Joanna Griffin

Yesterday (09/04/2010) I sent an e-mail asking John Vines, Joanna Griffin, Rita Cachao and Taslima Begum to write a report about the draws they made on last 'No Doctor's meeting', Wednesday, April 7 2010. Here, the text Joanna Griffin sent me:
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9 April 2010, 16:04
Hi Clarissa

I should write this quickly, maybe without thinking about it too much, a bit like when I made the drawing. When I made the drawing I was remembering the text. The text struck me by its idea: that it was proposing a very beginning sensation, a first sensation and then building on this and saying how separate concepts emerged, like comparison, memory and imagination. Now I think about it, it's like a creation story, but talking about the creation of ideas, states of being instead of physical things like the hills and people and oceans, which is a fantastic creation story!!

At the time I know I was thinking about cosmology. I get weighed down with my research with this concept of cosmology - its everything right and so to read about the scent of the rose being everything, entirely everything was just so peaceful. In my drawing I start with the rose, I think it was the scent of the rose the story began with, maybe I'm wrong, and I made a kind of gold fish bowl, not quite complete around it because that was this amazing starting concept - the rose scent as a kind of bubble of everything, of the universe.

I think you draw what you want to draw. I drew the flowers because the names of the flowers that he uses are very known to me - the rose and jasmine that's growing in my mum's garden right now and carnations that are all crinkly. I wanted to draw the flowers because it reminded me of the kinds of things we drew when I was younger, for art projects, I liked doing that detailed dainty drawing of a flower and I wanted to remember doing that drawing when I was thirteen or something. In some ways, there's an analogy there because art for me back then was as simple and contained as drawing a flower. I knew there would be other possibilities out there, but at the time this was sort of enough. Now the art making I do, I can hardly describe what it is, its become like a planet in itself, a complexity of history and time and possibilities opened up.

So my drawing takes me back to when I was 13 and its about the familiarity of flowers and having a delicate area in a drawing balanced by a strong line, then the circle round the rose became sort of moon like and I made it a kind of reverse moon with the night sky inside the moon instead of outside.

I thought the story had a romanticism about it, a kind of Proustian romanticism and that came from choosing flowers and scents, so my drawing has that flowerfulness antiquity.

i love the way the story ends by saying that valuing scents in different ways, according to you, is imagination, that it wasn't about creating images or films in your head, but just that you have that ability to play through ideas in whatever way you want.

I like that you've asked us to do this too, that you are showing everyone that there are other paths to information and that it is possible through drawing to make some kind of indication of what emergence is, you can make some idea of how a person has been touched by something, some indication of what is in a person's head and maybe how little we can really anticipate about the meaning another person makes.

very beautiful ideas you work with,

xx
jo