In 2006 during my MA in Fine Art I began to explore using literally raw materials to express elements of self-portraiture and human life in terms of a marriage between the fabric of the land and the inner and outer shell of the self and the spaces we inhabit. Close by my coastal home, coal and clay abound; Upper Cretaceous rock supports Fluvial sands and gravels and blown sand. This stretch of the Humber estuary’s alluvial make-up flows on a tidal pulse that reveals, conceals, and brings to and fro lives and deaths. From a meditation in this land, comes the Open Series of Drawings and objects, both found and constructed. Somewhat concerned with the pureness of the material as found and used, unchanged, in its original and natural form as closely as possible – at the point when it is the most ‘itself’ – as it is when working with these elements, that I feel that I am the most myself.
A perception of ‘value’ might be an element of this work in some ways as much as the sense of self and place; I use coal and silver with the most frequency to grow the basis of drawings – the materials and the physicality of how one has to use them (with a certain force of sweeping pressure, or a particular ‘scratching’ motion) – feels primal, and some have commented that the work has a primacy, too, through the richness of browns, greys and blacks, the nature of the mark. Perhaps we see silver through mostly monetary and decorative value in contemporary Western society, but it also has the highest electrical and thermal conductivity of any metal. This, then, along with the carboniferous layers of partially decomposed vegetation which makes up coal (then coke, coal gas and tar) – has dual roles, as generator of life-giving heat and fire – life-giver with the one hand, life-taker with the other. In fact, the duality expands to multi-facets of preciousness, a wealth of qualities and abilities – just like us. James Elkins, in What Painting Is, uses a chapter for ‘A short course in forgetting chemistry’ – the emphasis on the actual and metaphorical properties of materials for the artist/alchemist. The value to me is, therefore, metaphorical, as much as in the actual visual qualities inherent in each, and both will change their appearance in time, as part of a piece of work in which they congregate often with chalk, linseed oil, graphite, clay. Once a piece exists, it will alter visually through time, as we do, perhaps having a kind of ‘life’.
Linda Ingham
October 2010
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