Flourish Residency at Cuckoo Farm Studios, Colchester

Back at Cuckoo Farm. I have spent the last couple of weeks thinking about the look of the fish farms and am trying out a more aestheticised version this weekend. Moving away from making the pieces purely functional will hopefully add a bit more dynamism to the works and allow them to become more sculptural. I hope to introduce some non food plants as well, such as vines and creepers, the new piece has a large bamboo lattice surrounding it so there will be loads of space for these plants to grow around the functioning heart of the work.

I have been reading “The writings of Frank Stella” by Frank Stella. As well as being one of the pioneers of conceptualism his later works have dealt mainly with post abstraction painting and lead him to move into “3D paintings” many of which literally leave the wall and exist in space. Stella has tried to pull together painting, sculpture, conceptualism and abstraction within each of his later works. There is a lot that both painters and sculptors alike can learn from him. Reading his thoughts on renaissance painting and what contemporary painting can learn from it, you never get the sense of nostalgia but a quest to drive painting and art in general forward.