June 2018

All Change At Dalston Junction: The Joy Of Tracing

The Joy of Tracing

The act of tracing is an ideal state sometimes. The image is softened by a veil of tracing paper. The mind can disconnect as the hand connects. Something like electric currents can be felt at the tip of the pencil, guiding the hand.

Subject and Object are perfectly in balance as the hand responds to the image below. It interprets; neither dumbly copying nor being obliged to create something entirely new, in the emptiness of a blank piece of paper.

In this case the artist is a filter; not a creator. The hand can relax, entering into a state of pure intuitive action. Time is slowed down. The triangle between the hand, the eye and the brain runs smoothly, without interference. If I was a writer I would call it ‘Autonomism’.

High Places

It is always good to go to a high place; one gets a perspective on things, looking down. Things at a distance seem to move in slow motion. The sounds of the city become murmurs in a prevailing silence. I see a person on a street, or in a window, far far away. I notice them as I never would from the ground. My mind’s eye becomes a telescope and I zoom in; it is a fusion of the seen and the imagined. It is a frozen moment ; Time is slowed down.

All Change at Dalston Junction

Dalston Junction isn’t what it used to be. The very name used to have a thud about it but now, on September 20th 2013, it seems bright and sleak.

I am on a mission; to look down on this year’s 10×10 grid from Barratt’s Dalston Square. They are sponsoring the event for Article 25 and doing this drawing binds their regeneration work around town into the personal views of myself and 99 others across the grid; coming together to make a ‘collective snapshot’ of the city; a moment in time.

It is a good view from the tallest tower. The deep cut of the railway leads the eye South, just beginning to veer East as the City rises. Trains move like toys and the bridge seems to hover over the cutting. It is a brown grey patchwork but one red light and one yellow for sale sign shine out. Green tree cushions billow like clouds amongst the blocks of De Beauvoir Town; rising like froth towards the wooded horizon far away.

I watch a mother with a buggy crossing the road in slow motion. I see the London Eye but cannot see it moving. It is easier to see my pencil’s shadow move as the Earth spins, if I hold it still.