Interview with Estelle Patten:
What’s your role in the organisation of the degree show?
I am co-ordinating the catalogue, and I’m in correspondence with the printers and collecting images and artist statements from everyone in the show. I’m also sorting out the design and getting the whole layout together on InDesign. I’ve also asked two of our tutors to write the foreword and short text for the catalogue.
What are you currently working on?
I’m working on some videos. I spent Christmas travelling for long periods of time in coaches and cars, and I’m interested in the idea of the vehicle of travel becoming a simulator. You see the world flying past your window with very little interaction with it. I’ve been thinking about the space you occupy in that simulation.
The videos I’m working on are of light being distorted through reflection and rainwater. A mutation between the physical natural and the virtual digital, and environments becoming a hybrid of the two. I’m also just starting to make some sculptures, possibly some wax landscapes, where the heat from lamps mutates the physical material of the wax, so it appears organic but mutated.
I see light as the medium of a new digital era, and how we receive information. You can see its effects despite its immateriality as a material. It has physical properties that can change something tangible.
What are you thinking about making for the final exhibition?
A series of 3 or 4 videos of the video pieces, these light shows, in a dark space. I’ve got 4 different videos, one looks like light turning into birds. The videos feel familiar but are also ambiguous. There’s a relationship between something you know is there and something you imagine. I’ve also been thinking about including a sound piece. Sound that further creates an allusion, and tricks the viewer into seeing something that’s not quite there.
The wax sculptures also might exist as an active kinetic piece, a video or sculptures.
Have you encountered any major difficulties in making your work this semester for the final show?
After last semester’s work, which I felt was a really successful piece [based on fragments of identity], it’s been difficult because I felt a lot of pressure to carry that on. Objects will just arise and you can’t really go looking for them. I didn’t want to struggle to carry on with something that might not happen.
That’s when I decided to start working on the videos from the journeys instead. I was also really inspired by the Icelandic landscape I visited over Christmas; it was really barren but kind of clinical. It’s really interesting, because it’s volcanic but flat. ‘Light Show’ at the Hayward Gallery was great to see too, as most of the artists I wrote about in my dissertation [on light as a sculptural material] had work in the exhibition.
