The interim show has come to an end. It will be a while before I have to make an epic trip from one end of London to another at rush hour for a while. It turned out that both the drawings stayed in the show in the end, although they were one piece of work. The private view was good and well attended, as it was for the first week. On Friday we had a crit in the gallery with David Barrett. We spoke about the show as a whole rather than indiviual work. It was said that as a whole show, it was confidently hung due to our decision to get in an external curator, and it was more sucessful as a show about a show than about the individual artworks.
It was great to see my work outside of the studio, particularly as it was specifically made for the height of the walls in the Nunnery. The drawings have a different feel when they are hanging up high above the viewer, whilst also trailing onto the floor. Having one part of the work hanging in the middle of a space, rather than on a wall has certainly changed the way that I am thinking about my work, the materials that I use, and how it is displayed. In this way it was possible to walk around the drawing, someone during the crit had said that it had become a sculpture, I don’t think so, it’s still a drawing, but it could develop in a more 3D way in the future
It was most interesting for me that my work, on Saturday looked as if it could collapse at any moment. In our crit on Friday, someone noted that my work was crumbling, and how that added to the nature of how I titled my work ‘Time Passes and Things Fall Down’. As I had been painting with cement, this was beginning to crumble in some areas and gather along the bottom of the work. I liked this.
Obviously, not everyone was pleased with how these shows went and how their work was displayed. Some people also disagreed with how the show was organised and didn’t like the fact that we got external curators onboard. Some people contributed lots to the show, some people contributed very little or even nothing. The thing that annoyed me most was when on Thursday before the private view, no one had signed up to invigilate on the Saturday morning. For me personally, I was happy.
Now that Futura Bold/Oblique is done and dusted, I feel that I can get on with everything else that has been somewhat neglected over the last two or three weeks. We’re pretty much at the halfway point of the MA now, the weather is getting nicer and the days are getting longer. I’ll spend today reflecting on what I’ve done so far and then crack on in the workshops and the studio tomorrow morning. It was a manic week or so, and I think I also went to see 9 exhibition in the space of a week. I’m feeling quite deflated and un-motivated right now.
Looking forward, I’m considering where to go next:
1. Free-standing work, must be large scale to have presence and dominate the space.
2. Cut in half paintings, based around ideas of buildings that are half demolished/half standing. The structure being visible.
3. Work that is falling apart and crumbling down. Something with a temporary feeling.
4. A series of drawings or even an animation of something collapsing/crumbling. Again, temporaryness and the time passing.