Finding the thread

I’ve been researching these last few weeks; reading books, going to exhibitions and symposiums. Regarding my twitter project, where I’m posting images of readymade sculptures, I’ve been reminded of a contextual connection and found a new one. The connection that I already knew about (but was lurking in the back of my mind somewhere) was Richard Wentworth’s series of photographs that I remember from his retrospective at Tate Liverpool in 2005. I now remember seeing the photos in the last room of the exhibition and seem to recall that he used these photos to then make his own sculptural response. These photos were from the everyday and were of found sculptures. When I went to the ‘Modern British Sculpture’ at the RA a few weeks ago I came face to face with another one of his photographic series entitled ‘Making Do and Getting By – A Selection of Everyday Encounters 1970-1985 (1985)’. This was a selection of photographs edited as a video and accompanied by some jolly music with breaks of narration by Wentworth. Seeing this piece allowed me to develop a sense of distance between my work and his. His work was a very humorous look at objects outside of their usual role and as the title suggests a look at how we change the value of things when using them to perform another role. Some of the objects are used very instinctively, with quick decisions being made by the maker; others were similar to mine, where sculpture had unwittingly been made. Using photography to capture and preserve these fleeting temporal moments make the whole set of photos intimate and revealing about the human condition, with regards to our adaptability.

The other set of photographs I’ve come across recently were taken by Brassai in the 1930’s, they were referenced in the excellent book by Briony Fer about Eva Hesse called “Studioworks’. Brassai’s photographs were a small selection of images published in the Surrealist magazine Minotaure in number 3-4. These photographs were of magnified everyday objects; such as brioche, bus tickets and toothpaste, photographed in moody black and white, they are transformed into mysterious aesthetic objects. Included in the same magazine there were images of strange tribal art brought back from ethnographical expeditions, the everyday strangeness of the close ups are compared to the fetishisation of the primal art and leave us wondering if there is not some strange power imbued in the everyday objects.

By photographing these objects with a surrealist eye, Brassai proposes a link between sculpture and photography but is this link only a detached, passive one? Can found sculptures to which the artist has no control over, apart from capturing them by using photography, really be used to comment on sculptural concerns? These photographs are markedly opposed to the traditional notion of sculpture as the deliberate mastery of a particular medium. The ‘Involuntary’ sculptures are unmonumental, only existing for a short period of time but are replenished daily, numbers on a massive scale, all over the world, and made unknowingly: remade and reconfigured in all matter of materials, positions and placements. The recent tragic events in Japan showed images on television of cars, boats, houses displaced, sometimes piled on top of each other. As well as feeling upset at the enormity of it and the high number of lives that have been lost and the unimaginable destruction of the area, I couldn’t help but marvel at the uncanny strangeness of it all. How the powerful force of nature had left everything that we take for granted absurdly unfamiliar. 

Why do I feel a pressure to define what I do? Is it always a good thing for us to try and understand what we’ve produced? When you get to a certain ‘level’ you have curators and critics who can write about your work much more eloquently and succinctly than you can, and hopefully express it to a wider audience what you are trying to achieve. There needs to be motivation of course from the artist to want to make the work and this stems from some kind of investigation; a query that needs to be addressed. But where would we be if we all resolved these questions? What’s exciting about art is that we can investigate them visually through different media, using whatever method we find comfortable or to continue or critique a historical genre.

I’m interested in sculpture and in particular the transition from minimalism to post minimalism. I think that there’s still a vast space there to be investigated; where the hard, macho investigation into the subjective ultimately left the artist estranged from the making of the object. Eva Hesse’s ethereal sculptural experiments are said to be the next wave of sculpture in direct response to the minimalists. (The classification of art trends/movements and how there are defined is of course a separate debate.)

What is important though is that Hesse was involved around the minimalists artists and their work and her work was included in later shows (also too Mary Kelly). In her studio Hesse produced work which responded to the minimalists but under her own rules of investigation and experimentation with different materials.

