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Art Funnel


Art Elements
Concept
What to make / Clean ideas
Method / materials
Artist/artwork
Collecting
Coat
Printing
Sophie Calle
Biography
Stories
Bargello
This Mess is a Place
Dispersal
Deconstructed Sentences
Notan
Dado
Nutcracker
Padlet
Writing
Hundertwasser
Tools
Assemblage
Textile
Limpetwoman
Categories of relationship (with belongings)
Artists Book
Found objects
Barbara Iweins (Katalog)
Repair / recycle
Pockets
Shells / stones
Journey of Found Objects
Responding
Poetry
Words
Egon Schiele
New Materialism / Agency
Clean Space
Painting
Tianyi Zheng: My Shadow on Your Dust
Language
Clean Interviews
Collage
Lee Ufan
Counting objects
Clean Hieroglyphics
Mosaic
Yayoi Kusama
There are no rows in this table
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Shuffle
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RandomisedTable
Rand 1
Rand 2
Rand 3
Rand 4
Tools
Deconstructed Sentences
Notan
Dado
Dispersal
Artists Book
Found objects
Barbara Iweins (Katalog)
Categories of relationship (with belongings)
Clean Hieroglyphics
Painting
Yayoi Kusama
Nutcracker
Clean Space
Mosaic
Tianyi Zheng: My Shadow on Your Dust
Counting objects
Pockets
Shells / stones
Journey of Found Objects
New Materialism / Agency
Assemblage
Textile
Limpetwoman
Repair / recycle
Poetry
Words
Egon Schiele
Responding
Clean Interviews
Collage
Lee Ufan
Language
Coat
Printing
Sophie Calle
Collecting
Stories
Bargello
This Mess is a Place
Biography
Padlet
Writing
Hundertwasser
There are no rows in this table
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The Art of Over Thinking and Under Doing

