My degree has been a very intense journey, I have had times of complete frustration – feeling like everything I make doesn’t live up to the expectations I have of it (maybe there are too many) – but ultimately it has made me realise that I don’t actually have a choice, I have to make art, each time I have felt like giving in I have somehow found the inspiration to carry on, I never stop thinking about it, reading about it and I just can’t seem to physically stop making it.
Over the course of my final year I have been particularly interested in exploring the process of creating work, at times I have felt that I have been working out what it means to be an artist but that has been a really important part of my journey. I have explored working spontaneously, attempted to go beyond my own mind to create work, explored chance happenings in the studio, had an idea and followed it through and made it. My practice throughout the whole year has been far more focused on the process of creating the work than it has been on the final product and all of my works were recycled to create new ones, to me as soon as a work was finished it was dead – it had served its purpose to teach me what I needed to know at that time but beyond that it had no use to me!
The research that I did for my dissertation changed the way I thought about my work considerably, it made me far more aware of ideas around decommodification and dematerialisation.
My work has aimed to be subtle and considered, humble in its materials and honest in its considerations, I think I have high expectations of my work and have had to remind myself that I often compare what I am doing to artists that have been working for forty + years!
Reading has taken up much of my time over the last year and it has been invaluable to the quality of my understanding, my main influences in terms of artists have been:
Phyllida Barlow, she describes her work as being about the physical and material process and how this relates to space, although her sculptures are much bigger than anything I have been able to produce I also really like the raw, unfinished aesthetic of her work. My work is very much about how it interacts with space and I have always been fascinated by the offcuts of other peoples work, I often find the decisions that people make more interesting than the finished work.
Sean Landers conversations about trying to make his work as honest as possible has been a constant inspiration to me, I have always tried to make my work honest, in the beginning I thought I had achieved this but I think the more I read and think about what it really means to be honest and why this is valuable the more I realise that to make honest work could perhaps be a really difficult thing.
Gerhard Richter has been very influential in understanding my practice and the work itself, the way he relates to his own practice and talking about just letting things happen has been really inspiring.
There are many, many more artists that have inspired my work and I have discussed these in my blog and in other areas of contextual reference.
