Abandonments
I am drawn to abandonments — to places that once were inhabited and which now stand empty and in ruins. And I have my own abandonments too: things that I have given up and which the present buries such that not a timber, nor stone remains.
On the surface.
Today, I was trawling through photos on my laptop, looking for a photo that I had taken a few years back when thinking about the composition for a print that I am yet (perhaps never) to start, and en route through this archaeology of myself I stumbled upon a stone. Well — a linocut of a stone. Carved into the stone, a monoku, a one-line poem that I had written many years before and which had previously formed the basis of my first attempt at lettering in a relief print. I remember the process of working the letters with a gouge, and remember too my feeling of disappointment upon pulling a proof from the block and seeing the print for the first time. I decided then not to edition it.
Having dug it up today, some two years after making it, I am struggling to put my finger upon what it was that I disliked and all that I can come up with is the fact that it’s not perfect. By which I mean that it falls short of my vision.
Someone, somewhere, will, I am sure, have said that perfection is the enemy of art, perhaps the root of all evil. And it is true that finding fault with things can hold progress back, and true too that there is no such thing as perfect. There is only, ever, right in the moment, and right now — thinking as I have been over the past few weeks about working words into a print — this print for me has found its moment. The sentiment is as pertinent now in these days of loud and mouthy leaders as it was then and ever has been, and having let the print lie buried for two years I can see it now for what it is: a print, an object, a thing, rather than something that with my hands, my head, my eye, I made.
N.B. Just prior to uploading this post, I checked through its settings and noticed that its given url ended ‘anbandonments1’ — the ‘1’ suggesting that I had previously written another post called ‘Abandonments’. I checked back and, five days to the year one year ago I had in fact started a post called ‘Abandonments’. I got no further with that post than one sentence, and then abandoned it. That I come back to the same theme today, one year on, and that I find this print today when I am again thinking about prints with words, is something that I take less as coincidence, or fate, or as something divine, than as the strange workings of a subconscious mind which alone knows what it has buried.