What am I writing about? I don’t know until it is finished. Finished=no more time+no more words? or Finished=Concluded=Ended=Closed? Unless I write about where I have been) what have I been doing? What with? What has it done to me? How did I get to this place where I am starting this essay?

Let’s start at the end which is a beginning. A sand bank in a Deleuzian Flow (that is not linear from left to right but like all things, a coalescence of many things from many directions: an expression of interaction. the flow is affected and affects the sand that is affected by and affects the flow.

What am I looking at? an object? a subject?

A block of crinkled grey plastic that is in fact paper, 90gsm tracing paper to be precise, A4, part together, part apart, curving, curling, is it inhabiting space or does space inhabit it? an image of a body, on-in the surface, in-on the block, contoured, did I see the image or the block first? Did I see the hole, the terrible hole or the black carbon first? The presence or the absence? Or the blistered, yellowed skin around the hole?

I don’t like it. But I liked it less when I first encountered it, shortly after I made it (did I make it? or did the material and the process make it? With me the what? The artist as conduit for the Flow, the Coalesc-ant for the coalescence?) Then I was repelled by the image and textures and appalled by the messy space it occupied/displaced. Not only not like my ‘previous’ objects but entirely other to them. Disappointed. A failure.

Before that the noise, dust, excitement of the process – the baffling resistance of the paper and glue to the compressed air and grit, the particles entering between the leaves, the popping sound as the glue gave up to the probing forces…

But what is the point of this description?  a sort of revelation – a sudden awareness of the status of practice and material in relation to the Finished Object. An insight into how one can view my work as as much about the displacing of material as the material left behind,  and as a thing that displaces space, equivalent to its volume, just as our bodies do, as they move, and the uncomfortable feeling this can give one, thinking about it. An awareness that the material displaced is equivalent to the space left behind….

What am i doing in the film? I am obliterating material that is imprinted with with 2 d images of myself qua human from a positive/negative sand blasted stone and in so doing am revealing underlying versions of the same image (Strata?), thus obliterating material to reveal material, and stopping at the point where the material resists the process, or where the process is neutralised by the material.

the dust is a symbol of the Ness, or our desire to identify it, or in fact the Ness rendered as material, but it is also The actual Ness of the material.

what is the you-ness of you?