She took a different bus route home, not by choice or sudden whim, but to avoid the – at this point she really had no qualms about resorting to a cliche – numberless horde. Mentally, she ascribed no race or nationality to them, merely occupation, for even in her head she strained to be politically correct, to resist that virulent strain of xenophobia to which so many had succumbed. That was the only quality that bound them, the ones who spent their Sundays off on the same stretch of road as the rest of their seemingly homogeneous domestic sisterhood.

In fact, she realised that the route was geographically shorter, though it required two buses and a short walk in between. It bypassed her old school, and she quickly suppressed the uneasy recollection that it had been more than ten years since she last referred to it as her new school.

The sunlight was golden with the promise of brevity, and pretty enough to be almost convincing in its attempt to make everyone forget that it was the daily cause of long periods of torturous baking. She decided to believe the sun’s innocuousness, this time, and eschewed the second bus. The distance she would have to walk was a distance at which many of her peers would surely balk – the mere prospect of any physical movement in the humidity, let alone the sun, no matter how low and how golden, seemed to diminish their very air-conditioned beings.

Yet again, she stumbled on the feeling of being profoundly alone. She hated herself for using the word “profound;” its poetic flexibility was too convenient to be anything other than a void. What exactly did it mean? Deep, vast, beyond comprehension, beyond words – a word to mean beyond words, an admission of failure? She reminded herself that the greatest of writers – as if she could be one of them! – used the word too, and she wondered if they hated themselves for it, and raised their hands in defeat and involuntary pause from their pens and papers, typewriters, laptops, tablets, or whatever it is that people wrote with these days. She wondered if they, too, simultaneously experienced that literary self-loathing, and the reluctant acknowledgment that “profound” was suitably, undeniably, profound, and no other word could take its noble place.

Pausing to wipe the sweat from her face, she was slightly disgusted and surprised to find that the earnest sun and humidity, its humble companion, had engendered a significant amount of gravity-defying liquid deposit at the nameless underbelly of chin-meets-neck. Had she mentioned that she was profoundly alone? She had forgotten that brief yet familiar epiphany back when she lost herself in an introspective analysis of that adverb. Funny that it had to be in adverb form and not mere adjective, as if the state of solitude had any hint of movement. Alone – being alone – well, it was a continuous state of being hopelessly alive, she guessed. Again she distracted herself from the idea, as if she was already so accustomed to its surfacing that it failed to arrest all other thoughts in its wake. She was really quite fine with it, most of the time, but didn’t know how to express it in a way that would not prompt others to pity her, “this poor, desperate girl who, by accepting her loneliness, was trying to hide it in plain sight.”

A narrative had been crafted, a mere ghost of a narrative. There was no way to neatly conclude a short boat ride down the indulgent stream of consciousness. What else was there to say? She had weaved together those strange little vignettes – of buses, of sunlight, of profundity, and of walks – in what she thought was a vague sense of connectivity that merely displayed how her mind could wind from thought to thought without so much as a breather or an inkling of logic.

And with that, she arrived home.

It’s been so long, so long since I’ve written like this, since I’ve felt compelled to write. What is it about this emotional surge, that would otherwise be debilitating, that I have learnt to interpret as a motivation to write? I had trained myself, long ago – that feeling, that very specific feeling, I must dispel it. A sudden rush of words fill my mind and I force myself not to ignore them and instead surrender – not surrender, but pause, to allow them to crystallise. I miss this. I miss needing to write.

I write about everything other than the trigger. I deal with it by not dealing with it, by dealing with everything around it, everything that lead up to it, everything that will result from it, but not it. Right now, I shall commence the vague references to it:

You know when someone tells you they have something to tell you? Not necessarily that they “need to talk,” with all that context of a relationship’s end, although one inevitably recalls the potential denouement. They might just want to provide you with the latest development in their life, but instantly I am anxious, I worry. This is a uncontrollable, selfish impulse; I worry not for them, but for the effect that piece of news might have on me. Oftentimes, I feel worse if it’s good news.

I despise myself! But let me explain, if not in defence, then at least in honesty. You see, if the piece of news is negative, I will have to share in my friend’s pain, I will have to make certain sacrifices for this person, but at least I will be needed. I should just admit it – at least I will be in a better place! But if it is positive, all I need to feel is happy for this person. That is all, and yet I sometimes find that to be the most difficult thing in the world. In its place, I feel the most profound sense of abandonment – I have been left behind yet again, I have been excluded yet again. Especially if it’s something that I, too, want. It isn’t envy. It’s one less person in this world who shares my fate. It’s less of this person for me to possess.

