CosmiKnot

In making a doctoral proposal there is a certain amount of casting forwards. There is a required intuition that what you chose to research will be compatible with the practical process of researching. This is not a problem for an artist who works outside of linear time but in the realm of academic research the framework is still outwardly representational. The representational world is one of cause and effect i.e. I decide to research this and I make work with the theme of my research. Art has its origins in magical thinking and doesn’t really work as an illustration of ideas. Even as an illustrator I realised that illustration works better when you don’t just illustrate the meaning of the words on the page. Perhaps this is why I am aware of the pitfalls of art becoming illustration. An artwork can have an outwardly illustrative form but this is not where the meaning resides even if the artist themselves declares that it is.  This is my first performance of Blackberries - Blood ...

Well Isis are a bunch of ignorant fuckers and your instinct is to annihilate them. Wow wipe them out right? Well guess what I'm pretty sure that is the response they were hoping for when they burned a man alive in a cage. We've been having a very civilised debate about freedom of speech round these parts since they gunned down some cartoonists. There's a pattern here. The destruction of twin towers was a media spectacle not a comment on skyscrapers or unsustainable models of usury. These elements were part of the symbolism but not the debate. Al Qaeda are not a debating society no matter how hard we try and turn their slaughter of people into sense. Their actions are disruptive not logical and yet we, the West - the occident, somehow feel that there is a simple framework of cause and effect to be extracted. This can be distilled to an “eye for an eye”. Kurt Vonnegut spoke about the law of Hammurabi that somehow still grips our collective thinking today. The rule of an eye ...