I’ve been going to Degree shows (that time of year) and also talks. A friend, Adam Ghani, who I met on the MA had his Transfer Seminar for his PHD (also we went round the University of Northampton’s degree Show as always varied and very exciting including an amazing perform work by Dylan Fox). Adam’s Seminar made me think about how I approach research and also how his work delivers a polemic without seeming to preach. He edits existing films into a new narrative and currently uses a split screen with contrasting narratives often about real people fictionalised and then having the real person (or someone connected to them) in interview on the sound track. He is searching for the liminal, the space between, where he suspects the sacred feminine (and other base human architypes) resides after exile by the core religions. This method really works and made me relate to how by using material as filter I am finding meaning in serendipity
The work from my ceramic experiments are unplanned as I just form the clay into what it wants to be. However by pushing it forward with drawing: either repeating one section over and over or overlapping many different pieces. It is then pushed into painting and the colour is informed by the glazes changing via firing. It is a series about material, serendipity and magic! Another series is continuing with the work I did last year with Concrete Archive: however as paintings this looks at memory and space something that relates to the work I am currently developing more on that later.
I also attended a talk at DMU (and saw their Fine Art Degree Show again varied, sometimes beautiful. Including an incredible sound piece by Mathew Vaughan and seeing Darren O’Brien, Jonjo Elliott and Rhianne Burgess all friends via Silver Vine arts was wonderful too). The talk was a series of interviews of four artists on their relationship with print. I was interested not because I work with print (too prescriptive) but how a medium informs their work when I am using process as filter and even meaning. The four artists were Nick Mobbs, Marcelle Hanselaar, Cedar Lewisohn and Bronwen Sleigh. Mobbs and Lewisohn’s art practice was centred around Print although Mobbs was the only formally trained printer of all four.
All used print in different ways to enhance and explore their work. Mobb’s used google to hunt for images of adults hiding, often under blankets, these were mostly either celebrities hiding from the paparazzi or the accused going to trial usually for something horrible. He worked these images into photographic etchings and his current series finds people with patterned blankets and uses the pattern in the background to assist their hiding. He used print as it made the flat news image deeper with more resonance and he has often mixed-up images to make a composite so it ceases to be about that person and/or trail. Like Ghani he is using a ‘real’ narrative or the section of one to look at why an adult would choose to hide like a child.
Hanselaar is an established artist self-taught in print and likes the hard edges of engravings as it suits her subject matter which is often non-illustrated violent events in the newspaper. Again she is re-defining a true event in her case using her imagination. She is nomadic started her life in the Netherlands and has travelled all over the world. This experience feeds into her humanity and how she sees people as humans rather than nations and cultures. She needs a print workshop for this part of her work and this is the main reason she prints for only 4 months of the year and paints the rest though both feed into each other.
Lewisohn is self-taught and is as much a writer as an artist and his first work was improvised not using the proper equipment and he was more eager to get his work out so wasn’t worried about quality of paper and ink. More recently after producing just eight four foot square books he now appreciates the preciousness that can be achieved using print. The final artist Sleigh started out in illustration and it was while working in a print workshop she started to experiment with it as a medium. She also builds sculptures. Sleigh had a fascination on her course for architecture drawings using this and turning her prints of drawings made of urban areas into sculptures then back into prints shows her using media as filter. Seeing how other artists use material and process within their practice (and like Sleigh I have done the 2D-3D-2D myself) is useful. Another method that works for me is large scale to small then combined back to large scale.
The most recent talk I went to was Making visible: Making Art with Rural Communities at DMU. Carolyn Black and Dr Julie Crawshaw discussing their experience operating and investigating the environment outside of what we call ‘urban’. Black is both an artist and facilitator. She talked us through organising art trails through The Forest of Dean including Annie Cattrell’s Echo (Cattrell was there). She spoke about a similar project run just before that was embraced by the community as it marked the reopening of that patch of The Forest of Dean post the Foot and Mouth crisis. This trail wasn’t so appealing to them it seemed to only attract an ‘art crowd’ as they now had access to the area this wasn’t for them.
Crawshaw is a researcher including looking at the arts in the East Midlands. She concentrated on her experience on two islands on ‘Artist lead’ projects one in Sweden and the other on Lindisfarne. In Sweden this was a community that built what they needed and the artists and residents worked together. Whereas Crawshaw went into Lindisfarne as the mediator and found a community under siege from tourism and who were reluctant to have another wave of outsiders in the form of artists. The solution was the artists came in and workshopped their ideas with the community to form a collage of the island from within rather than an outsider’s perspective.
After these talks the room as a whole joined Black, Crawshaw with Leila Galloway who organised the event for an informal debate. One of the major points that came up is the definition of ‘rural’ and Country verses country. Black pointed out we all tend to go out into the countryside whereas she is already inside it often with unreliable internet. Class assumptions were discussed and the gentrification of the rural. How the generations who lived on the land are being forced out by the white middle class fetish for four wheel drives and commuting back to the city. This of course is still an assumption. High art verses low art; how the local fetes and festivals draw large crowds often for human contact. I brought up the assumptions made on access. We assume lack of education, information ‘high’ art. Urbanites assume to access to this but not to nature. Both are true and both can be misnomers. A persons living in London may never attend an art gallery and the opposite can be true. It is complex. And often shadowed with our own P/political affiliations. It was illuminating and emphasizes we never make art in a bubble however quiet we believe it to be!
My next series is utilising my rediscovery of oil painting. I intend to translate my fractured childhood memories and recent pictures on the internet on how my childhood home has been gutted and ‘modernised’. I lived in a 30’s semi for the first twenty-two years of my life in Watford, Hertfordshire now Greater London. Seeing the house my parents paid three and a half thousand pounds for in the early 60’s for now over half a million was both a shock and it felt like my childhood had somehow been desecrated. I intend on working on a split canvas using colour and surface rather than form to work through this reaction. Using my research on the nature of memory and its connection to space (this connects to the work I did on Concrete Archive). For me colour is also as powerful as smell in invoking a particular time in my life. Only in more recent years I have been able to wear navy as it was part of much hated uniforms (school and Guides) I wore in my teens. My childhood home was brown, yellow and green with flashes of cream and blue the new over developed house is white and slate grey, all angles and too clinical to be a home.
This is actually a very personal work for me. I normally side step looking at things that affect me so deeply but if I want to continue exploring memory I need to start looking within my own recollections.
Artist in Flux - Critical Diary 