The next few sessions I skipped into the MillSpace and spent quite a few hours constructing spokes for the wheels of a crane on Photoshop and then setting them up frame by frame for animation. There will be a much easier way of doing it (keyframes on Flash??) but as I did a BA in Fine Art we never got taught anything proper and I actually quite like doing this odd strange long winded way. I get a great sense of achievement! I did get really excited at one point, I’d taken off the wheels and was fiddling with them on a separate page and it looked really good. I had flashes of other pieces of work going off in my head; this is what art is all about for me, the moment of realisation when an idea takes on a form of its own. It was difficult though and took me ages to work it out, at one point I was working with about 77 layers, this was the point just before my head could have possibly exploded but I managed to simplify it just in time!
There’s such a lot more work to do and I hope that these animations work like they are doing in my head! I’m worrying a bit now about how the whole show will come together (when I’ve got about 5 weeks left). I wanted to have some sculptural piece as well as the animation in the MillSpace and a video playing in the cinema. I know I’m heading for a fall when I’ve got such a fixed idea in my head, this is not what my practice is about. I have developed a practice that is experimental and process led which means that I mess about with stuff until something good happens. I like not knowing, it keeps it fresh and almost always something amazing that I could have never imagined takes place. Of course I have an art education (!) and work is usually fuelled by which artist I’m into at the time. I’m really into post-Minimal practices like Ceal Floyer and Martin Creed, throw in a bit of Rachel Whiteread too (and others). But I’m also starting to look at Avant Garde experimental video, people like Michael Snow whose work deals with perception and the flattening of the image, this really interests me too.
How then in this residency can I do my own practice justice, wanting to work with the things that are interesting me now, combined with doing stuff that’s influenced by the mill, plus worrying about what the ‘non-art’ audience will think about it? I know I shouldn’t bother about what people will think though but it’s difficult. I’m hovering between trying to doing something safe and accessible which I’ll not be really happy with and doing something ‘edgy’ and more ‘me’.
Is this normal on a residency? Where it’s like being on a roller coaster; one minute your having the time of your life, thinking, oh my God I’m getting paid for this? Next minute it’s all rubbish and you want to be normal and work in Asda’s (or something). Or is it just me & my neurosis, ha ha!
