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.