This particular trigger, this time, there are too many emotions and memories and – dare I say it – hopes, bound up in this person. There is the sadness that arises from that reminder of impossibility specific to this one person, then there is the sadness that arises from a larger hopelessness. They cannot be distinguished. This trigger, too, it reminded me of a similar situation with this same person five years ago, then three years ago… Each time, the same feeling of abandonment. The same fear of change. The same selfishness, the same self-loathing. Is it the person, or is it the memory? Is it the extinguishing of one possible future? How improbable that I would travel this one path, and yet some small part of me held out hope.

All these people, they move steadfastly on. Things happen to them, the things that are beyond one’s control, the things that have thus far passed me by. For these things, I had long made allowances – I refer to those voids that one might otherwise call “expectations.” That emotional surge is the intense bottoming out of an expectation. I am unable to peer into these caverns, to explore them, to conquer them; I can only, manically and with great effort, fill them with words.

Apologies for the strange and inconsistent colour balance; the lighting was not the best!

Installation shot of the front wall

My just-completed male triptych, which looks like three different people drew them – Andy described them as Degas/Lichtenstein/Duhrer

Male Nude

Male Muscles

Male Skeleton

My arm/leg piece in the centre of the lower row, and my two skulls piece to the right in the upper row

Awkward shot of my arm/leg piece

Really awkward shot of my two skulls piece

Installation shot of the side walls

My torso/pelvis piece

I also submitted some of my writing for the contest, so fingers crossed!

I didn’t know them – either of them. I mean, I knew of them, but I didn’t know either of them personally. But I watched; I shared that moment, I indulged in it, just as hundreds of thousands had done. It saddened me because I had seen myself in that moment that they shared. No – it saddened me because I had not seen myself in that moment that they shared, because it was something I had never experienced, and probably never will. I thought I knew it, love, I thought I knew it. I thought knowing at least one side of it was enough. Watching them, I felt the emptiness of a broken illusion within me. You see, there was a fullness in that shared moment. The fullness said, I love you but we can no longer be together, we can no longer be together but I love you. What did I have? Only – I no longer love him. Or – it was never about him. What would I feel if I looked into his eyes now? Disdain, perhaps – how could I have loved him? I loved him because I wanted to love. His presence, his him-ness was incidental, variable.

I will never be able to say that there was anything more than repressed memories. Even the myth is gone. Even the myth is gone.

I’ve not done much design work in a professional capacity, but I can say that Sydney was great to work with. One always appreciates a client that not only knows what he/she wants, but also has the taste level to back it up. I caught on to her aesthetic preferences very quickly, which made the whole process surprisingly smooth-sailing. The first thing that really saved me a lot of pain was that she already had an image prepared:

Photograph by Seumas Yeo

I always find it much easier to have an image because it provides me with a direction in which to travel. It’s half the battle won is you’re already set on the main artwork. For our first meeting, I did really quick mock-ups on Illustrator just to give her an idea of what was in my head.

Sydney stipulated that she wanted a hand-drawn aesthetic, so I came up with the following by tracing over the image:

If we had had a big enough budget to work with, I think something like this would have looked amazing as silver foil embossed on a grey paper.

This got too detailed and overwhelming and I had to approach the final artwork with a completely different “system” of contouring.

She preferred the latter style, so I reworked it to make it much more varied and balanced between the busy linearities and negative space. I also had to extend the image a little, just so I had more to work with compositionally.

I also worked on a hand-drawn version of her stage name for the cover, and gave her a few options for subtle fonts to be used for track listings and credits.

Tried using a handwriting-esque font but it didn’t work at all, so I wrote it instead.

The assortment of fonts that I selected for Sydney to look at. She chose option F.

We then decided to work with a black/blue/grey colour scheme based on the palette of the original photograph, so I integrated a gradient into the original line drawing. The image lent itself really well to a wraparound design:

For the inside of the CD, I experimented with a couple of photos that she supplied of herself, but ended up with a few unfortunate experiments with an image that dominated the inside of the bifold.

A far too domineering composition with a strangely positioned tissue box was quickly eliminated.

We decided to go with a more ‘mysterious’ image of her at a smaller scale. I included a hand-drawn frame with a gradient to mirror the external design. Sydney chose to handwrite her acknowledgments for some intimacy, but I preserved the font that I had used for the track listing.

Ultimately, my favourite part of the whole package is the CD design. I think the image works really well with a very simple blue-and-white colour scheme.

The options we considered (the blue and white one is a clear winner, I sort of just did the rest to show how awesome it is in comparison).

Finally, the finished product:

Here’s a little SoundCloud widget to stream her amazing EP. If you like her music, please do support her by purchasing digital or physical copies of her EP on her BandCamp site!

