AirSpace Graduate Residency

My final solo show, which will mark the end of my residency at AirSpace is fast approaching! Started making some press moulds to make tiles that will feature in the exhibition. Have to say I’m pretty pleased with how they’re looking!

 

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Since coming to Stoke, inevitably, much of my thinking has been about ceramics. I read Emma Bridgewater’s Toast & Marmalade which got me thinking about the perfect pairing of  dishes to meals and ceramic pieces with the ability to transfer us to other places. All relevant to my wider concerns and interest in images.

This train of thought seemed to come to a head when I came across this egg shaped salt and pepper shaker I found at a charity shop. A neat, satisfying pairing.

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I have since started learning how to make moulds for slip casting and have plans to make sculptures and tiles that also function as vessels of sorts, bringing much of my thinking together.

It has been a while since I have posted anything on my blog. I have been busily working towards my interim show, Holes In The Hedge, in the window of AirSpace Gallery. I deinstalled yesterday and this marks the halfway point of my 6 month residency! Time is flying.

Holes In The Hedge is an exhibition in the AirSpace Gallery window, which reflected where I’m at with my research after 3 months of being in Stoke. It combines my interests in working with the labeling of objects and the manipulations inherent to lens based media with new concerns that have arisen over the past few months.

Taking ideas of ‘the handmade’ and the disregarded properties of ‘things’, the work takes lifestyle programming and the competition and anxiety it induces as its starting point. In particular it looks at domestic gardening and the idiosyncratic ways in which we choose to manipulate the landscape to create our own personal paradises and showpieces.

Thoughts on the myths associated with bird feeding have also come into the work. Leaving bread out for birds is in fact not the generous gift we think it is. The image of Hovis scattered in the streets is familiar, we recognize its purpose, however, it is also a human intervention incongruent to its surroundings and habitual.

Holes In The Hedge is an amalgamation of various garden features that I have intervened with and manipulated through dyeing, making by hand (where it is normally deemed unnecessary) and shaped incongruent to their natural forms.

The work aimed to use the window format to explore the idea of a ‘garden’ as a place that can be communal or private, and the moments when the line between the two gets disrupted.

 

Since completing the work I am now reflecting on what was most successful and which threads of thought I now need to push further. Later on this week I will be starting on making some moulds and I think this will solidify ideas.

Since my arrival in Stoke my thoughts have been dominated by idiosyncratic gardening, ceramics, foodstuffs (in particular bread + oatcakes!) and the way all 3 overlap with lifestyle programming and the foreign.  I have started in the studio trying to bring these disparate threads of thought together.

I am currently attempting to make popcorn from scratch (having been mulling over the idea that corn is to Mexico what oats are to Stoke….. how do we think of corn here?). Plus I am attempting to teach myself how to work with clay….starting simple with making my own gravel….for my yarden. I have gotten hold of some clay samples and am using this exercise as an opportunity to get a feel of their different properties. I have thus far tried simple ‘modelling clay’ and ‘pink grogged clay’. I have hopes of moving onto casting and tile making soon….

 

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After The Bake Off final last night, today seemed like a good day to openly reflect upon Digesting Recipes: The Art of Culinary Notation by Susannah Worth, which I finished reading last week.  It is a book, which looks at recipes as cultural documents. How, as a formula for writing,  its constraint can be seen in a negative light – as a set of instructions in place to trap or enforce aspirations of the unattainable; as well as in a positive light – it’s potential to provide escape, a proposal for action or a guide to new possibilities. It highlights the manner in which food can bring people together as well as bring to prominence ‘contemporary society’s stark disparities’.

I often use food in my work, playing with these relationships. I am interested in the way foods can  signify, represent, or become a label of a place and/or the exotic, as well as the role of food in contemporary society’s search for authenticity.

In my 2,3 Kilometer oder 4 Schnittlauchpflanzen oder 0,5 Schrippe oder 10 Pommes frites guide. I placed two similar recipes for ‘Fresh Cheese & Chives’ next to each other – one in English and one in German. At first glance they appear the same set of instructions. However, depending on your knowledge of both languages you, will come to realise that they are quite different recipes, and representative of the way in which different cultures approach the same end goal. I am interested in this process of assuming we understand what we see and having to reassess with time.

Digesting Recipes mentioned the discovery of a new disorder liked with this rise of lifestyle programming and competitive leisure cooking – KPA or Kitchen Performance Anxiety, which involves many of the symptoms of Generalised Anxiety. It shows how the high standards set on the telly by ‘immaculately choreographed renditions of rehearsed recipes’ that fly across our screens, really can affect us. In response to this, I think perhaps Bake Off exposes a more healthy / human side to cooking – through emphasising the inevitability of mistakes and the fact that these are laboured creations that provide both stress and escape. In my own work I often make extreme versions of food items. Through this my primary concern is to try allow the object to ‘escape’ its labels but perhaps I should look at my position as female artist and avid watcher of Nigella and think more about these links. Whatsmore perhaps art making does contain some sort of performance anxiety too….

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Last night I made Hanley Forest Gateau, a recipe I came across in The Oatcake Cookbook. I was intrigued by the way chocolate, kirsch and cherries, when in combination, were representative of a Black Forest Gateau, no matter how far from the original this new concoction may be. Layers of oatcakes made the sponge and I have to say it was pretty horrid, oatcakes definitely were meant for bacon and cheese. However, I think the way flavours are linked to places and the manner in which pairing meals with foreign influences seems to ‘upgrade’ them are things to look into further. Stoke, whilst very English in many respects, is a multicultural city. And I don’t want to forget that in my work here.