AN ESSAY ON HOW I WORK (and live)
Dr. M. K. Elliot-Ranken
I do not start any work these days with much of a fixed idea, just notions and internal rumors. Always in front of the canvas no matter the size I find the point is to act, a slash across the middle, always the middle no poncing around the edges like a swimmer putting one’s toe in to see if it’s too cold just in and take the consequences. The consequences are not that bad no matter what you do its only canvas and coloured muds after all. The meaning of it, the art is in the act. The failure to act and be the verb condemns one to the wilderness of names and pronouns a desolate place, an all too known place a space of bourgeois respectability and timidity. Art is after all, dangerous.
What then am I searching for? Language but not that which we use in our workaday lives. No this is the language of creativity. Possibly what Carl Jung described as a system of signs and symbols to navigate the subconscious. It is also more of a creole than a systemized language weak on structure, strong on adaptability and vocabulary and always in a state of becoming something new. We all have it but too often this creative language is lost in the process of growing up and the regimentation of education, a system that has surely lost its way.
I find that I’m getting fiercer about these things as I age, perhaps the only positive about this arcane and not especially enlightening process called ‘growing old’ no matter what they say about the fifties’ being the new middle age, is its bunkum! One is less likely to put up with stuff (and people as well) that wastes one’s time because one does not have all that much of the latter left to waste. Best be getting on with the verb of life not to mention ‘Art’. Because it remains the chance encounter of immense significance of oneself with oneself … to know oneself.
2019: Currently represented at Graphis Art Sydney, Art Act Artarmon, Disorder Gallery Darlinghust and Art Forum Singapore
2018: Artist in residence Albany at the Vancouver Art Centre WA, Exhibitor Group Exhibition ‘Concerning Peace’ Maitland Regional Art Gallery, spoken word poetry at various venues
2017: Collaborative Installation, University of Sydney for the Students Union, Collaborative Installation, The The Sawmiller’s Prize North Sydney, Collaborative performance installation, Woolongong Nocturne Arts Festival, Collaborative Installation, Bayside Art Prize
2016: Group Exhibition Dank St. Gallery
2015: Art on the Greenway Commission
2013: Kaleidoscope Exhibition, Kaleidoscope Gallery & Out of Hand Exhibition, Depot Gallery.
2012: Two person exhibition Krisie Cotter Gallery Cqmperdown
2012:“Be Here Now” two person Exhibition, Fire Gallery Enmore, work on exhibition at Graphis Art & Design & Kaleidoscope Gallery Sydney, Art Forum Gallery, Singapore and ASW, Newcastle
2012; Three person Exhibition Dank St Gallery, Waterloo
2011; Transitions Two person Exhibition, ASW, Newcastle 2010; PhD graduating Exhibition; ‘Nomad Strategy: Reduction’ Newcastle University Gallery Gallaghan Campus, Newcastle