The rise of the feminist movement of the late 60’s and 70’s and the move towards women using performance art to create work is also a valid point here. This type of work can be seen as another response to the heavy masculine history of art sculpture and women made it their own as there was no matriarchal history embedded in it. What if the performance for Hesse was the making of the sculpture, the involvement of the body in making the objects?

This has left me wondering if there is a gender issue with regards to the development of sculpture between 1960’s and 70’s and in particular the social constructs. Minimalism can be seen to have ‘male traits’; objective, rational, unemotional, present, hard, geometric , permanent whilst Hesses’ work is tactile, ‘made’, subjective, ethereal, non permanent.

Some themes of minimalism are still valid and interesting such as the spatial aspects, the repetition and the phenomenology of the experiences when encountering the objects.

But are we still at this juncture between the hard and the soft, the fabricated and the made, the objective and the subjective? There is so much theory written around these subjects that I’m still only feel like I’m scraping at the surface and have no real answers yet, only a line of investigation which, hopefully will continue to provide a rich basis for producing work.



Well I’ve had a very busy week. After a successful interview for a studio at S1 (see last blog) they offered me a studio (yay!) and I was really surprised how big and fantastic the studio was. As it was the last one to be occupied I thought that it would be the grottiest but no, it’s really great and I’m very pleased with it. The studios occupy the mezzanine of the building and look down over the main gallery space and are open plan so all the other studio holders can see what you are up to. It also has two side walls which is great to pin up stuff and have an area to mess about and document work, exactly what I needed. The only drawback at the moment is that the building is still being modernised and the upstairs studios have no heating so it is absolutely freezing. Pippa, the curatorial assistant at S1, has been looking after me really well and lets me borrow a heater from the office whenever I’ve been in the studio. As my enthusiasm is unbounded at the moment, a little bit of cold doesn’t put me off. There is also a fantastic communal space, where the radiators are working so you can go for a warm up, a chat and a brew. The people are so friendly and nice is a pleasure being around them. There’s also an art library in the space to and it has some fantastic books and magazines that I’m dying to dive into.

I officially moved in on the 1^st March, this last Tuesday and later that same day, Pippa casually mentioned that Axis were coming to visit on Thursday as they were doing a feature on the new S1 space, and would I be interested in being interviewed along with two other studio holders ? I nodded my head, but kind of didn’t believe her and kind of just carried on with things. On Wednesday as I was in the studio, leisurely milling around, taking my time and getting to know the space, I checked my emails and there was one from Julian from Axis who confirmed the interview. In the email he gave a few interview questions to think about and mentioned that as it was being filmed would I mind wearing black so that the pinned on microphone would be seen………………………………….OMG!!!!!
And that they were going to film my work in my studio!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I HAD ONLY GOT THE STUDIO THE DAY BEFORE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Don’t worry, the lovely Pippa said, in her calm and confident voice, they know you’ve just moved in and won’t expect a full studio and it’ll be quite nice to hear you talk about what you expect from S1. I tried to remain calm, for appearances sake (I’m very good at that) but let out a mighty internal yell. I’ve never made work so quickly. Luckily I’d been planning on what I was going to do in the studio (as I’d had a few days of art anxiety after getting the studio but before moving in) so I had things to hand so I literally threw some work together. I did want to utilise the space for kind of mini exhibitions so I came up with one really quickly. I am quite amazed at how much I enjoyed the frenzy and I think managed to pull something off.

The interview blissfully was very short and for the life of me I cannot remember what I said apart from that I don’t really think I talked about my practice properly! Ah well. I didn’t prepare because I would have got myself in such a start trying to remember stuff so I just thought I’m just going to answer spontaneously. I quite like the idea of ‘automatic talking’ because sometimes you say things that you are not consciously aware of. I read somewhere once that people don’t really listen and take on board what you’re actually saying, unfortunately as it was filmed and will be going on the website in a few weeks; this will not be the case.

