I am a mature student on a five-year part-time degree in Fine Art at Bucks New University at High Wycombe and about to begin my final year. In my first four years I have worked in a range of media, enjoyed workshops in sculpture, printmaking and painting and made use of some of my previous experience in photography and video. Last year I completed my dissertation, which was an investigation into of some of the ways we might approach a study of recent video installation art.
I have enjoyed it all but by the end of last year I became increasingly aware of a lack of any real centre to my practice or any clear direction or focus. Then it occurred to me that, in some way, uncertainty might in itself be an issue to explore. I thought back to my very first semester on the course and an assignment on ‘the absurd’. For that project I had devised a kind of game-like sequence based on the idea of dreams and their random connections. At each stage of the project, media, colours, words (or non-words) or found objects were all arrived at by chance and contributed by fellow students. It was quite a playful piece really but I think it raises some serious, maybe even fundamental questions about our varied reasons for making art and the kind of valuations we may put on it. Maybe all art includes some element of chance but what if chance itself was the very subject?
And so I decided to rework the idea probably as a year-long programme of linked projects. At the end of the summer term in a group tutorial I floated the idea with a few fellow students, inviting them to be collaborators. The proposal was that the collaborator would throw a dice. The number would lead to either a book of modern art, a science dictionary, a poetry anthology, a history book or ask them to make up some non-words. From the book, they would choose three pages either carefully or ‘eyes-closed’ or their nonsense words would be google-searched. From the outcome of this process we would come to an agreement about which finding seemed the most promising and that would be the subject of the work. There would then be an initial period of research and various options explored and discussed before any particular medium was chosen.
At the tutorial my fellow students (and Stella my personal tutor) seemed quite intrigued with the idea and were more than willing to be collaborators and dice were thrown there and then. My initial idea was that each project would last maybe a month or so before the next one started. In the event I found myself with six projects all initiated more or less simultaneously and so my summer has been spent trying to work on as many of them as possible at least at the ideas stages so that in the new semester the real making can get going.
My present collaborators are all at the same stage in the course as I am so they will all be under some pressure next year with their own practices and degree shows. So I fully recognise that their inputs to my project may have to be quite limited and will mainly take the form of occasional exchanges of ideas. Ideally though we would all gain something and I shall try to find ways of making connections with their work and interests.
The various parts of the project may work at quite different time-scales and I have little idea yet how many pieces might be completed, be thought successful or be of any interest. It is likely that the final body of work will be very varied with no recognisable personal style. We are encouraged to see our progress through the course as a journey. I have decided to call this stage of my journey ‘detours’.
