Stretching Fiction: in a language-based and visual artistic practice

Mike Croft

The project is a semi-graphic notification of the artist/author’s initiatives to stretch fiction – so-termed analogous to the stretcher component of an umbrella – in his language-based and visual practice. The referenced time-frame is from 2014 through 2025. The contention is that if one considers oneself as subject within one’s work, amidst whatever the work's more objective concerns, then it is a fairly obvious next step to third-person oneself – in the sense that a writer such as Fernando Pessoa invented heteronyms. While in visual practice such a prospect is, arguably, more difficult to articulate, a fictional element instilled in art- or other academic writing already has certain precedents in more experimental writing in the latter fields. If, as in the artist/author’s case, such writing is an adjunct to one’s visual practice, then a fictional characterisation of oneself as another can comment on and variously inhabit one’s visual work. Unlike how characters often populate fiction, however, the artist/author’s strategy is to only partly develop them, hence having them oscillate as, themselves, a question of relevance.

Page1 (2023)

DNA Ancestry (before ancestry test)

* April 2023, the author attended an introductory meeting for participation in a project, 'Call for Drawing – Genetics & Identity', as part of a larger project titled 'Human diversity along the Magalhaes circumnavigation space: genetics, history and culture', hosted by i3s (Institute of Investigation and Innovation in Health, University of Porto), formally beginning in July for a period of around three months. The objective of the project, open to a group of artists, was '...to characterise human variability across space, in the scope of the Magellan circumnavigational trip, contexualising genetic and phenotypic data with the different social, cultural, and political settings encountered during the first world journey'.

DNA Ancestry (after ancestry test)

* In the first part of the project, the author chose coffee staining as a primary medium, partly due to the coincidence of coffee's origins in Africa, the geographical origin of Homo Sapiens

Apart from anticipated general ancestral origin mostly in Europe, with some 16% divided between the Near East and South Asia, the author's genetic GPS showed up specifically as Germany

Genetic

GPS

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