainly we discussed it further in the sessions which I’ll comment on separately.

Meanwhile I commented to Jonathan that if I was walking through a forest with a thousand tall straight trees and one wonky one, I would certainly remember the wonky tree the most.