Tiles on Time: Inspiration & Sources
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Here I have expanded a tiny bit on selected inspiration for my ‘Tiles on Time’ material experiment. These works, artists and spaces speak to my desire to create a visual language with tiles about time and our relationship with it — or rather my inquiry to see if and how that might be accomplished.
Stairs
Across the world in public and private spaces we find routes and especially stairs that are worn by years of steps. These marks are collective, anonymous and a kind of poetry of time. They connect us, are easy to marvel at and when we take a moment to consider or guess how long or how many steps, or how many days or how many people it took to create the erosion — we open up a space of wonder about the passage of time and perhaps the ephemerality of the every day. Shared spaces like sites for public transport and public squares also hold these collective material memories.
Frank Bowling
Being from Guyana, but studying and living in London as well as New York, Frank has made a number of works using images of ‘home’ in Guyana as well as maps. His paintings have both a feeling of becoming as well as erasure. Much like memory — which we rewrite and rewire every time we fetch a memory. He often paints on the floor or on a table so the surface is flat when working similar to how I have been working on the tiles. Paintings drip and move, he plays with a sense of movement and momentum. Are we looking forward, backwards, suspended? A master with colour and definitely interested in materiality and behaviour of his chosen mediums. Daring with gesture, palette and interrelated layers.
Lynda Benglis
Specifically looked at the late 1960’s latex floor paint pieces. Also a master with materiality. She is chiefly concerned with how texture & form create a bodily sensation- the body being experienced temporally.
Mona Hatoum
Specifically looking at + and -, a seminal piece of hers where a circle of sand is equally subject to lines being drawn and lines being erased courtesy of a revolving, sweeping arm. Time loops, creation & destruction, ‘lines in the sand’, ephemerality & a piece that always sits on the floor. She is another master of material. Unafraid of creating a suspended disquiet & challenging power structures; large body of work in which viewers participate.
Emily Bird
A CSM Ceramics Design graduate who created tiles with multiple layers. “Informed by a Medieval process of tile-making I have developed a technique in which floor tiles embody a second layer of pattern beneath the surface, which only reveals through natural wear in time to come”
John Latham
Artist concerned with time, how we misunderstand it and how we might re-see it with the help of art. From the late artists foundation, “He proposed a shift towards a time-based cosmology to compensate for our sensory, spatially-dominated view of the world. Latham passionately believed that this would free the mind, language and pedagogy from dangerous specialisations and inevitable divisions. He developed a theory of time — ‘Flat Time’ — relating the notions of time-base, passing time and the atemporal.”
Clare Twomey
Specifically looked at a piece, Consciousness/Conscience, installed at Tate Liverpool of several thousand hollow porcelain tiles. The tiles were situated in a place where visitors to the museum had to walk over them to access other exhibitions thereby creating a time-based piece for people to encounter the experience of being destructive.
Cy Twombly
Much of his work is relevant, but most especially a sense of erasure, and his earlier works that look like writing yet are incomprehensible as words. The unknowable writing. We stare and seek it’s meaning. I have long loved these pieces and how they evoke a desire to understand what someone is expressing to us, the potent presence of a personal script, layers and layers of meaning we pass on to others, the inevitability of misunderstandings & decay — yet trying nonetheless.
Carl Andre
Specifically his assertion of being a materialist and not a minimalist. Works on the floor, grids, contemplation. Tiles for time would work without symbols and just fields of colour on the tile surface, unfired and dissolving together. Andre would make sure to know the material and its behaviour.
Francis Alys
Specifically looking at The Green Line. From FA, “Sometimes doing something poetic can become political and sometimes doing something political can become poetic.” A piece which solely consists of Alys walking 24 km with a green paint can(58 litres were used) with a small hole in it leaving a trail of paint behind him — along a historic, political dividing line in Jerusalem. Walking as performance, leaving a mark, drawing a line, at the borders — who owns the line — absolutely beautiful. Relevant to the tiles in terms of expanding the ideas around tiles for a path, pilgrimage or journey and it makes me want to ask more political questions of my work and intentions.
Gerhard Richter
Paintings of past, future — giant squeegee method. His paintings, both abstract and figurative have always made me feel a sense of a moment; the figurative ones feel more contemplative and still, while the abstract are full of momentum. It is creation through erosion, gesture through erasure — deftly speaks to the ungraspable. From GR, ‘I blur things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant. I blur things so that they do not look artistic or craftsmanlike but technological, smooth and perfect. I blur things to make all the parts a closer fit. Perhaps I also blur out the excess of unimportant information.’ and, ‘With a brush you have control. The paint goes on the brush and you make the mark. From experience you know exactly what will happen. With the squeegee you lose control. Not all control, but some control. It depends on the angle, the pressure and the particular paint I am using.’
Floor of Winchester Cathedral
Floor tiles to mark a sacred space. My daughter & I were taking about how what you walk on can change the way you feel — the zebra crossing, for instance. We definitely don’t give the Anglo Saxon mind enough credit. {And encaustic tiles are a bit of a dying art, I made a feeble attempt with some cookie cutters during the project.} Art on the floor, marking a space, holding a space. Symbols, communication, flow of information from maker/patron to the many feet who have stood on, are standing and will stand on that place — from different times but somehow, together.
You can view a short slide presentation on this project that I gave as part of my ceramics degree HERE.
