It has been 5 years since my degree show in Exeter. I remember thinking at the time that I’d definately still be making work in the years to come. Saying it is one thing, and I was pretty clueless back then (and I still am), but I am still making work. I’ve learned an awful lot in those 5 years, the first three were pretty tough, but the last two have been more productive and I’ve been a bit more proactive and focused. I remember leaving Exeter and thinking that I’d get a studio and it’ll all be great and then I’d go and do an MA after a year or so, but I quickly learned otherwise. I did get that studio, but it took 6 months or so. It was important I guess that I set myself the target of getting a space to work as my number 1 priority, otherwise who knows what would’ve happened!
Although I’m happy to have kept going when so many of my uni friends have given up, I can’t keep going on the way I am. I need to build a sustainable practice, I need to be more proactive in finding opportunities for myself and my work, I need to be brave! I watched ‘Mary Queen of Shops’ the other day, and Mary Portas went into this bakery in London to help out the business. The silly woman who actually applied for this help was completely dismissive of the help and advice she was given. She was so stuck in her old ways, and it made me think/worry about me in the not too distant future, going nowhere due to staying with what’s comfortable. I don’t want to let me or my work go that way.
It’s been a while. So I thought I’d catch up with my thoughts and make a post. I’ve been beavering away on a number of things over the last month. My work has seemed to go in some kind of architectural kind of direction. That may be something that I’ll explore over the next few weeks. I was thinking about things collapsing recently, and that goes back to those cardboard structures that I was making a few months ago, that I would leave to fall apart and then draw and various states of deconstruction. I also feel the need to do loads of research too, so that’s two things on my immediate to do list.
It’s been a tough week. following on from a very wet weekend by the sea, I had a migraine for a couple of days or so, reducing my week down, and that only served to make me feel drained for the remainder of my studio time. I’ve generally found this week a struggle though, questioning myself and repeating things from my older work. I keep falling into my own traps it seems. When something isn’t working, or rather when I think something isn’t working, I look back into what I percieved as being ‘successful’ in my older work, and then copying myself. I think I’m now doing this without realising it, and it is not a good thing. I need to somehow get out of this cycle.
I’m still interested in the idea of a recurring shape of series of shapes that can represent a feeling or state of mind moving through the space. I started on another large canvas this week. I wanted this to follow on from the last large piece that I’d completed. Something quite empty and cold.
Through working on this piece, I’ve found that I’m working with quite a rawness again, I like the way that the paint has bled and the masked off lines aren’t tight and neat. I like the rushed and care freeness of what I’m doing here. It kind of seems more confident. It’s knowing when to stop though and having the confidence to say ‘that’s it’. It isn’t at the stage yet by any means. I plan to get another two canvases of this size quite far on next week, and then maybe two double layered voile pieces along the same lines the following week, and that’ll probably be pretty much it for this project and I’ll see where I go from there.
I mentioned last time that I needed to slow down with my work, and I certainly did, as I haven’t blogged for a month. I had a couple of weeks out of the studio, and spent time just putting some kind of resolved looking portfolio together and writing a statement.
Now I’m back at it, I’ve just been making stretchers, stretching canvas and starting a few new pieces of work. After working on the see through stuff, it’s back to canvas, but working in kind of a layered way. I’m thinking about and working with the idea of a shape moving throughout the pictorial space, the same shape repeated in different ways and in different areas maybe. Again, movement between layers and different spaces.
