Coleg Menai

The formative assessment of our Research Module took place on Monday this week with feedback on Tuesday. Normally I would have recorded the space yesterday, but I had planned to do a gallery-dash in London. I particulary wanted to see Gerhardt Richter and Tacita Dean. The Richter show was a tour-de-force with some of his work I was aware of and other real gems I had never seen before. I found his glass pieces unexpected and particularly beguiling. Tacita Dean’s, Turbine Hall piece was a gentle and nostalgic paean to the medium of film. Sequences were “threaded through” an image of the end window which I felt tied it beautifully to the site…very satisfying From Tate Modern I walked along the Embankment to the Hayward to see Pipilotti Rist’s show at the recommendation of a friend. Wow, I have not seen video presented in so many diverse ways at the same time. The presentation approaches drew you into her works and I was very pleased I went to see it. From there I went on to the John Martin exhibition at Tate Britain. I had been really looking forward to that but I found it strangely underwhelming. There was a repetitiveness about the works which in some way became rather tedious. Also, I don’t think the hang was helped by the rather “cheesy” AV show on the big tryptic, I would have much preferred to have seen them without the hubris.

Tomorrow is the “last day” and I will record the Research Module material and that will be it for this term.

The video and the finished object for ‘stone in a sea of fog’ were united for the first time on Monday of this week. The push was to get photographs of the complete piece so that they could be sent to a 2012 Open Competition, closing date of December 5. The E-entry went in earlier this morning and the entry fee was paid over the phone…now breath.

The meeting of the video monitor with it’s new container went without a hitch. The multiple measurings and re-checkings as the piece was built really paid off. The fit was exactly as planned. The lead is also looking good and will continue to darken as it oxidises, but it is getting a great sheen already and the interior vertical walls of the piece now ripple and glow with a soft reflection of the horizontal video image. I was just going to say that this was the critical point but that isn’t true. The real heart-stopper was the application of the lead-bead to the seams, the final construction act. I hadn’t anticipated too much in the way of problems with the 8 middle seams but it was the corners where I was anticpating trouble. However, after well tooling the lead on the inside and outside corners into its flat profile, the bead went on without any drama…magic.

Now back to the dissertation and getting stuff together for the formative assessment in the last week.