Tuesday, 27 October 2020

[LAUIL601] Tutor Lecture: Jamie Mills

Tutor Lecture: Jamie Mills

  • PEEL Structure.
  • The theme is Methodologies of Reporting.
  • Observation, studies, reporting.
  • Limits of reporting through an ecological lens. What that means.
  • Mould grew on the book that is quoted from because of the damp.
  • Beautiful quote about texture.
  • Idiosyncrasy. Lived experience.
  • Illustration, illuminating, reporting. How to report chaotic ecologies a non-reductive way. The great piece of turf.
  • Complexity and systems are the way things exist. Twisting and looping.
  • The writing captures the sense perfectly. Be open and see things that nonhuman scales.
  • Seeing of things at scales; human scale, timescale, physical.
  • Weird openness of parts and wholes. Pieces and particles, active, making up something.
  • Ecological complexity: access. Priority of access. Ecological awareness. What the self is. Our experience. We don't see human flavoured things. Daffodil is objective. Daffodil + illustrator = illustrator flavoured outcome. It remains open by the human experience. Too complex, too strange. Mysterious and magical. Ambiguous, twists and loops.
  • Nature. We think things have always been there. But things have twisted, Lupita, evolved, connected. Interrelatedness.
  • Example of pumpkin seeds. Straightforward process of growing a pumpkin. But there are so many factors in the compost, rain water, the soil, the bacteria and fungi and what happens further below the seeds, the quality of nitrogen in the air, and from the plants around.
  • Explosion of complexity and context. Strangeness. Caught in a twist with in the thing you're observing. How the world isn't necessarily your own.
  • "prevailing principles that shape their work."
  • I have to remember that I'm an observer but I can't observe everything.
  • The closer I look, the stranger things are.
  • Albrecht Dürer. German painter. 
  • Patch of weeds by elevating it, all things start to happen.Slice of undergrowth vying for space. Root systems. Overlaps and overlays and transparencies. Ebon flow. Time, growth and decay.
  • Access. Hello to the ground. Almost like a small mammal.Loops and interconnection. Directly over painting and looping.
  • At best it is just an overlooked or ignored patch of weeds. Non-human interest and non-human scales. Rachel Carson quote.
  • Jamie's own work – different scales. Different elements. Exploring complexity.
  • A white cut out viewfinder from a piece of paper. Shapes the way of looking. Scale, withdrawn way. Drawing focus and attention. Highlighting a moment.
  • Scaling up. Exploding. Mix of scales. Scale of observation.
  • Using limited materials. China markers and mono printing. Limits and constraints. Focusing on textures and intricacies. Without having to think of colour.
  • Responding to my own photographs. Quick sketches, quick thumbnails and patches of weeds. Primary focus on tone and texture (monoprints) thinking about those dark mythologies and strangeness and withdrawn.
  • Is it possible to be trapped? Lost? Dark ecology.
  • Thinking about how pictures exist and how much can be represented. 
  • Synthesis and coming together. What form could they take? The sketches and photographs. In design file of work into a booklet.
  • Smaller pages and viewfinders. How text can work alongside this.
  • Any images we make are reductive and will fall short no matter what. But ecological awareness can show our own shortcomings.
  • Commenting on the difficulties and strangeness. Through images we can communicate through time, magical and mysterious ecology.
  • Jamie is drawn to systems and clear methodology of working so it's easy to keep momentum over long periods of time for him.


Reflection of tutor lecture:

A number of things really stood out to me in today's lecture including the idea of idiosyncrasies and lived experience, which is exacting what is underpinning my own work for 601. I'm glad to have a name for it and will look further into a definition. I like the idea that we are observer but can't observe everything. This sums up the 601 module as a whole. We can only research so much, in this research stage, because it really could go on forever. 


Using a viewfinder is interesting tool and concept and something I'm doing similarly on instagram. I create my abstract artwork and then, using the cropping tool, upload 3 variants that have been zoomed and rotated to focus on different elements, colours and shapes. It allows the work to interpreted differently in the parts of its whole.


This was a very eloquent lecture and gives me confidence in the work I'm doing. 

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