Graduate residency at Airspace Gallery

This is a very long overdue blog post documenting and reflecting on some of what I got up to throughout October and November during my residency – a busy couple of months!

13-15th Oct:

I created this for the Last Bus exhibition, a project entitled ‘A Stone’s Throw’. I exhibited the book upon a shelf with a selection of the stones I had collected whilst making journeys through the 6 towns of Stoke-on-Trent. I plan to carry this method of working in this format forwards – making pieces directly relating to my experiences here in Stoke-on-Trent, documenting the ephemera I have collected as I explore my surroundings here.

14th Oct:

AirSpace studio artists also held an open studios event where we welcomed 50+ members of the public into our studios. I felt like this was a good opportunity to share what I had been getting up to behind the (usually) closed door of my studio, and I had some insightful conversations with visitors.

Interim Exhibition @ AirSpace, 8-15th Nov:

I exhibited my interim exhibition ‘Ebbs and Flows’ in the resource room at AirSpace. This gave me some experience of curating my works in a set space which will be useful to draw upon as my solo show nears. Amy and I decided to curate one of her pieces into my show due to similarities in themes, we felt it would fit into as an additional work. I felt like I made progress from my degree show with this exhibition; managing to keep a concise theme running across the pieces I exhibited – the individual pieces working on their own as well as as a whole.

STATEMENT:

“Ebbs and Flows considers our relationship to the natural environment on a personal yet often disjointed level.

In Landscape/Soundscape, the horizon line acts as a sound wave; a point for notes to be plotted upon a music score. In this way, artificial sound is applied to a landscape, dependent on the visual data within the video footage. I have used this method to translate visual language into audio, juxtaposing computerised sound with naturally-derived visuals, building on research into the creation and deconstruction of sound, alternative musical notation and graphic scores.

Watch Landscape / Soundscape here.

No Walking Required (Amy-Lou Matthews) challenges the assumptions we make based on sensory information, asking the participant to take an artificial journey of manufactured sounds. Playing with sensory deprivation, blackout goggles remove visual stimuli whilst sound effects mimic a walk through a natural environment. The piece suggests a dialogue with Landscape/Soundscape; a similarity in the intention to build a human element into nature via manmade systems.

Fault Lines addresses the gap between tangible and intangible, physicality and thought. The sculptures are created from the negative space between hands held together – a gesture reminiscent of begging, pleading, holding, protecting or encasing. The resulting forms resemble mini ‘mountains’, the creases and grooves of palms and fingertips are personal to the maker’s own hands, appearing as though ridges and fault lines upon the earth. Fault Lines sees the mind as a mountain, the forms acting as a way to discuss the earth as well as human experience.

Finally, I am investigating the duality of language by compiling words and phrases with double meanings, particularly those relating both to the earth and to the human condition. Dualities is an ongoing collection exploring how language acts as a bridge between natural states of being and human states of mind.“

REFLECTING & EVALUATING

I thought the sculptures worked well in the space and displaying them within the plinths with acrylic boxes was effective, lending an element of museum-type display and perhaps even changing the way the sculptures inside were viewed as objects. I got lots of feedback on these plinths and how they were made which I’ll be carrying forwards when I think about display mechanisms.

The liked the visual aesthetic of the video but I wasn’t 100% happy with the audio – I would have preferred a more natural sounding instrument, but not being musical myself, it was left to computer-generated sounds. I aim to continue working with this with moving forwards – eg: collaborating with a musician to create  piece of music from sheet music I have composed from visuals in nature. The notion of collaboration interests me particularly cross-discipline (musicians and scientists for example) this residency has really enabled me to see this as a viable possibility for a method of creating work in the future.

I am also drawn to the possibility of the human voice and sound and exploring language again – thinking of future work.

After conversations with Glen we decided that the video projection looked best displayed in a small format, close to the ground. This was a curatorial decision I wouldn’t have made on my own so I was pleased with the outcome – it felt like I was trying something different out, and after pairing it with a drawing on graph paper for scale and interesting composition, I thought this would be the type of curation I would aim towards for my solo show. Not just going with the set up that is the easiest or most immediately obvious, but considering scale, the relationship between pieces, and how display affects this.

