(16th April continued)
What has been weird in the last week, is that I finished the community project being aware of how much I work I can make in a really short space of time, and planning to apply some of that urgency and sheer work ethic to my studio practice. But of course, that hasn't happened. I had to catch up with admin that I'd been putting on hold, get my head back into what it is I'm actually doing in my work, plan and deliver a workshop, go to a talk at the Baltic, visit family for Easter, read a pile of essays for some seminars next week…. so hence why at 7pm last night, I was still in the studio and have been since about 9.30am and my list only had the first couple of things ticked off. I know I'm better at working for deadlines, but this is ridiculous.
Been a bit of while since my last post – I’ve been up to my ears in various applications, including a residency, a commission, a collaborative community project (which I did get, usefully). I’ve also been trying to document my work (which unfortunately meant re-hanging the installation a showed a few weeks ago because the first round of photographs was useless – the second set of photos was much better though, see the images which accompany this post), negotiate access to a disused library near to my flat which I want to photograph the interior of, and plan a few workshops I’m supposed to be running. So the actual making of work has been a bit slack in the last few weeks.
All this buzz of activity has got me thinking about the practice / planning / administration / application / everything else balance. I’ve never had a great deal of success with these nationally advertised residencies etc, mainly I’m assuming because so many people apply for them. I was given an application number of 116 one time. The other thing which was becoming more and more apparent as I was writing, is how incredibly difficult it is to explain your work / practice in a way which is suitable for an application process, but which doesn’t sound incredibly dry and boring. It feels as if an overly casual tone sounds a bit naff and rather forced, where as my natural formality for applications comes across as rather unexciting – it’s difficult to get the enthusiasm for a project or idea across. This is of course leading back to some of the reasons I started this blog in the first place. The other thing is, as been especially apparent over the last few weeks, giving all this time over to applications has meant that I just haven’t made much work. So what is better: (and it there a ‘better’?) applying to get work shown / for various advantageous opportunities, or thinking about and making work, with the idea that my work and ideas will improve as a result, thus improving the chances of success with applications? There is of course the other argument, that perhaps I’m just thinking about it all a bit too much, and that that time could be put to better use my thinking about the work itself.
12 March 2009 continued
On a slightly different track, I picked up an old Brownie camera at a market a few weeks back, and I’ve been given some help about how to use it, what film to use etc. I also got a manual for it from the internet, so I’m a bit excited about trying that out at the weekend. A friend of mine has also very generously given me his medium format camera on a bit of a long-term loan, so I’m going to have a play with that too. All this is leading up to photographing the dresses in various locations, one of which is intending to be the interior of this empty library. I was then going to print these images as either tin-types of using liquid light onto various materials – unfortunately I wasn’t successful in my funding application for materials and training for the printing processes, so I’m going to have to come up with a cheaper / DIY version. It’s also becoming a bit tricky as regards coordinating getting into the library, having some help from a friend and borrowing some lighting equipment all for the same dates.
Been rather busy this week, so much so that it's taken me a good hour and a half this morning with a couple of cups of tea to wake up enough to be able to string a series of coherent sentences together.
I'm currently showing some of my work as part of a group exhibition called Re-appropriated Phrases, Sayings and Idioms. It's basically using various parts of the university over about three weeks, with different artists from the MFA course showing each week. So I was hanging that on Monday, sorting out the final things Tuesday morning, followed by a very long but productive meeting with Sarah Tullock, an artist who I'm organising some projects with. Tuesday afternoon I went to a talk by Minty Donald who's just completed a three year research project in Glasgow called Glimmers in Limbo about understanding urban environments and authoritative versions of the past (http://www.glimmersinlimbo.co.uk/). Really, really interesting stuff and rather creepily relevant to the ideas me and Sarah were discussing earlier. She gave quite a clear theoretical framework for her research, which I found really useful – I'm been trying to figure out something for my own work with not too much success so far, so it was useful to see how someone else was relating their practice / research to ideas within geography, anthropology and architecture. Wednesday started off with a talk by George Chakravarthi (http://www.georgechakravarthi.co.uk/index.html), followed by a bit more running around, then me and a couple of the other artists exhibiting in the current group exhibition gave talks about our work.
The space I'm using is a bit odd – it's effectively a corridor with a window along one side, and an area at the far end with a very high ceiling. And a definite lack of electricity points. Add to this the fact that universities are pretty crazy about anything vaguely health and safety related and you understand why I spent three hours on Monday morning learning about amps, fuses and appropriate cables so that I could extend the wires on my spot lights so as not to used a load of extension leads plugged into one another. (Continues)
February 12th continued
I'm showing the dress piece I was working on over Christmas, together with another two that I've made since. The corridor is entirely empty apart from these dresses and four spotlights. I've got them set up at the end of the space, hanging from cotton threads with are sewn into the exposed seams. These in turn hang from a couple of wooden sticks, which is hanging from a single thread from the ceiling. This methods means that the structure of the dresses isn't squashed, but also means that they spin and move when people walk past. I've been thinking about different ways of lighting work since Still Lives in the summer. On this occasion, I've got two different lighting set ups depending on the time of day. When there's plenty of natural light, I've tried to highlight the dresses themselves, to emphasise the subtle colour differences in the fabric. During the evening, I'm lighting them from further away, so that there's a range of shadows. From the end of corridor during this set-up, the dresses themselves seem to disappear, or at least become less visually prominent – you see the shadows first.
I'm not sure how successful this is. Whilst I've gotten quite a bit of positive feedback, there are a couple of things that keep reoccurring – the fact that they are female forms, and that people think they look ghost-like. I chose a female form primarily because I wanted to give an impression of more than just a torso, and with one item of clothing, as I wanted it to hang without a break, and so that it could fade away at the bottom. And at least in Western culture, a dress is the really the only item of clothing that is a total body covering by itself. As far as the ghost comment is concerned, whilst there are ‘ghosts' involved, echoes and traces from unknown people, I'd rather things were a little more subtle than a Boo. (Continues)
