ambiguity of forms

I suggested in my previous post that I'm perhaps more interested in work while it's still being created. Possibly proving that, I feel I have more to say about this piece than about the clay idols.

But first the facts. The main reason for my trip to the studio tonight was to add a layer of fabric and plaster to the current sculptural form I'm working on. I had a great time - it's immensely satisfying to work with these materials - if messy.

Later on after I'd come home and eaten I went for a brief walk because it's nice to make the most of the light. I started to think about a subject I periodically return to - whether I still consider myself a poet.

I think my answer to that is 'no' - but with a couple of caveats.

First - although for a long time I did call myself a poet, try to be a poet, and think of myself as primarily a poet - for most of my time as a writer I didn't think of myself as a poet. For most of my time as a writer I thought of myself as a writer (sometimes as an artist) - and if I called myself a poet or my work poetry it was a label of convenience.

Second - I don't now really think of myself as a sound artist, or a sculptor, or a musician, or whatever. I think of myself mainly as an artist. And that includes writing, includes text. It leaves open the possibility that I can write poetry - and I'm certainly more likely to write poetry than a novel.

One of the few things I will definitively say is that I will never write a proper full-length novel. I'm not sure that I could for one - and if by some accident I did manage it then the book would almost certainly be absolute shit.

None of which seems to have much bearing on the title of this post - or the images of the form photographed in the corridor outside the studio at the Mill after I'd finished plastering it.

Except that the next train of thought after realising that I don't really think of myself as either a poet or writer anymore - and write very little beside the blog - was to wonder what I get from making sounds and physical forms that I don't get from writing.

The first and most obvious difference for me is the physical aspect. Writing was always a confined and sedentary activity. I tried to shake it up. I would write on unconventional surfaces and objects using unconventional writing implements. I would stick paper (or bubblewrap, or plastic bags, or whatever) on the walls or ceiling to write. I would write using my left hand. Most of these ways of what I called 'defamiliarizing' the process were about creating physical obstacles.

There were other strategies - I started performing as soon as I was able. I enjoy performance and was always ambitious to do more than just read my work - to have more to my work than just voices. Visual poetry seemed like an interesting avenue to explore. Even before I knew what visual poetry was I started using non-text symbols, drawings, and actual physical objects in poems. One was even presented as a comic strip.

There were longstanding interests in other fields. Throughout school and into my early twenties I was interested in painting and drawing, and also attempted a few comics. I tried making music from time to time. I was fascinated by film and theatre and wrote a number of scripts but never attempted to get anything produced. I made sculptures from time to time - often from junk. On one occasion creating a piece meant to be purely tactile and not actually looked at.

But above all these things I was fascinated by dance. I took a course of contemporary dance and watched a lot of dance on tv when I had the chance - although my parents had no tv at home. I would never have been a good dancer but I really enjoy dancing and I know I'd miss it if I wasn't physically able to dance.

And this is why I won't ever be just a writer again. It was both a great relief not to be in my head all the time - focussed on utter minutiae - and a great release to be able to physically embody and enact my work.

To be able to make a huge noise, to handle and shape materials into large objects, is immensely satisfying. A poem or other piece of writing feels somehow more provisional, less finished. With a sculpture or a soundwork there is a greater sense of progression.

But even without that the sheer physicality of making sound, of making objects is far more satisfying to me than writing. But please, I'm not denigrating writing. This is purely my subjective experience.

There's more. If it was solely about visible progress and the physicality of making I think part of me would still want to cling more closely to poetry.

I'm not sure that I was ever that good a poet. I was certainly never able to be as abstract as I would have liked. My work tended to stick to physical objects, actual events, and recognisable emotions. When I tried to explore ideas it often didn't work that well. I was usually crashingly obvious and clumsy.

And this blog up to around 2007 offers plenty of evidence that when it came to tackling emotions my poetry was often a form of self-harm.

With sounds and with sculptural forms I can be much less direct, much more allusive and abstract. Which brings us back to the sculptural form in the photos here.

I mentioned in the first post I wrote about it that the form was a lot more vaginal that I intended. And it is - but it's not just vaginal. In the image above, and in some of the others it might be a flower or mushroom. In the final image below it might be a cock.

It's all of these - and it's also obviously a roughly handmade sculptural object made from a variety of materials. It's a series of curves - a satisfying shape created with no thought about what it might resemble. It's able to talk about all these forms, about the process of creation, without ever having to be any of them, and without ever having to make a definitive statement about them.

I like this unfixed nature combined with an actual object with pretty serious physical heft.

So for me sound and sculpture allow me physically embody the work, they allow a measurable progress, and they allow me to engage with ideas in the abstract and allusive way I found almost impossible in my writing.