Birmingham City University

So its the depths of deepest December and the dark nights are closing in early. So much has happened since my last post before my degree show. I recieved a 2:1 in the end, although fustratingly close to the First grade I really wanted (who doesn’t?). I was pleased, and in hindsight it was exactly what was deserved. I haven’t picked up a video camera since the show – not because I have been put off, I am letting my idea’s dictate my choice of mediums now.

Saying that; progress has been slow since finishing Uni – the decision to move home to live with my parents was a hard one (but my finances decided it for me) and I have missed being around fellow artists with whom to bounce ideas and thoughts off. Milton Keynes is not the complete cultural wasteland I previously thought, as there are a number of young and enthusiastic artists working here, but it is not the same as being in a studio every day, with the constant support of collegues and tutors.

None-the-less, my collegues have moved on – and it has been exciting to see the vast array of different ventures being explored by them over the past 3 months.

– Ad hoc exhibtions, residencies, internships, and perhaps most impressively the Birmingham Grad -Space which has been set up to provide studio spaces and a support network for new arts graduates.

Back in Milton Keynes I have found some part time work in MK Gallery, and some voluntary work with MK Arts for Health (an organisation based in the hospital here). Not perhaps as thrilling as some of my peers, but it is definatly a pace that is suiting me – and helping me to slowly unwravel what it is I actually would like to do! I do not feel under pressure, as I know some of my fellow graduates do, to get the best residencies/internships, and I feel I am perhaps happier for it. I am not sitting around waiting for opportunities to land at my feet, but I will not stress myself out over things that are completely beyond my control.

My advice to any new graduate would be to have the same attitude, because dissappointment is not probable..its a certainty! My motivation is that I want to find a role in which I will be happy and secure, and feel fulfilled -I am not interested in comparing myself to other people,

On that note – I’m off to trawl the jobs and opps section of this site. :-D

It’s the final countdown! The BIAD School of Art degree show will be up and being assessed in just 2 and a half weeks, 3 years of work are drawing to a close.

This week I have used a nail and hammer for the first time since secondary school – the plinths I made are a smidge wonky but they stand up! The studios are being painted white, floors are being scrubbed, everything is a go go go! I have managed to secure myself an exciting space within the building (which is a beautiful grade 2 listed Victorian school). The space is a corridor, a ‘non-space’ in one sense, which I hope will compliment the work. The plan is to have 4 plinths, two either side of the corridor, to create a vacuum of audio-visual mashing.

I have been slowly finalising my video ‘Culture Vulture’ for the final show. My main struggle has been with structuring the sequences so that the 4 different screens compliment and work together, to make a whole coherent installation.

I am becoming increasingly aware that the multi-layered nature of my work, references a technique within video art which uses short incomprehensbile clips to confuse and alienate the viewer. This wasn’t particularly purposeful, it happened somewhat organically due to using found footage, and now I am worried that it detracts from the work.

Whilst I am interested in creating a distance between the viewer and the the screen, I don’t want to make work which is so opaque that the viewer cannot gain access to its meaning – especially as the meaning for me is so integral!

And so I find myself patronising the audience by putting not-so-subtle signifiers into the work, such as choosing to focus on the ‘ethnic’ other, which is more recognisable.

If I make the work accessible, do I make it stupid?

Should I go back to the drawing board here and re-assess how I expect my audience to interact/experience the work?

Does it matter if my audience undrstands? I hope that the audience can understand without me patronising them, perhaps I am underestimating them!

On another note I have been busy trying to create a website for myself this week, I shall post a link here:

www.wix.com/hannahkg/hannahkg

I perhaps should invest in an easier domain name eventually.

Thats all for now.

It’s funny how an unpronouncable volcano has managed to affect everyone. Tuesday the 20th of April saw the opening of Ouvrage a collaborative project exhibiting at BIAD School of Art. Except there was someone missing! – Francoise Dupre, the artist who started it all and has carried the work itself across europe, was stuck in Istanbul, along with thousands of others travellers. So myself and the other student collaborator Rebecca Snow, had the nerve-wrecking task of opening the show ourselves.

Ouvrage began in 2009, when Francoise invitied Rebecca and I to accompany her on a trip to Mostar in Bosnia and Herzgovina. We stayed there for a month, exploring the city, researching its history, and holding participatory workshops with the local women’s group ‘Novi Pogled’ at the French Cultural Centre where Francoise had her residency.

Francoise Dupre’s practice is inherently particpatory, and the participants are given an active role in the decision making. Dupre also works with the everyday and the familliar – using traditional craft processes such as french knitting, and recycled materials to create textured and highly decorative pieces of work.

