Read Elkins Stories of Art and watched Angelas presentation. Then produced this sketch.

Started thinking about the mechanics of my art and its processes and how a map would feature the ocean as the symbol or metaphor for Oceanic Consciousness from which art rises or back into which I fall but then I wondered how useful that is as a tool.

Islands dont rise from the ocean but through it.

Is there a better metaphor for the creative process that doesnt rely on a vague solidification of coldness, wetness, darkness.

I thought of the rock cycle with its Sediments of once living creatures and plant life that melt and Metamorphosize; its erupting and bubbling, cooling and crystallizing Igneous stones; and its great collisions of continental plates and mountain ranges. And the strange consequences of long vanished glaciers that dumped great stones miles from their origins.

I thought of a re-classification of art where Blake,  Van Gogh and Pollock are Igneous tapping directly into the raw magma of life and consciousness alongside Primitive Art. Art built from visible fragments of layers of older art would be Sedimentary – Monet, Picasso, Moore. Duschamps “Fountain” as some great Igneous “sarsen” stone hurled up from the magma whole and deposited in a surprising new context.  Hepworth melting the past into something new but basically chemically identical. The great mountain ranges where Cultures clash together and give rise to new ideas- Magic Realism in South America, Islam and Christianity producing the Tales of the Troubadors and Courtly Love in 12th-14th C Europe. And as with a cycle its on the move and there is a spectrum between the three classifications and artists can move from one to another as they change and mutate their practice and past artists can appear in more than one place.

Well its in its early stages. Not sure how helpful it will be as a personal tool. But it may help me get away from the Mind Map connectivity template that can be a bit rigid and structured for a subject that is forever in flux. It may even address some of the issues raised by Elkins. Not sure exactly how yet.

The Watery Abyss (Sedimentary Limestone 2015). This was about the surfacing of ideas from the place where ideas come from. Looking at it again while thinking about Mapping The Territory helped me reimagine ideas rising from something more molten or layered than water.

Then I thought of a poem I wrote about how things one experiences can be allowed to decompose before being re-composed rather than being used as material immediately.

Don’t Write About These Falling Leaves Just Yet

Don’t write

About these falling leaves

Just yet –

Their colours,

Their trajectories,

Their shapes.

Their patterns

Their sound.

Let them drift and mulch,

Rot and decompose,

Settle and sink

First.