An Archive of Uncertain Jings!
Artist in Residence The Alan Davy Gallery, Hertford Arts Hub 2020
An Archive of Uncertain Jings : investigating the signs and symbols in the work of Scottish painter Alan Davie.
Laura Hudson with wall of Jing drawings in the residency studio at Hertford Arts Hub, 2020
Inspired by the particular way in which the late Scottish painter, Alan Davie, drew upon and contributed to the human fountain of signs and symbols in art, the central focus of my project was to investigate what I came to call the Jings!. Searching for jings!; the forms, signs, sigils, glyphs, pictograms, ideographs, psychodiagrams, signals, motifs and symbols that behave as pointers in the highly complex visual world of Alan Davie became an irreverent and highly speculative journey into the imaginary, symbolic and the real into pictorial references and the history of images, into knowing and not knowing.
“We could define the function of art as being: to arouse the faculty of direct knowledge by intuition, and what we feel by intuition requires pointers or symbols more than concrete ideas for its proper expression; and these pointers have to be enigmatic and non-rational. They are shy of intellectual interpretation and come to us, as one Japanese writer has put it, “like flashes of lightning” Notes by the Artist in the catalogue of the Alan Davie retrospective exhibition Whitechapel Gallery, 1958
jings! sounds a lot like things, it is a Scottish interjection used as an exclamation of surprise or in lieu of swearing. Without any specific meaning of its own, Jings! is a vocalisation of an individual response, contingent, mobile, it never quite means the same thing twice because it is all about timing and context, all about the community in which it exists. To my mind the same can be said of the forms found in Alan Davie’s paintings, the word jings is so playfully apt as logos for Alan Davie’s enigmatic imagery. Inspired by the particular way in which the late Scottish painter, Alan Davie, drew upon and contributed to the human fountain of signs and symbols in art, as artist in residence I am proposing a humorous journey into the unknown; looking for jings! in the work of Alan Davie.
Jing Drawings Laura Hudson 2020
The found jings! are extrapolated and interrogated to form an Archive of Uncertain Jings. Through speculative analysis, a playful taxonomy is devised to classify the Jings according to how they behave. Taxonomy is the science of classification, coming from the Greek taxis (“arrangement”) and nomos (“law”) put most simply as the law of grouping on the basis of shared characteristics. Looking at the imagery of Alan Davie it seems possible to identify certain behaviours and functions of the Jings within the context of their invented worlds and therefore devise a library of forms and to record the Jings along with their taxa in a fictional keepers chart that allows for multiple ‘archivists’ to expand rather than limit the jings and collectively celebrate the state of not knowing. Playing with both words and pictures the museology of artefacts become artefictions and part of the creative process; inverting traditional methodologies and appropriating naming systems from various sources such as weight from boxing or speed from music or flavour from ice-cream. Patterns emerge and behaviours can be imagined that are better suited to exploring the unknowable and illogical.
