Continuing Conversations

Apparently, my blog was one of the most read last month. I’m rather flattered that people are reading it, although it also feels a little peculiar at the same time – by trying to discuss my work in quite an honest, day-by-day way, I’ve made a conscious decision to omit ‘art-speak’; but in doing so, it has all become more personal, which is a slightly un-nerving act in itself.

The format of writing in a blog makes this easier though, I think. By putting my ideas in this context, it’s automatically less formal, and there’s less of a temptation to add some pretention into the mix. This is also about the only time I write anything for Other People to read without asking my partner (who has a degree in writing) to look over, re-arrange my sometimes rather erratic sentence structure, and generally smarten up. However, I’ve looked back over my posts so far, and I still feel happy with them – I wonder if there’s a way of taking extracts to include in that elusive Artist’s Statement?

Looking around the archives at the Discovery Museum was great. They’ve got a fantastic collection of objects, which I could have nosed through for quite a while. What interested me more when I got there though, were not so much the objects which they know a reasonable amount about, but the ones that they don’t. There are quite a few objects which the museum owns from previous collections, when the cataloguing and record keeping wasn’t as detailed and accurate as it is now. I quite like the idea that a museum is effectively there as a place to house knowledge, but when the museum lacks this knowledge, it heightens / creates a sense of loss about that particular object.

I’m going to be spending the rest of the afternoon reading some essays about collecting, and making a few notes. There was recently a call out for papers for a conference called ‘Museums and Biographies’. They want to ‘draw together analyses of representation, material culture and personality’ and they are ‘inviting papers that can cast a new light on the study of lives, objects and display’. My work seems to fit rather nicely into this, and they are asking for artists as well as historians and museologists, but as I’ve never done anything like this before, I’m not quite sure where to begin. Hence the reading.

Well, it's been a bit of a while since my last post – Christmas, New Year, and having a rush of applications to complete have taken over recently. I've also been spending an inordinate amount of time sitting in front of this computer either arguing with it about colour calibration or researching various ideas.

I'm attaching a photograph of the dress piece I completed just after New Year and photographed in the project space I was working in. I've recently applied for some funding for training in alternative photographic processes (using liquid emulation and making tintypes, a late 19th century process), but for the moment, I'm trying to get the colour accurate for digital printing. Which is a mission in itself, as my computer resolutely refuses to stick to the correct calibration I've worked out for it. Anyway, until that is solved, I've attached an image to give an idea of how that last piece of work is looking.

I thought it worked quite well in the space, until my partner told me the space made him think of some sort of underground torture chamber, which gave the dress rather different connotations. I was seeing the work set up there as a chance to work out how to photograph in those types of interiors, what sort of lighting etc, and for that it worked – I'm now looking for alternative locations to set up a shoot (which preferably avoid aforementioned implications).

I'm off to meet one of the Keepers at the Discovery Museum later today, to have a nose through the objects in their social history archives and collections. I'm looking for items which have some information about their previous owners, some sort of story attached, as I think this might be another direction to take this work – an actual history or story, rather than it all being anonymous. I was reading various theories about collecting over Christmas, and looking at some research about what sort of people ‘collect’, and what is collected. As I was reading, I was thinking about how after we’ve died, all that is physically left behind are the objects we’ve amassed during our lifetimes. So by collecting, (either consciously knowing it to be a collection, or not) is that an attempt to create a permanence, a physical grounding after we’ve gone?