A week spent grappling with the dissertation and shooting and editing video.
Next week we have a group trip to London, the idea is to hit as many galleries as possible in three days. Looking forward to the Turner prize stuff and Mike Nelson’s Coral Reef at Tate Britain, also want to see the Turrel show.
At the end of the week I’m visiting Oriel Davies in Newtown to meet Amanda Farr, the director. Oriel Davies looks a likely venue for the virtual exhibition which is the basis of the dissertation.
I now have four short videos of shelter building with deliberately inadequate materials, the last shot in six inches of snow in the abandoned Dinorwic quarry above Llanberis in the heart of Snowdonia.
The one I’ve attached here was shot in woodland above the village of Llanfairfechan.
Gimme Shelter – shelter building
A video afternoon.
The huts tip-toe around the rather nostalgic, more sentimental and romantic aspects of home. I’d like the project as a whole to also deal with some of the darker themes such as ownership, encroachment and the universal need for shelter. To this end I’ve been building more life-size shelters, firstly round the back of the studio using pallets and carpet, and then in the woods with deliberately inadequate materials. I’ll try and post some of the video later this week when I’ve had a chance to edit it. In the meantime here are some stills including a shot, left off the last post, of one of the huts on the road.
Building continues in the hut laboratory but the priority for the coming week is to give the huts a weightier context. I’ll be out and about with the video cameras building more makeshift shelters using limited materials.
Meanwhile the collection of materials for the ty unnos continues and I’ll be making a start this week on the catalogue essay for the dissertation exhibition as well as producing a first draft for the reflective statement for the current module.
A busy week was made all the more so by helping out in the Mostyn Gallery helping construct a video projection booth for Ground Level the touring Hayward exhibition. The week topped off by a great opening at the Mostyn – 4 new exhibitions: Chant Avedissian’s Cairo Stencils; Alex Katz as part of the Artists’ Rooms series; Ground Level; and Eva Koch’s NoMad as part of the Mostyn’s Love Video series. Eva gave a really engaging talk on Saturday talking really openly about her practice and the secret behind those beautiful long slow pans.
Here’s the address of my Culture Colony profile:
http://www.culturecolony.com/profile/491
The show was a good focus for activity last week but resulted in a plateau of creativity; the key now is not to close things down but try and keep taking risks with the work between now and formative assessments.
One of the aspects of the ty unnos tradition that interests me is the idea of encroachment so the huts have started to appear in estate agencies.