P.S. My friend Zixin (whom I blogged about in my previous post) did an interview with Sydney on Other Sounds, which you can read HERE.

Zixin asked me to do a really quick logo for the column, so I just went with the cliched ‘text formed by tape from the cassette’ visual. It was a surprisingly easy job; I just had to figure out the right ‘brush’ to use in Illustrator, and I actually managed to do trace the cassette and write the text using just my touchpad. It did take a heck of a lot of tries to get the readability of the title (and a lot of sending screenshots to Zixin) but I’m happy with how it turned out!

P.S. Check out November’s mixtape here!

The drawings will be in a show of my instructor’s classes’ work in March, so I’ll take better photos (with hopefully better lighting) then.

“We have the Idea of the world (the totality of what is), but we do not have the capacity to show an example of it. We have the Idea of the simple (that which cannot be broken down, decomposed), but we cannot illustrate it with a sensible object which would be a ‘case’ of it. We can conceive the infinitely great, the infinitely powerful, but every presentation of an object destined to ‘make visible’ this absolute greatness of power appears to us painfully inadequate. Those are Ideas of which no presentation is possible. Therefore, they impart no knowledge about reality (experience); they also prevent the free union of the faculties which gives rise to the sentiment of the beautiful; and they prevent the formation and stabilization of taste. They can be said to be unpresentable.”

— Jean-François Lyotard, ‘What is Postmodernism?’ (1982)

This is an artist statement, but I cannot tell you what kind of art I make.

I haven’t made anything in a long time, not organically, instinctively, obsessively, or however it is artists are supposed to feel about making art. It is not because I haven’t felt compelled to act on an idea. It is only because I feel compelled but I don’t know how best to act.

I know what I want to achieve via making, but I don’t know what the object looks like, or how to get there. There is no way to attempt to express what I want to express in my preferred medium, because I have no preferred medium. I have no medium. I only have thought. I don’t mean it necessarily in the way that a conceptual artist means it; it is not purely cerebral, it is not ‘that which makes the object into art object.’ I mean that it is the manner in which I am able to process my emotional and intellectual states – I mold them, tear them apart with my brain.

I feel the gravitational pull toward a physical form. Nevertheless, my work will be insistently textual. I am adamant. I must hold onto the text because I am a writer and I write to clarify my thoughts, I write because my thoughts and my feelings exist in my mind as words, even if my words are “I don’t know how I feel, how can I explain how I am feeling?”

(At the same time, I am certain that at some point I will have to make sacrifices, and the text may have to be sacrificed. I am not afraid to say that I am afraid of this, I am not afraid to say that I don’t want to let go even though I know I may have to let go.)

I am insistent that the form and the way of manifesting the form should be introspective and not retrospective. That is, the process of making must not simply be the fact of giving form to an idea (in which the method of giving form has already been determined). Perhaps the final product cannot escape this model of creation, but at the crux of creation the process itself must be somehow therapeutic and cathartic. If the creation is inadequate, it will not merely be critiqued as being inadequate. It will acknowledge its inadequacies within itself. It will be contained but at the same time it will be completely open to interpretation.

I am lost. I want to give form to what is otherwise shapeless, which lacks definition, which exists as a weight. Every attempt to describe it emphasizes its vagueness but affirms its necessity. I want to manifest, but I am unable to manifest. I fear it will never happen.

I want to be made real.

//\\

“I am caught in this contradiction: on the one hand, I believe I know the other better than anyone and triumphantly assert my knowledge to the other (“I know you—I’m the only one who really knows you!”); and on the other hand, I am often struck by the obvious fact that the other is impenetrable, intractable, not to be found; I cannot open up the other, trace back the other’s origins, solve the riddle. Where does the other come from? Who is the other? I wear myself out, I shall never know.”

— Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse (1977)

Oftentimes, I feel like the self is an ‘other’ from which one has to detach – disembody oneself in order to analyze, understand, and gain control. The work will be anchored to the self but be allowed to fly far away from the conception of the self, but only in order to return.

I want to systematize the mechanics of the self. I want to represent my thought transitions and my emotional transitions; I am trying to rationalize these processes and by doing so intuit the self. I want to be able to chart the myriad paths of my mind. I believe in systems even though I am completely and utterly without a system. I want to make a system that isn’t a system, a system that is a system but which collapses on itself and that does not mean that it negates itself, but rather, the collapse becomes a part of the system I have created. I want my paranoia to be allowed complete and utter freedom but by cataloguing said paranoia I will regain control. I want to be able to integrate the disintegration.

I no longer have anything to hold onto but myself, I have nothing on which to project my feelings and thoughts but myself. So the only natural progression is to project the self. It cannot be judged according to any standard because the only standard against which it is meant to be judged is its authenticity and adherence to my sense of self.