It was exciting, and hot, and overwhelming. Mostar is nothing like Birmingham, or any British city, and at the same time surprisingly familliar. We felt like tourists, and we absorbed as much as we could from that position – outsiders looking in.

It seems apparent, now that the work has travelled to Birmingham, that my stay in Mostar has in fact effected my practice quite profoundly.

The position of a tourist, the alienation, the misunderstandings, the cultural shock – these are all part of the distance of otherness, than I am intersted in exploring with my own work. I was amazed at how the other young people we met shared the same main cultural influence as us – American Television. We found ourselves having quite lengthy discussions about ‘Star Trek’ and ‘Family Guy’, and this common ground was immensely valuable, like the one anchor of familliarity that we could cling to, when everything else felt so unreal.

My current work explores Otherness through the culture of popular television, where essentially the viewer becomes a tourist in the world portrayed on screen. I hope that the final work will articulate this idea of Otherness being something that exists ‘at a distance’ – the same sense of alienation that is felt when visiting a foriegn land. This distance is our own construction, we use it as a tool to define ourselves more clearly.

It seems that human beings are relational by nature; our sense if how we relate to Others is both subject-forming yet simulaneously also formed, or invented, by us. This notion that our own sense of self and understanding of the Other is in fact part of a fiction that makes up our idea of reality is at the core of what I am dealing with.

Now as Ouvrage hangs in the BIAD School of Art Foyer, it has a sense of memorabilia about it. It’s out-of-place-ness adds to its potence, and my appreciation of it.

The more I read the more I want to expand expand expand! In a few weeks I will be giving an assesable presentation about ‘my practice’. It seems the pressure to define my practice is sending my brain into overdrive, trying to absorb and adapt everything I read and see into the confused mush it has become. The problem is, I feel as though my art-making, my personality, and my feelings are all intertwined – an intregral part of my identity. But who I am is undefinable, just like my practice, I am a mixture of experiences, of stimuli, and of relationships, all these things make up my essential ‘me’ness. How can I begin to explain where my practice has developed from, how can I narrow it down to one interest, one experience, one meaning.

And now in the panic of this realisation, I am trying to steal other people’s meanings and histories, in a futile attempt to get some clarity, At least this process of outward seeking has enabled me to draw some comparisons, and at least figure out what my practice is not!

I must simplify! I must reduce! I must stop this post now because I have a meeting!

It’s the 1st of March. My degree show is 105 days away, and so what better time to start a new blog!

Last week was a mid-way point, a critical review of what we have developed so far this year, and where it is going from here – with the perspective that we are now planning what our final presentation of work will be. I presented a video sequence I have been working on, a collage of footage from Celebrity Big Brother along with subtitles, and clashing audio from Ch4’s ‘Bodyshock, The girl with Eight Limbs’. It’s great to feel like all my disjointed ideas and feelings from the 1st and 2nd year are finally starting to come together into a resolved piece. In hindsight, all that I was exploring before – ritual, the museum of otherness, the alien Self, all of these things were working towards this more fluid and cohesive notion of the Other as Opposite. Its exciting to read articles and books that affirm my own feelings about this interesting subject! However I can’t help feeling that, with so short a time until the degree show, this is only just the beginning (I know there is life after the degree show, but I am of course striving to present a body of work that is coherent and well researched).

An encouraging result of the mid-way review was that I can finally feel settled with regards to my choices of mediums and their structure. My biggest downfall has always been the formal aspect of my practice, I second guess every decision I make, and 99% of the time seem to get it wrong. Well what a relief that this time its that 1% that I have been struggling after. Now I can just focus on the content, on trying to access the meaning that I know is there!

Over the weekend I read a compelling,if a little disturbing, chapter in a pschoanalysis book which discussed Freuds ideas with regards to the Other. His theory was that the Other is both familliar and strange because our narcissism projects all our repressed self-hatred onto the face of another, therefore leading to a demonised double, who is both our opposite and our mirror. I know that Freudian theory is largely dicreditted, but doesnt this ring true? It seems especially relevent to my developing practice, with regards to the voyeuristic nature of television documentaries. We are drawn to these strange and foriegn faces on the screen, not just because they are curious, but because they are uncanny, they are a mirror of ourselves – only we dont see a mirror we see something totally separate and alien to us, that we can hold ourselves in higher esteem for not being like them.

Perhaps that is a generalisation of the television viewer, but I know it certainly applies to me. Even as an artist, and with this work, I seperate myself, I am self righteous and self aware, and that is why I must make work in which the viewer becomes self conscious, I see their ignorance of their own condition, I seek to reveal it. Part of that process however, is revealing it to myself. It always comes back to me.

I’m off to watch ‘Gypsy Weddings’.