Jane Grisewood

Visual artist, Jane Grisewood has done a lot of work on journeys and memory so i thought it would be useful to have a look at some of her work. She creates journey drawings similar to the ones i did in class using graphite on paper, noting every part of her journey using tiny scribbles.

"The Line Journey drawings map my passage back and forth between familiar and poignant places. With graphite in one hand against a small piece of paper in the other, intricate networks of lines are made by the shifts of my hand as I walk from place to place, recording movement, duration and distance."[1]

"Grisewood’s practice focuses on time and transience, dislocation and memory and much of her work involves repetition, movement and duration. In her conceptual explorations of time she works with shifts and boundaries between scale, visibility, dark and light, control and chance, inspiring her fascination with the temporal dimension and liminality of space, and the catalyst behind recent art/science collaborations. While working across media, from performance to books, and through a range of processes, drawing is where it starts, whether in inside or outside spaces. For Grisewood, drawing can be with graphite or a camera, and is derived from thought and memory as well as observation – a performative, open-ended process – a moving between."[2]

I really like Grisewood's work because it is so free and although it doesnt have any obvious visual direction it still has a high level of aesthetic value and meaning.

Jane Grisewood has also made some really beautiful artist's books, but the one that stood out most for me from a design perspective was a book she made called "Back Light", which reflects on the experience of observing the annular solar eclipse between 17:31pm and 18:38pm on 20 May 2012 at the McMath-Pierce solar telescope while she was artist-in-residence at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory.

I really like the concertina format of this book as it turns it into something that flows rather than just consecutive pages.

[1] http://www.janegrisewood.com/Drawings/project2.html
[2] http://www.janegrisewood.com/about.html

All pictures from: http://www.janegrisewood.com/