Water Talisman
We visited Tamsin Cunningham’s beautiful Art Studio on the west coast of Scotland as part of ArtMap Argyll’s open studios, and I was immediately transfixed by her miniature Water Talisman prints. For Tamsin they are mediations on water, it’s flow, drift, float, current, storm, torrent, wave and ripple, and are of a size that allows you to carry them with you, portable art that can act as a talisman and provoke reflection.
Tamsin is an architect, artist and writer and you can view her captivating work on her website www.tamsinghislaine.com
One of the aspects that first captured my interest was how, laid out together on the table, they reminded me of Tarot cards and brought to mind Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies, a card-based method for promoting creativity through random chance drawing. In a similar way, Tamsin’s Water Talismans could act as a Liquid Compass (Tamsin’s evocative phrase) for meditation, guiding the intuitive patching of a modular synth. For each of these pieces, I dealt out the talisman face down, selected one at random, and then meditated on the artwork for a while before starting to build a patch on the modular synth, using Tamsin’s artwork as a graphic score. Each piece was recorded in one take, without editing, and is presented here in its raw form, exactly as it was recorded in the moment. Original artwork by Tamsin Cunnigham.