I visited Firstsite the gallery in Colchester. Cornelia Parker and Hilary Cartmel were the artist I was most excited to see and their sculptures.
https://firstsite.uk/event/tell-me-the-story/
As my work is sculpture based and heavily dominant around photography and film documentation, I was interested to see how they displayed their works in different environments and used the space to their advantage. This trip helped me develop my thought process when displaying my sculptures out to an audience. I was struck by Cornelia Parker’s Neither from nor towards because of the amount of work and time that has gone into working out how to display her work as well as the effect she wants to achieve. This is her piece, it took centre stage to the exhibition (see below) and the use of lighting made the piece even larger and exciting.
The angled lights created a number of shadows for just one rock. The sculpture was hung up by very fine wire that you could hardly see that were held up from a frame above. The rocks were hardly touching and were so still. The light on the large amount of rocks created a scattered/ongoing bursts of shadow and made it appear as if there is more than there actually was present.
This was something I had tried to do in my CUBED installation but wasn’t too successful due to the brightness of the space and the lack of LED lighting. (See below).
I tried to elongate the shadows and point the light from below. This was interesting to see this exhibition to see how the level of light changes the appearance of the sculptures even more. And in Neither from nor towards, the frame work that held up the sculpture was built to the exact size of the sculpture itself, allowing the hanging rocks to evenly disrupt shadows across the floor. I have booked the installation room next Monday to work with installing my work and light and shadow to develop these skills even further. I am to develop the clay breast from Beauty Hurts, to experiment with them further with presentation and replication of a larger mass, like Parker’s piece. – Been beneficial to push my experimentation further.
Reflection 21/12/20: The installation room was very helpful – was extremely dark and allowed me to have no background noise which is where I began to create my films – Only Touch With CLEAN Hands.
See below my sketchbook page, I use my blog to finalise what I am saying within my sketchbook pages:
Hilary Cartmel, the figure made out of wood was a hard material made to seem delicate yet textured like the female form. This piece is called Sprawling Red Women (see below) was positioned so when you first walked it, it was difficult to work out what it was, until you walked around to the other side and see the female curve, the breasts and the long leg pointing up.
I loved the mix of an elegant pose of the female made with the wooden material in Sprawling Red Women because it contrast between what we visual the female form to be soft as fleshy.
- This was a point that has been made in my work with the clay figures and breasts. A contrast in materials that both shock and possible disturb the viewer as it isn’t what they’re used too. Cartmel has used a material that was in her surroundings within this work and developed it to be a dismantled piece of art when moving it to different environments. And this too shares a connection to the way I have been working with working both at uni and home, making art that is easily moveable and adaptable.
Reflection 03/03/21: Being at home has pushed me to incorporate more domestic settings into my practice, currently thinking of women roles in the household. For example, the variety of bathroom projection – successful as they incorporated a new unique space to a studio and force the female body and the domestic setting together. Inspiration – Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen & Cartmel.
The trip helped me analyse the display and presentation of the exhibitions/work. I thought back to a 1-1 with Jane, thinking about big sculptures but these would be impossible due to COVID and Kara Walker had also been mentioned to me before. Walker is an artist who created A Subltey and also know as Sugar Baby. She created a massive sculpture to get people openly talking about issues that they feel they don’t know how to discuss/struggle. This involved issues such as slavery, history and women. (See Sugar Baby below). She created this massive female sculpture out of sugar icing as it was a desired food.
I decided to photoshop some quick images from my sculptures in CUBEB to see how it would look if I could think BIG, see below. I know these are very exaggerated but I love this idea of celebrating women being the dominant to have power for a change as it’s usually men (like David by Michelangelo). To be more reasonable it would be exciting to create a smaller than life size sculpture to get a feel for a much big than my hand sculpture. Even if this isn’t possible I love the use of photograph as Lookin’ At Me confuses the viewer with the size.
Reflection 15/04/21: I use projection to work with sizing/scale.