No one can know what I am. Therefore everyone shall know what I am. I must dig so deep, I must dig down to my core, I must expose this core. I must accept that I will idealize the core but I must also acknowledge within the work that I have idealized the core – an unflinching, self- critical self-awareness.

(I understand that in some ways this will be futile. It will not bring anything to anybody, maybe not even to myself. But I need to know that this self-portrait will exist for a brief moment. I have a distinct feeling that it will resolve everything. I am merely trying to affirm myself despite the fact that I can feel my feet on the ground and the air entering my nose as I breathe.)

//\\

“We find ourselves in the moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion… there is a sense of disorientation… These ‘in-between’ spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood… that initiate new signs of identity…”

— Homi K. Bhabha on ‘hybridity’ and ‘moving beyond’ (1998)

I am operating in the “interstices.” I feel dyads interacting in limitless paradox and therefore collapsing within my sense of self. I am at once rational and emotional, thinker and feeler, writer and maker, traditional and contemporary, Eastern and Western, conservative and liberal, organized but disorganized, logical but illogical, without conviction and yet full of conviction, together and yet in pieces… I divide my life between two homes… I bifurcate the self, not to explore the halves, but to explore the area between the halves and process of bifurcation itself. I am without direction, but I am intent on mapping.

One looks at the self as a set of “in-between spaces”. How does one represent the specificity and vagueness of these ellipses? How do they interact to constitute the self? How does it make me different from my neighbor? Why does it make me feel so different from my neighbor? I cannot explain it and therefore I must find a way to explain. If I cannot express it clearly then I must express it in all its mangled form. Multiple narratives exist at any one time, but to me they are a single narrative; they form a web but they are also linear.

My work will have nothing to do with the outside world and everything to do with the outside world. Nothing because I am not concerned with responding to the socio-political issues that unfold around me, everything because these are the very events that have in some way contributed to the state of my existence. Nothing because the work will be specific to the self, but everything because it – it must be true that everyone has something of these crises within them. The whole thing is dependent on this. It must be as accessible as it is insular.

I am everywhere but nowhere. I am everything but nothing.

I am nowhere because I am everywhere. I am nothing because I am everything.

I exist in a permanent state of liminality.

Note:
The attached diagram should be understood as the beginning stages of my exploration of in- between spaces within the self, and methods of charting them. A possible model for the understanding and analysis of the self is as an entity engaging in a potentially endless number of tripartite relationships with numerous dyads. The self maintains an eternal conversation (I hesitate to use the more sophisticated but colder term ‘dialectic’) with these dyads in order to navigate the paradoxes that occur or have occurred. At the same time, the dyads eventually begin to interact with other dyads. Some of them might not even be dyads at all, in the sense that the two concepts are not in opposition to one another, but simply happen to conveniently come in a pair, and which need to be integrated…

I wanted to use my sketches in some way, but obviously the sketches themselves don’t quite have the same aesthetic as my visualisations, so I decided to treat the sketches as a data set. I guess I felt like looking back on the drawings (and a few paintings) that I did, I could sense that I was favouring a certain pen, or that I really enjoyed drawing architectural structures, so it became somewhat of an analysis of my drawing habits.

I have to say that this piece was the least straightforward, in the sense that I was actually trying to posit some kind of relationship between the subject matter and the medium that I chose, and also in that I was trying to represent certain nuances in the data set (such as that I drew so many figure drawings because I did them really fast). Therefore, it became the most problematic piece. I went through a lot of different representational systems before I settled on this one, and even this is far from perfect. Some comments I had were: the arrangement of the squares suggest unintentionally suggest a sequence of events i.e. the order of the sketches; the actual surface area of the squares doesn’t correspond clearly to the representation of a certain relationship between the two variables, etc. Although it looks decent, the system itself is not yet developed enough to be an unassailable representation of the information/relationships, and I could still push it further and find some way of including the order in which I sketched, and which sketchbook I used for each sketch.

The inertia of going back into something and editing it, especially after I’ve experienced the feeling of finality, is extremely great. The idea of redoing this piece, or even going back and executing the last two planned infographics, seems almost redundant now. I don’t feel compelled to do it, I only feel obligated to do it. For some reason I’m so process-oriented that once I feel that feeling of “done”, it’s just difficult to redo, rehaul, revisit. That lack of commitment scares me. I don’t know if I should leave this behind or finish it. It’s like when I write: I achieve some kind of catharsis and I don’t need to return to that topic. Even though I should.

*This is the sixth and final in a series of posts on infographics that I created after completing a summer program in Istanbul. Check out the first post for a bit more information about the project.