AirSpace Graduate Residency

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….

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….

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.

I have been doing some volunteering at the British Ceramics Biennial, which has not only given me the opportunity to  meet a bunch of great people and contemplate the outstanding array of works on show .. it has also given me the chance to have a good look at the Spode Factory, which houses the exhibition. There are lots of remains, from when the factory was operational, still in place and I have come across some intriguing ceramic objects … that perhaps I can take into further work.

Whilst on a shift by the back entrance I came across a bizarre pile of gravel by my feet. Gravel was already on my brain after working on my piece for the AirSpace studio members’ Assemblage exhibition. So I was giving this heap quite a bit of my attention. I suddenly realised that it was awfully regular looking and had a strange blue tinge. Picking up a handful, I realised it was a heap of discarded ceramic pieces. All the same shape (triangular prisms) and two tones, grey and blue. I find this strikingly fitting with my previous thoughts on gravel as a mass of neglected stones. Similarly in this instance ceramic works that are usually regarded as precious, decorative and fragile had found an unusual home beneath my feet. They were happily being completely ignored until their manmade regularity became apparent. This seems like the reverse concept of my gravel pins – concealing as opposed to revealing. I have gotten an urge since being in the city to start playing/making/working with ceramics, despite my negligible skill. I feel that the idea of ceramic gravel may be a healthy starting point for my upcoming making….

I also came across this lump of dried out clay – somebody’s working remains. It is an intriguing object; to me it resembles both a comb and a block out of which somebody was cutting tagliatelle like strips. I wonder what it was used for? And what it could become.

One of the themes currently being explored in the 2015 British Ceramics Biennial, in Stoke, is ‘the production line’. The AirSpace studio artists currently have a show titled Assemblage, in the AirSpace Resources Room, that reflects our own interest in the process of production.

I thought this would be a prime opportunity to relook at the photos I take which inform my work. My final works are normally succinct sculptural or photographic entities that attempt to create perfect images – images that expose misunderstandings through their own warped logic. To get to these more resolved pieces, however, I do a lot of reading and looking and photographing and finding random, tenuous links between objects, images and stories. Spaghetti Grows On Trees is an ongoing collection of these photos that aid my thought processes, which looks at our relationship with the absurd and myths. For Assemblage I have bought four of these photos together in an attempt to create a dialogue. All of these images speak of objects we recognise but seem displaced or ‘other’ through manipulations of different kinds; their functions and forms are warped; roles are shifted and hence questioned. Objects, becoming protagonists in front of the camera, adopt new roles as ‘things’. One of these objects is a rock that I discovered in the wilderness whilst on a residency in Iceland. It has inexplicably regular holes that pass right the way through it, which seem far too precise to have been made by nature.

I am also experimenting with different ways of recognising the photographic print as ‘thing’. I have experimented for this exhibition with printing on Japanese Washi paper, which has a light and translucent materiality. I liked the manner in which it floats on the wall much like some of the objects in the photographs themselves. I think this is something that can still be pushed further.

I also used gravel and magnets to pin the prints to the wall. I was interested in gravel as dull decoration, how the individual stones as entities are disregarded when in mass. I was looking to  highlight the beauty found in these objects, commonly out of view, through isolating them. This is a concept I’m growing more interested in through reading The Quadruple Object by Graham Harman, the idea that we forget certain properties of objects when they don’t appear active to our consciousness, i.e. how much of what surrounds us ‘retreats into a shadowy underworld’.

Enjoyed reading documentation of Brian Eno’s John Peel lecture today. A perfect inspirational read for a lazy Sunday afternoon. Eno talks on the importance of the creative ‘industries’ and the serious function of art in all of our lives, stating how the arts are important for our ‘exposure to the joys and freedoms of a false world in order that we might recognise those and locate them in the real world.’

May next week involve plenty of false world creation!

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/6music/johnpeellecture/brian-eno-john-peel-lecture.pdf

(also on iPlayer I believe!)