Well it's a ST(ART) part 2

P(ART) 2 a bloggy kind of thing

I thought I’d upload a few recent examples of the kind of images I’m making, seeing as making images is my job and my vocation in real life, and sharing my process is all part of my practice, in any case. It’s just what I do.

I’m fortunate enough to benefit from a certain kind of “artworld invisibility” IRL. I’ve been at it for over 30 years. I have no signature style, no recognisable style or subject/theme consistency at all - because I really enjoy working with a wide range of different styles and techniques. In the visual arts this is generally considered a bad thing, whereas I would argue that I simply explore my medium in much the same way as a musician might have a preference for modern jazz but still loves playing classical and will session for r&b or heavy dub. OK, so I’m known for a few specialist areas I work in, while other areas of my personal work go completely unnoticed. My medium (in other words) is really my subject as well as the object of my professional devotion.

This has been kind of liberating for me, as it’s allowed me to explore every area, every boundary, every corner of the medium I work in without having to compromise.

Sure, along the way I’ve had some successes with exhibitions and publications, published a couple of books, and my work is collected by a few kind people too. I’ve enjoyed an incredibly diverse range of commercial assignments both abroad and at home before turning my business from a commercial practice into an art-based practice.

But life is just too short to stay in one zone or plant your flag in a patch of land that’s yours forever, in order to just stay there, doing the same thing and milking the money for as long as you can, before sliding off the radar as the next big thing eclipses your one trick pony.

OK, that’s a tricky 3-factor metaphor to deal with, but I get why some artists do that, but it’s just not “authentic” for me to be that way. I’m far too curious and restless. I want to see what’s round that corner, and then the next, and then the next. I don’t think I’ll ever “retire”. I’ll just go on making images for as long as I can, until I drop. Same with teaching and mentoring.

I find myself now, without fully realising at the time, that I was making a completely new set of images using a completely new medium. At least the medium I found myself using was new to me. It sickens me to say it but over the 4 years of our trans-identified daughter’s estrangement from us I’ve made more screenshots, than any of my usual forms of image-making. Thousands of them.

Language: Naming Things As They Are

I have a vast “cuttings library” in digital form. Whenever I saw or read something that touched a nerve, made me think, made me recoil, made me mad, made me remember something, made me laugh, made me curious, made me furious, or challenged me – I took a screenshot. My sources were social media, websites, pdf book extracts, academic papers, conversations, mainstream media, freedom of information requests, minutes from meetings, fringe events, and a whole lot more – always accessed via one device screen or another.

I’ve never gone along with the Twitter-hating crowd, who complain of the endless group-thinkery and the hostile encounters; which of course I’ve met full-on throughout my own gender journey. In my first year of attempted conversations with TRA’s or the more fervent trans movement supporters, I got nothing but “Die horribly, TERF!!” or infantile promises to find me and disembowel me. I use a female twitter name, remember? It took me a while, but I did eventually find my way to the people who genuinely want to talk openly, in good faith – people from all sides of the debate.

Where clinicians, therapists, medics, writers, thinkers, endocrinologists, sociologists, parents, teacher etc, were concerned, I tried to follow the science, the common sense, and the personal experiences of those people - many of whom who were risking careers trying to raise awareness or who had suffered professionally and personally because of their beliefs.

Hacsi Horvath was one who springs to mind, Kathleen Stock another. Julian Vigo, Helen Joyce, Will Malone, Jo Bartosch, Malcolm Clarke, Dr Em became voices of sanity and rationality (& humanity) throughout this period. I suspect it’s the same for a lot of people who started to “see it” a couple of years ago – you get an inkling of what’s happening, played out against the background of a modern-day, medieval witch-hunt of J K Rowling – and suddenly you can’t NOT see it any longer. This seems to have peaked so many people.