When you are required to bring (a) a piece of work you produced in the last year indicative of your current research interests and (b) a work of art by another artist/craftsperson that is, in some way in critical dialogue with your individual practices... here’s what to do:
Start out with a couple of perfectly good ideas for the piece of work.
Visit plenty of galleries.
Read a lot - but:
Only read the first 2 chapters of any book.
Buy or get from the library more books than you could possibly read and keep far too many interesting tabs open on your internet browser.
When someone recommends a book that is related to any of the ideas you’re having - get it (even if relationship is somewhat tenuous and even if there’s no time to read it).
When you see something in a book that is completely riveting, spend several hours copying it into Padlet or making it into a PowerPoint presentation - but do not complete any of these tasks.
Fill your life with lots of other things (work, holiday, family visits, a new diet) which mean you now don’t have much time left to generate a piece of work on the day in question. (You know that’s not the right way around, and that you are supposed to be making lots of work and just taking the latest piece / idea, but for some reason you don’t approach it that way.)
Wait until you have now had more half-ideas than you can remember, then write them all down in a chart. Try to make them into “whole” ideas - but realise that none of them ‘grabs’ you. You know you don’t really know what you are looking for.
By the way, don’t do any art while you’re doing all of this, except to follow an online course on abstract composition for a while (mostly watching videos and preparing collage papers, but don’t actually get as far as making anything with all the papers).
Keep thinking about all the ideas; realise you’re waiting for one brilliant idea to come along - but it doesn’t.
While talking to someone in your house, remember that you bought a beautiful golden funnel from a kitchen shop when in Japan. Find it and show it to them. Ooo and ahh together about the funnel. Then, instead of putting it back where it ‘belongs’, add it to the already large number of items on your desk.
Think how great it would be if you could put all these ideas into the funnel and have the one brilliant idea come out the bottom.
Imagine a 3D artwork with the ideas on bits of paper attached to wires, going into plasticine inside the funnel and a ‘question mark’ appearing from the bottom. But don’t make it. Don’t draw a picture of it. Don’t even procure any plasticine or wire.
Describe the idea to someone a week later. It’s getting close to the appointed day. Think to yourself ‘I will have to make that.” It’s not the big brilliant idea but does illustrate the thought process.
Sleep on it so that overnight it expands into an idea involving a big messy pile of ideas on paper, several smaller funnels with little ideas coming out and then the big one waiting for the big idea.
Run it by someone else who agrees it’s a good idea - it’s just a snapshot of where you are with your thinking - and - at a push - it could be in dialogue with the work of Sophie Calle (the artist you have chosen to be in dialogue with) - really?? - surely THIS idea would be in dialogue with someone else. Make a mental note to research ‘funnel sculptures’ (but don’t do it).
Go on Amazon and spend at least 45 minutes of your ever-dwindling time researching which funnels, wire and plasticine to buy. Order 10 funnels which are a little bit too big but which are at least all the same size and colour (this somehow becomes a new criteria while you are looking at hundreds of funnels). At least the wire and plasticine do not take so long to find.
Spend a good 10 minutes looking for the paper you want to use for the written ideas. You can’t buy any more paper as you already have enough for 5 lifetimes, but it must be this exact paper. Locate a step ladder and find the correct little bundle of papers at the back of a cupboard.
When the funnels arrive, play around with receptacles to balance them in. Put the big golden funnel in a kilner jar - that looks good, but don’t look any further than the mug on your desk for receptacles suitable for the 10 new funnels. (The mug is not suitable.)
Decide not to worry about that now; the main thing is “What ideas will be written on the papers that will be attached to the wires?”
Find a large sheet of paper and start writing all the ideas down. (Don’t bother looking at the list you wrote before.)
Realise you will need to put the ideas on separate pieces of paper in order to figure out how to combine them. Tear a large sheet of paper (you don’t want to spoil the special paper) into 32 pieces and write one idea on each piece. Realise this is a better way of going about all of this than the ‘whole’ ideas you were trying to create before. Now all these ideas seem more like elements of ideas - and can be combined in different ways.
Shuffle the papers and pick out elements from the pile at random. Put these in pairs as you do so and write the ideas down in little boxes on a piece of paper. Look at the results and realise they are quite boring.
Think, “I could combine these using throws of a die.” Spend time locating a die.
Sort the elements into four categories (concepts, things to make, materials, artists). Number each set from 2 → 12. But some sets don’t have 11 elements (yet) so some throws of the die would not yield any results. Realise that this can’t work as there needs to be an equal number in each set.
Get on the computer and start a table with four columns and put the elements into the columns - adding more possible elements until they are all even (11 rows, so 44 elements by now).
Spend a very long time with Chat GPT working out how to create a ‘shuffle’ button that will randomise the elements, so each row has four random elements. Feel inordinately pleased with yourself when that finally succeeds, even though the number of hours to come up with the piece of artwork has dwindled significantly.
While eating dinner, realise that all that has happened so far - including hyperfocus, procrastination, perfectionism and unrealistic time forecasting - is part of the process. Think it would be good to make a poster with drawings showing what’s been happening.
Press the shuffle button. Notice that one row of elements may have the seeds of a good idea. You know that you may be tempted to press ‘shuffle’ again at some point, so you need to capture this idea.
Write it down under the randomised table. Think to yourself that you had better capture all the other rows as well (before being tempted by the shuffle button). Spend more time writing out all the ideas you can think of for each row of random elements. Quite a lot of them are rubbish, but you carry on doing it anyway.
Continue to feel excited by the whole randomising table thing and think about pressing ‘shuffle’ again and getting a new set of 11 x 4 elements and generating sets of ideas for each of those. Realise you do not have time for this. Time is really short now. Notice a bit of anxiety about the funnels but imagine there will still be time to do something with them.
Realise that in order to make a poster you will need to know how many drawings there’ll need to be, so start writing (this) list of all the actions you have taken so far that have led to this point right now.
Realise that you don’t know how many more actions there will be before the appointed day and so how many drawings to make room for on the paper. Stop writing the list, realising you may never come back to it. (And perhaps you will.)
Tell yourself that you can’t draw anyway. Wonder whether this piece of writing may be ‘the thing’ to take to college. But who would this be in dialogue with? Leave this for now.
Continue editing this piece of writing immediately after writing “Leave this for now”. Fiddle with it for another 30 minutes (at least). While editing, realise that the number of items in this list (32 currently) is not necessarily the number of drawings you’d make on the poster. Some points could be two drawings, others may not have a drawing in them. Stop now.
Actually stop writing the list. Instead, start writing the words on the actual papers you intend to use. Open the bag of wires. Push the plasticine inside the funnel. Make two holes in each piece of paper. Thread the wire through. Poke the other end of the wire into the plasticine. Almost finish this.
Go away on a work trip for 9 days. Leave the almost-finished construction at home. Spend any spare time on the work trip researching Sophie Calle and seeing whether there are any links between her work and your funnel idea, or, indeed, any previous work. Make a PowerPoint presentation about Sophie Calle’s work and include some slides on ‘Critical Dialogue’, even though you’re not really sure what that means...
Check the brief. It says: “This could relate to critical context, material processes, form, scale, attitude etc... How is this work informing the way you approach your own practice? What are you getting from engaging with it? How is it making you think differently?”
Re-reading this, realise that you are supposed to be comparing one piece of your work with one piece of someone else’s work. Decide it’s too late now to change things. You still have a 6-hour journey home tomorrow and the following day IS the appointed day.
Arrive home at 8pm. Eat dinner. Complete the funnel piece. Photograph it and add it to the slide deck. Add a couple more slides. You have now (at last) done all you can.
Realise overnight that the little papers should really have writing on both sides. In the last 15 minutes before leaving home with the funnel, write the same word on the back of each piece as is on the front.

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