Jenny Arran | Matter
May 2019

 

Starting
at the points
our paths cross,
the interactions
and entanglements
with matter.
Sensing what we
cannot name
and listening
in the silence
of the peripheral

 

Entangled

Paper Ribbon, Wild Clematis, poem

Winding in
the loping curves
the soft fall of
their pliant wrapping

untangling the
spooling rills
in the quiet
flex

supple
between knowing
drawing in
trees

winding
turned ideas
windblown
to silence
and given

in time

 

 

Flock

Oak, Chestnut, Pine, oil paint, poem

 

 

 

Flock
Oak and Chestnut mainly,
some Pine gathered from the woodpiles
of boatbuilders and carpenters
all just not, quite
the little flock of outsiders
watching me paint, in left out quiet
from the corners of my studio

Gradually they watched
insistently, together
fragments hummed
with being
unseen

much silent noise
on our unknown frequencies

gathered to vibrance
in object presence
clothed in the elements
of painting
to hum
their being

 

 

 

More…

I’m interested in the language and the vibrancy of matter – in what we sense but cannot
name that draws us in to relationship with things and objects as it does to people.
I’ve always treated my work like a conversation, a call and response – a relationship to
explore – between myself and the wood I am painting, the tool in my hand, or my body and
the object I am changing, moving or shaping. It’s a responsive, sensory/embodied,
listening and metaphoric process.

The work is really all about process and about a movement between two states ways of
being – stillness and movement. These works in the window were initially made for a show called ‘Matter’ held at Glynde Place and incorporated one other sculpture and several video pieces.
All made using found or disused objects. The Traveller’s Joy (or Wild Clematis) was dead and looping like drawings in the trees at the edge of the Chalkpit in Glynde, and the blocks of wood were the pieces I couldn’t paint on because they had too much presence, sitting latent, unused on the sidelines of my studio like a group of players needing costumes for a drama.

The filmed process of the making of the piece ‘Entangled’ was an integral part of the piece. The slow careful repetitive, tending task. Binding or mending, highlighting the process orientated element of the piece. They were intended as a form of drawing – both the piece and the video.
An interplay between movement and stillness.
The shop window fixes them, objectifies them, turns them into product more than process and it becomes the words then that carry the sense of movement.

Physics tells us that everything is in a state of process or becoming,
that particles, once interacted, communicate, respond and tangle with each other’s
motions even thousands of years later when they are light-years apart.
A universe of language with everything speaking,
on every level, to everything else.

I’ve been musing on the movement between the role of artist and mother, the points where the paths cross and inform each other. The ‘work’ of art and motherhood, the physicality of it, the unseen time given to tending and mending, ‘bodies’ (both human and more-than-human).
Listening. Weaving the threads that connect the generations back and forth,
memories and the making of meaning. Connections through process and time.

 

 

 

Jenny Arran
www.jennyarran.co.uk