My hope is that this blog will document and aid the development of a body of work that responds to the experience of living and working on the fringes of the Olympic site. The blog and the work will be a dialogue, documenting and responding to what I see,to the changes taking place around me.
One of the greatest things about the ACME residency was that it facilitated my move tothe East end of London. After graduating I knew I wanted to settle this side of town because of the thriving art scene but had no idea where or how. Now that I’m here I suspect that this part of town is not the best of places in the world to grow up but as an artist, here by choice, it’s a great place to be.
I was reminded of this as I wandered down Brick Lane on a quest to Atlantis (to get art supplies). For me, Brick Lane as a street encapsulates much of the areas personality and not purely because of its famed Bengali Cuisine, trendy markets and quirky shops. What I love is the randomness. The interventions, quirky tagging and personalized store fronts.
A response to an earlier part of this blog questioned the part we play in change. Here unlike the Olympic site, you can see the evolution of the environment, see direct community intervention and reclaimed public spaces. I know it wouldn’t be to everybody’s taste but it feels like it’s ours, as though we have a say and if we are brave enough a voice to respond.
I have selected the site for my next endeavor. It could be said that work on this next piece is well under way. Unfortunately however, a weeks break working in the real world and financial worries have broken my stride.
It frightens me how inconsistent I can be, how hard it is to be self motivated all the time, how much ‘house keeping’ seems never to get done, and how I always see opportunity’s after the dead line has passed.
Did any body visit anything exciting for the Open House London event last month?
The event in London, runs over one weekend a year opening up little seen buildings for public tours.(this year 18th and 19th of September) I’ve known about it for a few years but as with many things, every year it has come to my attention to late and the weekend has passed me by. Finally I got my self on the mailing list and this year actually got my self to one of the openings. A much anticipated visit to the Lloyd’s building.
My studio is about a half hour bus journey in to the City, close as the crow fly’s. I enjoy taking trips out there to observe how the other half live, I have grown to love the Lloyd’s building. I love that such humor encases such seriousness, that such flamboyance hosts so many men in gray suits with matching ties.
For me the most exciting thing about the day was being allowed to photograph at will. I suspect Open House generally could be a photographer’s paradise. I’ve spent a little time drawing from this quirky building but photographic opportunity’s are usually cat ailed by the flamboyantly dresses security on the door. If your camera looks to official you will usually get moved on.
As well as being a great morning out I’m happy to say that the images have led my work down an unexpected path, which is never a bad thing. Next year I will defiantly be buying a guide book and making a weekend of it.
http://www.openhouselondon.org.uk/
One of the things that has become apparent to me of late is that when I’m instinctively drawn to the work of another artist the odds are, if I dig a little deeper there will be significant links to my work and practice. This morning I revisited the Donald Judd Tate 2004 exhibition catalogue. I was looking for a section I thought I recalled about colour and architecture but found something else entirely.
As my new work will both exist within and be made in response to the city it is interesting to me that David Batchelor’s text reflects on Judd’s use of Modern materials and colours as incidentally reflecting our experience of modernity, the feel and ‘colour’s of the modern city ‘.
It is true that our experience of colours and in extension surface, within the city is often intense but also ephemeral. As an artist I spend much of my time trying to order these experiences with my camera and sketch book.
As a painter working with sculptural forms I do believe that Judd, although claiming to turn his back on painting continued to address painterly concerns, i.e. colour, structure, composition and support. Instead of leaving these problems behind he simply started began using an exciting new language to address them.
Supports where set free from the wall and became compositional elements within a site. Liquid colour pallets traditionally favored by painters where replaced by commercially applied paint or work built with materials for there intrinsic colour. Although new and modern, even the highly reflective, coloured and transparent materials could be said to explore painterly concerns. For century painters have strove to capture light and built up layers of transparency.
It’s interesting to me that much of Judd’s work is untitled and yet the descriptions of materials are specific and descriptive, emphasizing the materiality of the work and rooting them in the real rather than the contrived art world. ‘They are as Steinberg has said about Rauschenberg, not windows into a world but objects in the world…They refer not by picturing but by presenting, not by evoking but by embodying that colours and surfaces of the city.’
See David Batchelor ‘Everything a Colour’, Donald Judd, Exh. cat., Tate 2004, pp.64-75
As I touched on in my previous post I was a little nervous about installing my first guerrilla intervention but the speed in which the workmen were progressing imposed on me a natural dead line. The last thing I wanted was to return form my holiday to a freshly laid street in which my work would have no place. (As it turned out this was an unnecessary worry as the street still looks like a krypton factor assault course)
Sooo I dragged my self out of bed at 7.30 on a Sunday morning, donned my high viz vest and headed out like any sane person to insert work in to the central reservation of a busy London road. All was going well until I looked up half was through to see traffic police doing speed checks only 100yards away! What are the chances? After a small panic attack I got my head down and finished putting the panels in place. I need not have worried they couldn’t have cared less. I’m hoping this will get easier.
