Holding certainty at bay

Artists Jaimini Patel and David Kefford have a lot in common.Both of their works are site specific, deal with provisionality, contingency, fragility, awkwardness, using everyday material that elude control in a playful manner.Kefford is interested to explore the contrast between the private making process and public interaction after the works are exhibited in public spaces and for Jaimini the process of making is of prime importance. Kefford randomly connects/assembles the found objects in a sculptural form , Patel rearranges the objects transforming their present context to render new meanings and associations.For both these artists failure is an important concept since their works are never predetermined  or preordained but gradually unravel themselves through a series of  risks, chances, trials and failed attempts using intuition rather than logic and reasoning.

Jaimini Patel, "Markings"

David Kefford " Coming Together and Falling Apart"

Phyllida Barlow

 (artist)I see failure as a whole process towards finding out about something.  That if something doesn’t work it carries an enormous amount of information with it.So the failure of it is that it hasn’t quite happened yet, but I don’t know what it should be. And that not knowing state is often deemed a kind of failure; you must know what you want, you must know what your intentions are, you must know what your aims and objectives are.  It’s such a harsh, unforgiving language.  And yet the not knowing can often be that, as an artist, you’re not working necessarily with very vivid visual, cerebral processes.  You’re actually trying to find those, and that’s why you want to make the stuff, or draw the stuff, or paint the stuff.  So the failure thing to me is very much associated with that striving for, and that struggle.  Two words that are now very unfashionable.  But there is something for me in the striving to find the visual thing that isn’t yet in one’s head.  It just doesn’t have a cerebral identity.

Jon Thompson (Artist, curator, academic)

Art is about chance-taking; about holding certainty at bay long enough to discover something.  You have to feel that you are risking something when you start a work.  It may be a miniscule risk, but still a risk.  You’re trying to do something that you haven’t quite managed to do before, or you haven’t tried before…an idea, a move that you don’t know is viable.  The only way that you can ever know whether it is a sound move is by carrying it through to completion.  That is why the study of context – its elaboration via the traditional methods of research – gets you absolutely nowhere, because what that tries to do is predicate an outcome, more efficiently, more economically, more directly, or something.  In fact it doesn’t help in any of those ways, it short-circuits the essential process, basically.  Process means making something physical – bringing into existence and that cannot be achieved discursively.  It requires perception harnessed to intuition…