Trying to stay ahead of the degree game really helps minimise my anxiety. I always promised myself, that if I ever returned to education I would try not to make the same mistakes I made when I was younger. My mistakes were mainly around not giving myself fully to the process and leaving everything until the last minute; in doing so I came out of school with really poor results. During my time on the degree I have tried to work with the tendencies I still have in these areas and ‘thinking ahead of the game’ has, I feel, paid off.
Preparing for our end of degree show has not been an exception. A few months ago I was in anxiety over what I could do as a final piece and I also felt a lack of inspiration generally. Due to this, instead of waiting for inspiration, I just started making the ideas I had put in my sketch-book, without judging the results too harshly. This turned into a more positive period of making and along with various influences (as described in earlier blogs), led me to my spheres which I then saw as having installation possibilities for the final show.
I found having some ideas early on, extremely grounding, although I am still working out the exact nature of the presentation of the work. Thoughts regarding positioning them outside have subsided due to my doubts as to how they will deal with any bad weather. I have become much more excited at the idea of positioning them inside on either a bed of small stones or alternatively on fake grass (astro-turf). Small stones seem to create a Zen like effect, which I really like, but it is quite serious. Astro turf appears to add a surreal quality to them. The combination of white walls, fake green grass and giant and small earth-balls seems to work for me. I want to throw the viewer into a mix of visual shock, an experience of the ridiculous and into a state of uninhibited, childish fascination.
Whilst considering moving away from the more serious Zen experience, I would still like to hold onto the idea of a thread of religiousness or sacredness, within the work. When I have been on holiday, looking at large granite tors on Dartmoor, I have been struck by having a combination of reactions; joy at the bulbous shapes and their almost ridiculous positioning on the landscape, like large granite ‘blobs’ of cake-mix dolloped off of a giant spoon, along with feelings of history, pre-history, of ancientness and possible mysticism. In Phaidon’s ‘Vitamin 3D’ Anne Ellegood discusses this area of art and states,
Although artists remain sceptical of the notion of art as idolatory or the supposition that individual works of art can carry an aura of subconscious universal appeal, it is not unusual today for artists to create sculptures that seek to have some relationship to veneration and ritual. This sacredness is not necessarily linked to specific ideologies, but rather to an exploration of the ways in which sculptural objects have functioned in earlier periods in relation to activities that surpass the quotidian and extend into the extraordinary. (Vitamin 3D / Introduction by Ellegood, 2014, p.12)
I find Ellegood’s ideas on surpassing the quotidian (or everyday) inspiring. In creating my large (and small) spheres I have wanted to create an emotional affect on the viewer, rather than a cerebral one. I do not want viewers to think about ‘what the work is about’ in an intellectual way; but rather as in the analogy of the Dartmor Tor, I want them to ‘feel’ the piece. I want them to have a natural reaction to the sight of many spheres together, covered in soil, with little or no exciting colours to tempt the senses. I want the viewer to struggle with notions of ‘adult meaning’, finally giving up to a more childhood sense of ‘just feeling’. I want the viewer to glimpse into the LSD experience where size, shape, ideas, smell and taste all become confused. Where there is a sense of message, but nothing is clear, where the world stops making sense, but where there is a strong aura of something unexplained.