I can only apologise to S1!!!



I’ve been to two great talks this week (and another later today by Eva Berendes at S1). The talks I’ve been this week by Sarah Woodfine at the Graves gallery, and Sonya Dyer at Site Gallery. Both very different artists: Woodfine practice revolves around drawing and spatial concerns and Dyer Sonya Dyer‘s work uses a variety of means and contexts to investigate artists and political agency, rethinking historical and contemporary ideas of Europe and European culture.

Woodfine had been commissioned to produce a work which responded to an existing work in the gallery and she’d chosen the painting Lady of Shallot (1858) by William Maw Egley. The work produced was a sculpture Island. The work at Site Gallery is part of open call Platform programme and the project is called Paul Robeson Research Station.

The main differences of the practices are that Woodfine ‘s work comes very much from herself with her own visual language and of personal concerns and Dyer uses the opportunity for research, for understanding and to educate. Both practices are strong and developed: Dyer’s was exposed, easy to access, and an ongoing process and Woodfine’s is abstract, personal and difficult to access. Access of information and the responsibility of the artist in relation to the audience is one of the key things here. I found Woodfine’s sculpture hard to engage with until she spoke about it and then it beautifully came alive. At Dyers talk there were many people in the audience who already had interest/connections with Robeson and the debate was around politics and art that deals with those subjects. It was very interesting and lively and it also seemed a very popular choice by the number of people in the room.

But one thing irked me a little; Dyer mentioned that she’d never do art that was biographical like Tracy Emin. I thought that this was a bit of a dig at other methods of producing art. Of course, there are really important issues, which are often overlooked and suppressed by the media and history books, and raising these issues is vitally important but this doesn’t mean that ‘biographical’ art is less valid. Woodfine mentioned that she found that being an artist difficult at times, she feels that she has sacrificed things for it e.g. kids and relationships, what recurring motifs and themes were present in her work. It just was a lovely open and honest talk. It seems that these women are two different kind of artists: one that has chosen to use the language of art to understand and promote ideas and the other where being an artist is something that is intrinsic to her whole being.

As my own practice is sculpture based I do have difficulties with projects such as Dyer’s and I wouldn’t go so far in saying that these social projects shouldn’t be in art galleries, it’s just not the sort of thing that I usually enjoy engaging in. But with regards to Woodfine, where the object only came alive when the artist told us about it, this causes problems too (for the audience). Either way, for artists, it can be difficult when taking into account the audience in a piece of work. My own opinion is that you should make art that you want to make and if it leaves space for the audience then that’s great but if it doesn’t it’s still as valid.

In this few weeks since my last blog I’ve not done any actual practical work but have made leaps and bounds in reference to my overall practice. I’ve applied for a studio, turned down the residency in Sheffield, been to some great talks and also applied for 4 exhibition/screening opportunities.

I’m getting really excited about the prospect of having a studio again. I have had one before, at Islington Mill in Salford, which I ended early in 2009. This was fantastic for my practice development but the didn’t find the artistic community that I wanted. Islington mill is a fantastic place but only about a quarter of the studios are for artists (the others being creative practioners). They have the arts club, which do some fantastic things, but I wasn’t allowed to join as I had an arts degree (It’s for people who want to have a non university art education but I just loved what they were doing and wanted to be part of it). Also the studios were self-contained, which was great at the time, but doesn’t give you the chance to see what other people are doing.

The studio that I’ve applied for is at S1 art space in Sheffield and it’s open plan and artists hold all the studios. I have had to apply via application form, with images and a CV, and also have to have an interview this afternoon. This formal procedure could be seen as quite elitist but I think that there should be a sense of protective selection as there’s a community to uphold. The studio holders also have to commit to helping out in the space to for a few hours per week, which I like the idea of. They also have a fantastic gallery and ongoing exhibition programme and the opportunity to get involved in that is really exciting. Fingers crossed.