I had positive feedback on the vinyl text on the wall, despite this piece essentially being an ongoing collection, an ‘in progress’ type work, remaining an idea to be concluded almost. But visually, I liked it and felt it helped to pull the other works in the exhibition together conceptually. Using the vinyl was a new material for me and it achieved the clean aesthetic I was after.

It’s been just over one month since I began a six month graduate residency at Airspace Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent. It’s been busy: finding a temporary home, moving into the studio, becoming familiar with new surroundings, and picking up my practice again for the first time since leaving university in May.

Aims and plans:

During the residency I’d like to manufacture an immersive space for listening carefully, or looking closely, at subtle sounds, objects and writings, hoping to initiate a sense of introspection. I want to build on my ideas based around language, sound, sculpture and human relationships, and explore hands as subject matter. Hands are emotive and gestural, involved in communication, physical touch, the senses – but also the most important body part in physically making and crafting in the arts. I am interested in how this links to Stoke-on-Trent, with its rich history of hands-on making.

The Last Bus:

This exhibition is fast approaching and as part of airspace studios myself, Amy (who is also undertaking a graduate residency) and several other artists with studios at airspace are exhibiting work too. It’s happening across a series of disused buildings in Hanley before they are knocked down. I have been making a series of journeys by bus and on foot through the 6 towns of Stoke-on-Trent collecting stones along the way, from which I will build cairns – the journeys themselves being documented in the form of a book.

Cairn: a mound of rough stones built as a memorial or landmark, typically on a hilltop or skyline.

Liverpool: Bluecoat and The Royal Standard

New Art West Midlands funded travel for Amy and I to visit Liverpool in mid September. We visited ‘Abacus’ at Bluecoat, an exhibition encouraging playfulness and interaction, and Kevin Hunt, whose work was included in the show, gave us a tour of the print studios and various other spaces within the gallery. We then walked over to The Royal Standard – a complex of studios and other spaces for creatives. It was interesting to see how the artists work in their own spaces, and compare it to the clean and polished exhibition at the Bluecoat. I felt inspired by the raw ideas and the lesser finished works, feeling keen to get back to my own studio.

Meeting with Terry Shave:

Last week Amy and I both met with Terry Shave, who is on the board at Airspace, to discuss our ideas so far and where we hope to take them during the residency. It was great to speak with Terry, to hear his insights into my ideas and felt positive to go through the process of explaining why I make the work I do, which I think is important to constantly reaffirm to yourself when making. Our conversations centred around cultures of display in the museum/the art gallery, how writing can be framed as art, the assignment of value to objects, to feelings, to tangible and to intangible, the possibility of collaboration with scientists or musicians, and we discussed how I might really use the environment I’m in to impact the work I make by drawing in some elements of site-specificity.

Bee Works – Klaus Weber

I was making a coffee in the studios’ kitchen when I stumbled across this book – it was a pleasant surprise. Following on from recent work exploring the visualisation of sound in human language and bird calls, musical scores and spectrograms (you can read more about this here) – I have been wanting to create a ‘natural’ or ‘chance’ composition. A musical score or similar which is exposed to natural beings and to the elements. The score would capture traces of what has been. I would then translate these markings into musical notes, similarly to how I worked from the spectrograms, being left with sound crafted from visual data. Weber’s Bee Works consist of canvases set up to catch bee droppings made at a particular time of year, similar in this intention to capture and record the environment, working with nature.

Clay college:

Hoping to develop some technical skills using clay I enrolled onto an evening course at clay college based at Middleport Pottery where I am learning to throw on a wheel. This is a skill I have always had an interest in and it seemed fitting to try my hand at it whilst I’m staying in the potteries! Below is one of the many wonky pots I’ve thrown.

Currently reading: Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane

I’ve really been enjoying the focus on language in this book – there is something undeniably human about the birthing of a word and the attachment of it to an object, emotion or landscape. I’ve become interested in what it means to use language and particularly what I am referring to in my work as the ‘duality’ of language, words with double meanings that cross the line that separates the human and natural world. ‘To engulf’, ‘to burrow’, ‘to grow’.