My previous project was to create a series of images on five artists integral to free jazz/avant-garde jazz: Miles Davis, Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Albert Ayler.
I explored the artists music and lives and began to understand how their music was a direct response to their environment; and in that sense my images became a response to my own experience of their music, almost like a 3rd person perspective. The abstract drawings and patterns are free drawings and experimentations I completed whilst listening to the music, but are also responses to their city, New York. Perhaps its a map of the subway, the Brooklyn bridge or a towering structure: each pattern has a place.
To reflect the spontaneity and freedom of the music, I felt it right that each image should have no specific orientation and I resolved this by constructing the images into a book, with each image being a double page spread. In that way they can be enjoyed no matter how you approached the book, and to enforce that approach, the book had no clear front or back cover, nor an indication of whether it was upside down or not.
It was possibly the first project at university that I felt completely in sync with and for want of a better word t just seemed to sustain a constant fluidity. I have always felt engaged with what I create but I could feel momentum building and this project was where I could really see myself pushing through to the next level. Everything before was part of the journey and i regret none of my decisions because each success and failure was the mechanics into my progression. The success of the project has not made me complacent however, it has made me crave something grander, the journey will be even more challenging and will require me to be even more precise clinical and progressive but that risk and challenge drives me on, I will not lose my momentum.
The final images from Free Jazz