The Twitterarti Party: Trans pavement art, a class ap(art)

Here, Twitter proved invaluable in providing a single screen that acted like a kind of portal entry-point to the quality stuff. Each screenshot became a simple, economical “nudge” to a wider argument or a deeper issue under the surface, as opposed to the simple sloganeering that was often displayed on the screen surface. Although, of course, in so many cases, a single screen shot says everything it needs to say. So I amassed a diary-like collection of these “nudges” that were there to return to, or to question, or to help me try and make sense of at the time, or later.

This collection is close to 10,000 screenshots, and I have just got to stop. It’s a historical record - one mans journey trying to make sense of his daughters abduction and abuse, over 4 years. It’s also part of my “letting go”. I’ve peaked in my own way. I’ll be creating images using these screen shots as evidence of my education; my own personal gender journey of learning, of how I came to understand the cult that has taken our daughter, and how fragile “identities” are created and affirmed by widespread indifference and indoctrination.

Where this particular series begins, each image contains thousands of tiny mosaic tiles, like individual pixels. And each tile is a learning point on my gender journey. The face becomes a kind of human library, and each face is made by me using artificial intelligence. The face you are seeing belongs to no-one in real life. It’s generated by referencing hundreds of thousands of faces of all races, ages, and of either sex, and approximating a human face from a vast library of its own.It may look like someone you think you know, but it won’t BE that person. This person does not exist. And yet, here they are.

The faces ask questions: Who am I? Do I exist? How do you see me? Am I real? In time, I’ll generate simple captions or add text in a meaningful way, and use different groups of screenshots if they’re relevant to the concept I’m trying to convey.

These are just a few first very low-res experiments. The tiling software isn’t new, or even particularly difficult to use. These apps have been around for a while. When they first came out I felt they were a bit gimmicky and I couldn’t see how or why I should look at using them. They seemed to be one of those clever digital tools that are just “showey-offy” but their power fades fast as you realise they can only do one thing well and once that novelty wears off, well where do you go from there?

But since our lives changed so dramatically, and I found myself trying to find anchors of hope or understanding in the middle of so much turmoil and trauma, finding the right form or shape to contain my “education” meant using what most directly and efficiently puts this strategy into practice.

I still wonder, every day, whether I’d be doing what I’m doing now, had our daughter not turned away our offers of help, our concern, our love. As I tried to point out in my main story, she was already being groomed while we were unaware of what was really happening through secrecy and stealth. The groomers and indoctrinators had already found their way in, while she became more and more removed. She was absent somehow, in a way that we didn’t fully understand at the time, and once we did start to understand what had happened, it was too late - the grooming and the cult had made her cemented, fixed, unmoveable.

And so, before her departure from the family home, I promised her that I would “educate myself” because I truly wanted to be a better Dad to her, to do better. This willingness came from a place of true love and compassion. It was all we could do in the absence of a daughter who was finding communicating with us so difficult. The timing was awful – coming as it did just before she left home for good and a new life she was already planning with her new queer family.

What if she’d listened to us? What if she’d found the means to understand our concerns and talk about them, with us? Would I still be doing this? Would we have been won over? I still doubt it. Believing that you can’t change sex is fairly fundamental to the human condition. “Pretending to believe” or “going along with it” were never going to work either.

So here I am, still writing, when I said I wouldn’t be, or when I said I’d be turning more towards images, and using fewer words. Well, that bit’s true at least; compared to my earlier musings and rantings, and I am finding a certain peace from letting-go of some stuff after all this time, although I’m having difficulty finding the time to produce my GC artworks in amongst scrabbling around to make a living, or finding work for my real life business. Any help by upgrading your subscription to a paid one would really help fund the time that I’ll try and use to create meaningful and useable artwork to help with the pushback.

If anyone wants me to showcase the work of any other GC artists, just let me know. I’ll try and get hold of them via my agent @NormaSausage and ask the artists permission to feature a portfolio of their work, perhaps even with a short interview or profile if I can.

If you have any comments, or even suggestions, or want to commission something of your own, please leave a comment or drop Denton a gmail, feel free to use or distribute anything I produce here, in Denton’s Weekly. I won’t charge (that’s for my parallel working life, out in the open) but a subscription upgrade would always keep me going, and doing my best to deliver. Thanks for reading