For the full time MA students it almost over; all that is left is to take down the work figure out how to take it home/ sell it/ store it and collect their results.
I’m half way through and I am wondering what it will be like for me next year. What will the relationship be with the new full time students? How will we put a show together? How important is the show in the grand scheme of things?
For now I am working on what I want to accomplish in Tallinn. I leave on the 26th and will spend the day in the V and A in London before jetting off bright and early on 27th.
I didn’t tidy today as planned. I had a Skype meeting with Larna about designing workshops to fill the void that the demise of creative partnerships has created. Interestingly I was at a meeting today and was asked to be involved in education workshops for the Gallery. It seems that at last a few seeds have begun to fertilize.
I wandered around the MA show also, hence the woeful beginning to my post this evening. I will miss the friends I’ve met. I hope that we will keep in touch somehow. Some will stay in the UK and get jobs in London, some will fly home to their families. What will I do? I hope that I will go to Mino. I asked Shiro about that today. I asked if he would be my referee – he was reluctant to agree without seeing my work, which I see as a genuine response. Which reminds me I will send him a link to my website.
Tomorrow i will tidy and make cyanotypes and research.
‘Look at Jason Oddy – pinholes + mouth’
This is the suggestion form my mid-phase review on Monday. So of course I have done a web search and found these intriguing images of empty corridors, empty rooms and objects which repeat sometimes to infinity.
http://www.jasonoddy.com/
What has this to do with what I presented on Monday? I have no idea as yet. He uses pinhole photography but this is not obvious (to me at least) from the images on his website.
Actually on reading his statement he uses a 5×4 plate camera not pinhole. Is it possible that he has been confused with Justin Quinnell?
http://www.pinholephotography.org
Tomorrow I will be tidying my studio room in the hope of tidying up my mind.
I went to the Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield on Thursday to see the contents of the building I had been working in, in the last few weeks of being in Yorkshire. It was almost a year ago; September 2010 I was creating cardboard installations for display in the space.
I encouraged the participants who were groups of local school children to view the space and to look at the dimensions they would be working in the design of the space, what was outside. I encouraged them to notice there place you went to in the room, the first thing you would see the direction you walked around the room.
After exploring the rooms we sat on the floor and made drawings inspired by photographs of Barbara Hepworth’s sculptures. We attempted to translate this into sculpture using cardboard.
This was difficult because our ideas on paper were hard to imagine collectively as an enlarged freestanding object. We got carried away slightly with the idea of freestanding and then later with scale. There was a lack of time for some to achieve these goals and others crafted smaller scale objects which often got lost in the big room.
The key it seems is to understand the inside and outside of space and to give it the time to be crafted into its form.
After dropping off my exhibits for the Angels of the North show at Greenbelt 2011 and having a great chat with Carla Moss and Andrew Shelton about ghosts in the curtains, the practicalities of hanging and whether anyone including ourselves actually takes more than a passing glance of notice at exhibits I headed off to Leeds City Markets to get a new battery for my watch which had begun to fail me.
I’d forgotten how exciting the place was; so much to see and do. We had 15 minutes to wait for the battery to be replaced so took a wander around the stalls and pathways. The smells coming from the cafes and food shops, the flashing lights of the mobile phone accessories stall, people learning to cook in a healthy eating centre, children making pictures in another activity centre, the lovely lady at the fabric stall selling bright red shiny material with printed black skulls (in honour of the Hirst exhibition at the City Gallery we supposed) the Chinese grocery store where we perused the packed shelves and I awed the roasted seaweed formed into sheets with the markings I’d seen on handmade paper in Scotland.
We collected the refurbished watches and headed into the city, through Victoria Quarter, across Briggate and through the arcade towards Park Row where we stopped to eat lunch propped on the sill of the new NatWest building. The need for refreshment brought us to the Henry Moore Institute where an impressive display of books vied for our attention. The little room was shut today. Mario Merz was holding fort with a show called ‘What can be done?’ I found it a little underwhelming but I did like the piece that gave its name to the exhibition which was a stainless steel trough about an arms length in width filled with what looked like fat but was much more likely to be some type of resin because inside it was set a neon sign with the words meaning what can be done.
I was much more taken in by the work of Darrell Viner who made computer drawings, repetitive and obsessive and utterly dark like some kind of sci-fi, matrix of non-compliance. There was also a machine with three slabs of marble that rotated and took small amounts of the marble away in the process. It reminded me on Janine Antoni’s work where she grinds the two huge stones by pushing a lever around in a circle for many days.
Downstairs I was confronted with the brilliance of highly refined roman influenced marble busts of the Gott family and others which some terracotta figures of such fine beauty I could barely believe they existed. Then through to A Selection of Objects carefully Arranged where I found images of Stuart Brisley’s 26 hours in Vienna and lost of waxed figures place in ornate frames. A little weird and sickly those wax creatures like the heads in the Wizard of Oz film. The ones in the cabinets belonged to the queen that whilst detached from the body where still animated when woken by a careless and frightened Dorothy.
By the time I got to the Damien Hirst Show in the front room of the gallery I was visually exhausted. Still I took a look at what had been created. I was tired and I’d seen it before so I spent no more than 5 minutes in the room before wandering off to the installation Pharmacy. It smelt of liquorice and it intrigued me. I glanced at the restaurant that had been installed and the silver wall paper that would be scraped off the wall at the end of the show much to the amusement of the invigilator who disclosed the price one could pay for a single roll. I asked him about the liquorice. I think he thought I was a little mad and conferred his colleague. It turned out he was chewing Airwaves.
I will write, it may be nothing but I must write or i will not exist fully. I am making and to write whilst making confuses me. When I think about making it runs like a film in my mind that I edit whilst watching this is why as soon as I write a few words they get deleted again until i have nothing.
but then if i wait until i have made before i write then surely something of the idea is lost in the practical world of creating something that exists outside of the film in my mind.
regardless of meaning or coherence i will write and keep doing so in an attempt to capture the idea as it evolves from dream to action.
Now I am thinking of Tallinn, in darkness, dusty, damp and smokey. There are people mumbling in different languages or just standing around or glued to laptops or gazing at the smoke. I am supposed to perform so I need to find Sandra or Jaanika to find out where should be. Where I am will depend on what I do. I should have this organised before I arrive as so much depends on the space, do I tell them what I need, or do I allow them to assign a space for me? Better I think to begin negotiations with a suggestion of my requirements. I expect I will need a floor. I like floor space, empty floor space, I will probably need around the size of a domestic room, maybe bigger to allow an audience. and what about the door? where will the audience come from how will they enter the work, maybe I have a space withing a large room, a corner maybe, starting in the corner and coming out, but do not want a stage or a domestic room where people have to enter a domestic door as they will expect domesticity on arrival and that is not where i will present my work.
To go further I need to know where I will be somewhat. I may want to work on the floor maybe I could have a small room like the one I stayed in when I first arrived. I would start in the corner the viewers would come in and by the end we will all have been pushed back out by the process. i will find Sandra and ask her if I can use the room I was in before. Then I will continue my dream…
