One of the main themes that kept coming to mind creating “Thought Experiment 2021” was the feeling of being unbalanced, like I was living in the past and future but just drifting in the present. Which is where the design for the central character of the piece came from. Being split down the middle half his body being black and the other white. Which also related to my own mixed black Caribbean and white European background. To me being mixraced Is both a balance of two things, but also feels unbalanced in the fact that the word “half” is used to describe me, suggesting I’m not fully anything. I don’t personally find this offensive, just interesting (I intend to explore this more in my follow up piece over the next month). Elsewhere in the artwork another character is half black and half white and quite literally stitched together, referencing Frankensteins monster. Which I always felt was such a perfect character that’s aged so well in terms of identity and question whether we are how people see us, how we see ourselves, what it says about society of how the “monster” is treated. And I was always inspired by artists taking a conceptual idea and turning it to an extreme literal idea, the same way Frankenstein is exploring the concept of identity, then literally making the main character made up of different people. This almost cartoony comical exaggerated approach is something I love to explore throughout my work. This central character I created felt to embody the uncertainty I felt at the time. He is depicted above frozen in contemplation holding a broom, referencing the way I was using my craft like a groundskeeper to tidy my state of mind and the mess of notes and doodles that would spill across the finished artwork. 

Above can also be seen a photo I took of a mask that has hung in my home as long as I can remember. I have vivd memories of me and my older brother being both fascinated and frightened by it as children. It’s burned into my memory as one of my earliest experiences of something evoking so many emotions at once. From curiosity and wonder to terror and playfulness. This became the face of the opposition to the central character in the artwork. I created this shapeshifting mask character as a reminding symbol of how I want my artwork to feel (the world through the eyes of a child). In the artwork it’s both a guide of what I want my own art to feel like. But also an obstacle and opposition in terms of the fear of never being able to reach that goal, or even worse having already peaked as an artist. At the time I was always in competition with myself and every time I finished a piece was met with this weight of anxiety of never being able to create something as good as the last thing I had done. Doomed to repeat myself with watered down versions of what I had already done. These characters feel more personal every time I draw them, and their story will continue in the next artwork I’ll be creating over the next month. 

In this next drawing/colouring stage I fleshed out the rough doodle concepts into fully formed characters and ideas, making my thoughts physical. Using my doodles/notes as a kind of blueprint. I use a combination of pencil illustration, watercolour, paint, photography, pen and oil pastels. While spending more time on this drawing phase I start to understand the piece more than I did when I was just scribbling down ideas almost subconsciously. It’s amazing to me how things you create can seem completely random at the time, but make so much sense and feel so relevant to your state of mind at the time in hindsight (I plan to push this idea even further in my follow up to this piece). So much of this piece was about how I felt as an artist at the time, which Is why I included photos of the tools I was using to create the piece itself.  worrying about everything from making money as an artist, feeling lost and the worry that commissions were using up my creativity and no longer growing it. While touching on some quite personal and heavy themes, I wanted the piece to counterbalance that with a playful almost childlike feel. This comes from my art always feeling very much connected to my childhood and wanting it have that nostalgic animated comforting feel. While also being able to dive into deeper personal feelings and concepts beyond surface level (kind of like making medicine bubblegum flavoured).

When an idea is finished I always find it hard to remember where it even began, it feels as if the idea has died, reborn and been reinvented over and over. What I do remember about creating this piece back in 2021 is that I had been illustrating commission album covers one after the other and it had been a while since I had the time to create something personal just for myself. Despite loving being able to bring someones else’s idea and music to life through an image, Album covers always have to be a perfectly square shaped canvas, I had started to feel quite literally boxed in and was aching to try something different, personal and out my comfort zone.
I approached this artwork in an entirely new way by going through my sketchbook and gathering all the notes of the thoughts and feelings I had scribbled down throughout the past year. Adding my then current feelings of being creatively blocked, ideas on what being mixrace means, fears of the uncertainty of the future and continuing to relive past mistakes etc. Without thinking I just freestyle doodled rough sketches of these ideas and feelings into visual concepts, adding notes and markings that probably only make sense to me. So I ended up with a really rough kind of visual diary of the past year. The next stage would be turning these rough sketches into fully formed drawings. The next month I see as a opportunity to revisit this way of working and will be creating a continuation of this first piece.

The Towngas Ma Tau Kok Control Center has been recreated within the Leave Your Body world. Its worth mentioning that this was built with the help of a very talented Minecraft Architect, and consist of the exterior only – but wow is it beautiful.

A site recreated within the aesthetics of Minecraft is similar to how most 3D scanning and digitization projects – the information extracted is for “skins” and “shapes” and how these two types of information interlink with each other. The material of the site cannot be calibrated, and the material of the project becomes the medium in which the information is expressed – light emitted from a glass surface.

I had a really hard time working with the old footage and photographs from Ventspils, it was too emotionally charged (but not in a spectacular powerful way, more like in a gentle-nagging-weighing-down way). and I was sitting in the studio, breaking down a bit and thinking “this is not supposed to be so difficult and boring, this time is supposed to be creative, playful and life-affirming!!!”

so I asked myself WHERE IS MY POWER

(and I found it.)

I’m actually starting to work on some fun stuff right now that also came out of my archives but it’s not at all what I expected coming into this residency.

so yeah, I don’t think I’m ready to work with that particular video footage yet. I had glimpses of what kind of film this footage could become but it’s out of my reach right now because I’m only starting to come back to my individual practice, plus so many hard things happened in the past 3-4 months (from my housemate leaving without a word, to another burnout from work, to fighting off illegal eviction attempts, to going through assessments with DWP that kept being rescheduled) – I really need to listen to what energies/thoughts/feelings are here with me and ready to be expressed. not forcing anything anymore.

♥

This reel is on my Minecraft mood board for sure:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CPyBLT-lTkb/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

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Video description: An Instagram reel by @minecraftprimebuilds that shows a Minecraft player jumping over objects/obstacles in a tunnel while in the child’s voice we hear the following words (that also show up in large letters over the video): “Roses are red, violets are gay, I sent this to you cause you are gay”

Minecraft is a sandbox video game that was first made public in 2009 before being released in 2011. It has since become the best-selling video game of all time. A game with over ten years of development and lore is intimidating to step into. Instead of just releasing a video game with the possibility of sequels like a movie, the recent trend in video games is to continually make improvements and add complexity over time, through updates. Added complexity retains the interest of hardcore users, and updates keep up with current trends to absorb new users. Developers consistently introduce new skins, maps, items, stories, missions, etc. As a maintenance format for the medium of video games it works. One can’t help but think what other systems could benefit from similar forms of continual improvement and incentivizing.

I am embarking on the early portion of the adjustment period and wondering how long it will take to where the game feels intuitive. The controls are still uncomfortable and there are too many types of blocks to know what to do. Luckily I can stand on the shoulders of giants and channel the wisdom of millions before me by watching Youtube tutorials. So far I have figured out how to build a tunnel and put some light in it.