Roni Horn

I looked at Roni Horn's work of the Thames River initially. I was thinking about in relation to my maps of the surface of the contact lens because they both seem equally pointless and futile. Horn's because the water to which the annotations relate only existed in that one photograph - what does it even mean to view water as a still thing in an image? Its useless, its gone - and mine because its absurd and nonsensical. Annotating my map or numbering it like Horn's might make it more about the concept rather than the aesthetic - I don't want it just to be a map just because it has visual similarities, I feel there needs to be more.






Horn's annotations touch on the kind of solemnity and poignancy that I associate with my own way of thinking, as she mentions abstract notions and poignant events. This is all clouded in great abstraction and mystery because we cannot really know the context to these short descriptions. It is, as I have been researching with titles, between the text and the imagery where the meaning is made by the viewer. The gaps in knowledge, the space for the imagination.

I found this quote from Roni Horn on metaphor, which I thought was interesting because metaphor for me does not distinguish the unknown, but ties things together in strange ways to make something other, not the truth, just an image of what it might be.

"You use metaphor to make yourself feel at home in the world," says the artist in this clip from the episode. "You use metaphor to extinguish the unknown. The problem is the unknown is where I want to be."

Although I really like the idea of doing a similar thing to my map with annotated phrases, or including text in some way, I immediately encounter the issue of what to write that doesn't sound too dramtic or over-thought. I always struggle with writing anyway and tend to avoid it if i can because I never know, and hate that I can't know, how somebody will read and interpret it. Aside from this fear, I have been thinking about what I could write, and I really don't want it to sound as if I am preaching or suggesting that the work is about something. I think the beauty of the visual element is that people can see a load of different things in it without me being at all prescriptive. Writing, although in many cases, and indeed as i am wrote in my dissertation, can provoke the imagination, it may also limit it.