'The only difference between a fake and a copy is an intention'

 

I picked up my PhD on Thursday and drove straight to the Humberstone Fitties.  The timing of this journey was coincidental yet it stands as an end point that hopefully will lead to a beginning.  Proposition Cottage names my intention to build a new workshop in my garden. The trip to the Fitties marked the start of finding out and a massaging of ideas to create the thinking-making-doing of a new project. This writing of things down is a start to a raveling. Writing art as words is one of things that has changed since graduating, it is a new proposition, a challenge to practice. I write this here to make a point and as a note to self; it is a mark and a reminder. This is text as inscription, the carving of words into an existing surface; it is not a log or a record or an artwork.  It is Ariadne's ball of red thread to follow back through the labyrinth. It will push and pull me through time and space and make the building into a proposition; more than a ramshackle shed in my garden, but not much more. 

 I miss some things about my old house yet most of these are a nostalgia for the past. I miss my old studio as it was a place to make things but it was also a place of identity.  I did not spend much time within its musky sawdust covered walls yet there was always the potential to spend my time lost in making. I could  be on my own with the tools that I have carried with me through most of my life.  My dads Eliot Lucas "big pliers", the homemade lathe, the Oxford stick welder, the Coronet multi purpose woodworking machine with over thirty ways to sever a finger. The making of a new workshop is the building of a pragmatic and practical space within my garden and rebuilding this place within my identity. 

The idea has given me focus.  Initially it was to be a place to make things and gradually it became a thing to make in itself. Like most good ideas and noses it cannot be fully unpicked, something is missed and always remains secret.  I have no memory of how I decided to build a new workspace while keeping Derek Jarmen's Prospect Cottage in mind.   I know that it has something to do with death, austere bleakness and the loneliness of both the intellectual and the long distance runner.  

Prospect cottage delivers an aesthetic weight with enough presence for me to hide behind.  I have speculated on replacing John Donne's poem  'The Sunne Rising'  which Jarmen mounted on the creosote black weather boarding with the more regional E'ee Ba Gum - can your belly touch ya bum?'.  I aim to add my own re-imaginings of Goya's Black paintings. These are the only artworks that have brought me to tears  in a public gallery.  I like the term 'fresco facsimile' it reminds me that the only difference between a fake and a copy is an intention.  The idea of building my own place in the garden to grow old and learn wisdom, to carve out an inner and outer thing of volume is a becoming a desire.  Most interesting things come from desire, something we are told never to give up on.  

I am writing again and as you write you start to think things through.  I find propositions flowing from words,  the ability to be clever clever.  For example, in reality I am building a shed, a simple garden shed  in which to potter and repair. Yet is it a place to shed anxiety about an inability to move forward, to shed  fears of losing an identity built on Oxford ark welders, my Dad's big pliers and to surround myself with long-saved materials that were bound to come in handy. 

Prospect cottage has become Proposition Cottage as to make a copy is not the intention I desire.  It is too cheap and literal to sustain a movement and a shedding.  However there is something about the black weatherboard and yellow windows that I cannot shrug off.  Jarmen's death made us all sad, we sat through the hour and a half of Blue and despaired at the oracular degeneration of one of our visionaries. Derek Jarmen, like John Berger and Ruskin are guides and seers, their words and works nourish and guide yet their main contribution is to continually challenge artists to think and feel and make things both identities and worlds.