Meetings of people with stammers to describe a fire    (1999 – ongoing)

Meetings of people with stammers to describe a fire    (1999 – ongoing)

Pen and spray paint on acid-free paper.
420 x 594 mm
Ongoing series.

♦

“The Meetings posters, a series of drawings, are very contradictory. They announce the particularity of the meeting (“people with stammers to describe a fire”) and yet also state that “everyone” is “welcome”. Taken together these two groups must coincide; everyone must be stammering. There’s clearly no ‘point’ to such a meeting, but the work indicates that stammering could be the perfect poetic description of a movement of flames, which is a beautiful idea. The work also presents itself as a mass-produced poster but this is an illusion since it is hand drawn. My activity in drawing each poster could be seen as a kind of stammering, and so I myself could be included as a stammerer in the ‘meeting’ that initially appeared so restricted. As this work shows, there is always a power struggle within the relations between groups of people, but the balance can be shifting, playful and provocative rather than one-sided and inert.”

( From Describing A Fire: A Conversation between Adam Chodzko and Mark Godfrey, in Adam Chodzko, MAMBO 2007: p84)

The Meetings… series began in 1999 and is ongoing, with, in each, the flames developing their own form for the present moment in which they are drawn. Chodzko has spoken (eg lecture at Central Saint Martins, London, 2017) about his repetitive process of drawing the flames as a meditative process of weaving a structure of flows that not only describes but is the internal movement inherent in, and between, all his artworks; of fluidity, of meaning folding, unfolding and becoming.
Meetings… also emerged  from Chodzko’s own direct experience of stammering.

Related drawings include; “The Tropics of London.”