Bucks New University

‘Mind the Map’ day turned out to be excellent – a seminar day linked with a fascinating exhibition at the Transport Museum in Covent Garden. Talks and interviews with several artists doing interesting things with maps.

Simon Patterson giving an account of his now iconic ‘Great Bear’ variation on the London tube map and a new piece called Saptarishi. Then Jeremy Wood walking the landscape with a GPS device to create his own personal cartography http://www.gpsdrawing.com/maps/traverse-me.html Then Susan Stockwell making wall-size maps of South America with used coffee filters, Africa and Afghanistan in bank notes and the whole world in computer components. Much more at http://www.susanstockwell.co.uk

Many ideas here that could feed into my map-based Detour 3. For more on the exhibition try http://london-underground.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/photos-mind-map-london-transport-museum.html

In the meantime a digression from my ‘detours’ with a just-for-fun project set by tutor Alan – an open invitation to make some ‘mail-art’ based on picture postcards and to be sent through the post led to an afternoon spent doing silly things with photoshop. I may post some more.

Recently I have been re-visiting Arthur Koestler’s 1964 classic ‘The Act of Creation’. It’s over 700 pages so I have only ever dipped in here and there, and I’m sure it must be very dated in art theory terms. Nevertheless his central idea still appeals to me and seems very relevant to what I am doing. The idea is that creativity can occur when two previously unrelated planes of thought are made to intersect and he applies this concept in a variety of situations – including jokes.

In my Detour 5 with collaborator Gill – try to keep up – we decided that, of her three randomly chosen artists, Nam June Paik looked the most promising. As a founding father of video art he particularly interests me and especially his ‘My Faust’ series of around a dozen gothic structures made in the late 1980’s each referencing different aspects of western society. www.paikstudios.com/gallery/22.html

Meanwhile Gill has a passionate interest in bees – remember them? – and they feature in various ways in her own practice. And so there are the two ideas to rub together. Over the summer quite a bit of research has been done into the many faceted world of apiary and a maquette made for what might eventually be called ‘The Palace of the Bees’. You will have to peep through the little holes on the front of the hive bit to see the video of the bees who live in Oxford.

Detour 3 is the one that has made the slowest progress so far but Saturday is ‘Mind the Map’ day.

So this is how things stood at the end of year four. Six collaborators, six throws of the dice, six excursions into unknown territory. Six ‘detours’.

Detour 1 – Stella threw a number 4 and was handed a dictionary of science.

Quite quickly she chose a page with diagrams of silicate minerals.

Detour 2 – Danielle threw a 3 and from a poetry anthology made a fairly quick choice of three poems.

Detour 3 – Diane threw a 1 and from ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’ chose a sixteenth century Mexican map.

Detour 4 – Cally threw a 5 and made up the non-words ‘Palangor’, ‘Manzer’ and ‘Zoop’.

Detour 5 – Gill threw a 2 and from a book of modern art picked three artists completely at random – Cesar Domela, Nam June Paik and Robert Mapplethorp.

Detour 6 – Deborah threw 4 and from the science dictionary she picked ‘red shift’ or the Doppler effect.

So a fairly daunting agenda to start with and for a while I began to doubt the sanity of the whole enterprise. Happily though, a good range of numbers and sources and more than enough to keep me busy for the whole of next year. Next week we are back to the studios and my first priority will be to meet with each of my collaborators and discuss where things go next.

Yesterday I was filming bees at Oxford’s Natural History Museum – don’t ask – I’ll explain later.

I am a mature student on a five-year part-time degree in Fine Art at Bucks New University at High Wycombe and about to begin my final year. In my first four years I have worked in a range of media, enjoyed workshops in sculpture, printmaking and painting and made use of some of my previous experience in photography and video. Last year I completed my dissertation, which was an investigation into of some of the ways we might approach a study of recent video installation art.

I have enjoyed it all but by the end of last year I became increasingly aware of a lack of any real centre to my practice or any clear direction or focus. Then it occurred to me that, in some way, uncertainty might in itself be an issue to explore. I thought back to my very first semester on the course and an assignment on ‘the absurd’. For that project I had devised a kind of game-like sequence based on the idea of dreams and their random connections. At each stage of the project, media, colours, words (or non-words) or found objects were all arrived at by chance and contributed by fellow students. It was quite a playful piece really but I think it raises some serious, maybe even fundamental questions about our varied reasons for making art and the kind of valuations we may put on it. Maybe all art includes some element of chance but what if chance itself was the very subject?

And so I decided to rework the idea probably as a year-long programme of linked projects. At the end of the summer term in a group tutorial I floated the idea with a few fellow students, inviting them to be collaborators. The proposal was that the collaborator would throw a dice. The number would lead to either a book of modern art, a science dictionary, a poetry anthology, a history book or ask them to make up some non-words. From the book, they would choose three pages either carefully or ‘eyes-closed’ or their nonsense words would be google-searched. From the outcome of this process we would come to an agreement about which finding seemed the most promising and that would be the subject of the work. There would then be an initial period of research and various options explored and discussed before any particular medium was chosen.

At the tutorial my fellow students (and Stella my personal tutor) seemed quite intrigued with the idea and were more than willing to be collaborators and dice were thrown there and then. My initial idea was that each project would last maybe a month or so before the next one started. In the event I found myself with six projects all initiated more or less simultaneously and so my summer has been spent trying to work on as many of them as possible at least at the ideas stages so that in the new semester the real making can get going.

My present collaborators are all at the same stage in the course as I am so they will all be under some pressure next year with their own practices and degree shows. So I fully recognise that their inputs to my project may have to be quite limited and will mainly take the form of occasional exchanges of ideas. Ideally though we would all gain something and I shall try to find ways of making connections with their work and interests.

The various parts of the project may work at quite different time-scales and I have little idea yet how many pieces might be completed, be thought successful or be of any interest. It is likely that the final body of work will be very varied with no recognisable personal style. We are encouraged to see our progress through the course as a journey. I have decided to call this stage of my journey ‘detours’.