A Fish Has No Word For The Sea

I've been going easy on myself and intentionally trying not to think about making art. It has helped a lot because most of the time I am in a panic mode over what I should be doing next or if I am doing too little etc etc. Most of the time I am stressed out.

A lot of my ideas are becoming clearer, making more sense. I've had a lot of recurring thoughts over the past couple of months not knowing how they relate to each other. I'm writing about them here because it is better than being on a post-it on my desk or another page of scribbles and ramblings in my journal.

When I finished Honours at the end of 2006, the thesis and the work was a culmination of a lot of the ideas I had up until that point. Since then a lot of things have happened to inspire my artm-making and feed my concepts. I would only ever notice how my ideas were developing whenever someone did an interview with me and the questions would be the same but the answers would change slightly over time. A lot of things are the same as before but the concerns over masculinity and violence aren't so much a focal point anymore, instead things have broadened and I am looking at personal identity and fantasy as a whole. Who defines us, what defines us etc.

I've been thinking about plots that occur in people's imaginations, about themselves or about other people - how things like party-photos, myspace, facebook, and 'the scene' drive that sort of thing. Who is interesting? Who isn't? What does this person actually 'do'? What do we think they do? Why do we assume that?

Also things like personal marketing, PR, getting seen, getting published, who's who is the zoo and all that shit. The creative climate. Who do we give a shit about and why? Buzz. The swindle. Sales. Fame.

A metaphor popped in my head the other day of the action figures I used to play with as a child. They were all from different things, Robin Hood, Spiderman, Lego, Transformers etc. yet they all co-existed and we re-appropriated into these stories I would create. In one play session Kevin Costner might team up with Optimus prime to take down Spiderman's castle. In another play session they might all be trapped in a sinking ship. The point being each had their own personal mythology, but the new context of my narratives some characters changed entirely and others stayed the same, depending on how they looked, my personal affinity towards them, or the condition of the figrue.

I was also reading a lot of crossover comics when I was a kid, and in them and I would be concerned about how a character could be completely different in another universe, and how this new universe changed them, they would act and behave differently, be scared. Something at their core may stay the same but the writer may make them weaker in comparison to a stronger hero they ar eteaming up with etc.

At the same time, I was reading the Spiderman clone saga, where there were four 'spidermen'. Eventually Peter Parker had to give up being Spiderman and rotate between four new heroes, one of which already existed that he was kind of doing shifts for. I don't even know how to get into how complex those story arcs got but I read them with nail-biting ferocity, I was deeply affected by this story arc. Everything I experience about my own personal identity or other people's I relate back to this.

I don't know how much sense this makes at the moment but I'm hoping to get some clarity in the coming months and incorporate these things more lucidly into my work, make these machine-men in leather jackets start making some sense instead of just being fashion statements.

When I was minding the end of year show at COFA a couple of ladies asked which works were mine, I pointed to the giant screenprints, they mask "Tsk tsk tsk" sounds and said "...looks like someone should have gotten over cartoons a long time ago." the other said "You ARE in big school now..."

I just smiled, and was kind of confused, and it was summer.