Coleg Menai, Bangor

My plan to heave a post-degree sigh of relief and have a few days off appear to have gone awry. It’s been a bit of a whirl the last few days.

We’ve spent the week curating and installing our graduate show in the Bangor Museum and Art Gallery, the show opened last night after our graduation ceremony. We drew a good crowd and the feedback was positive.

My occasional volunteering and freelancing at Mostyn, Wales’s leading contemporary gallery, have translated into a permanent part-time post as gallery assistant.

The Gimme Shelter work has been selected for the National Eisteddfod in Wrexham in August.

I have been offered, and accepted a place in Central Art Studios Cymru, a collective of established and emerging artists – space to work and a supportive creative and critical environment.

I will be travelling south to view The Last Gallery where my solo show opens in October.

And finally, I have been selected for Artisterium 4 the annual international contemporary art show in Tbilisi, Georgia in November. I am learning about the world of funding applications.

I’ve been meaning to paint the outside of my house for 5 summers now…

I was going to end on that but I can’t leave without mentioning the exceptional tutors at Coleg Menai especially Helen Jones and Emrys Williams who head up the BA Fine Art. They are both practicing artists and tutors of the highest calibre, approachable but uncompromising, friendly but professional. It’s thanks to their constant raising of the aesthetic bar and fantastic professional development support that the list above has happened and that I now possess a First Class Honours Degree in Fine Art.

Well, as of this morning I have a BA(Hons) Fine Art. Phew!

Well it’s out of my hands.

Assessment began on Wednesday, the show opens on Friday. This seems like a good time to reflect on what I’ve got from the last three years.

The work ethic is the key, I think. Working with energy, on more than one thing at a time and, the most difficult thing for me, without fear of failure.

My practice seems to have evolved into the production of multi-layered, multi-media installations around ideas of home and identity. Multi layers offer the opportunity to reinforce an idea through rhythm, rhyme and repetition, multi media allows for the introduction of unease through juxtaposition of seemingly disparate media or ideas.

This ‘multi’ approach is borne of having the same approach to the making process, hence the importance of working on more than one thing at once, that’s how the happy accidents and interesting juxtapositions come about.

I was thinking about this the other day and thought of a reproductive analogy: asexual reproduction is energy efficient and dependable and predictable; sexual reproduction is energy inefficient and unpredictable, sometimes a combination of genes will produce a stillbirth or a monster, but it may produce a genius or extraordinary beauty. It’s the mixing and cross-fertilisation that produces the magic.

So, work like fuck, that’s the motto for the studio wall.

Phew!

It looks like this crazy plan may just have worked. The installation is all but complete, needing just labels on Tuesday to have it ready for assessment on Wednesday. Once the moderators have done their stuff on Thursday it only remains for us to curate an introductory group corridor show and tweak the labelling for the public next week. Here are some shots to give an overall flavour of Dwell.

The video triptych installation is complete, here’s the left panel shot inside the 3D installation.