Project Me

Happy birthday to you,

Happy birthday to you …

Today is your seventh birthday! And as your author this has given me pause for thought. When I started you and proposed that you would be “charting my progress” it was, of course, impossible to imagine where I would be today. And yet at the same time as I re-read various posts it is not completely surprising that I am here doing what I am doing.

You have been a constant and faithful companion along my journey. The opportunity that your always listening ear, and your remarkable memory give me have, I am sure, been more beneficial than I care to admit. I have found your silent support and total acceptance of whatever I need to say both comforting and rewarding.

Then there are your friends – the other blogs that you hang about with – and their authors, who while not exactly friends have become important voices with welcome and oftentimes uncannily accurate observations and comments. Thank you for introducing me to them!

As your author I take a lot of credit for your existence however I must also congratulate the a-n.co.uk team without whom you could not exist.

So without any more fuss, or danger of this becoming a rambling acceptance speech, I want to say a very heart felt thank you!

… Happy birthday dear ‘Project Me’,

Happy birthday to you!

I have lost my sense of time. Days and particularly weeks are not making any sense to me. This is most likely the result of the ‘sudden’ change in my routine. Most of my weekdays are now spent at Mejan rather than being divided up between three schools with no two consecutive days in the same place. It is great being able to focus more on what I am doing there, and I have also noticed that I am starting to have an even better working relationship with the tutors and other students. The stress and urgency that I felt, and no doubt exuded, last term is no longer there and this I am sure makes for easier and more productive working days – for everyone! Being present is a sign of my interest and it makes it easier for others to be interested too. I also have time to be more interested in what other people are doing which is doubly rewarding as our discussions are most often in Swedish.

On two occasions this week I have explained my work in Swedish! At least I think I have explained my work!! Once to some visiting tutors at college, and also to two new staff at the Andersson Sandström gallery where I returned to buy catalogues of Riitta Paivalainen whom they are showing at the moment. It is somehow both wonderful and worrying to discover a successful artist whose work is related/parallel/similar to one’s own. Paivalainen’s works with second-hand clothes and mentions that she is interested in their unknown histories. There is a picture of a piece in which she uses shirts that could easily have come from my collection.

Not only does her content give me things to think about but her form does too. She produces large-scale photographs of garments and fabric in specific conditions and locations. She states that she is a photographer rather than an installation artist. Her interest is in the image rather than the encounter with the real objects. Reading this led me to think about two things; firstly that there is a saleable (re-exhibitable!) product (artwork), and secondly that as she sets up her photographs in isolated landscapes she most likely avoids problems of permissions and public accessibility. Producing an image affords her a level of control and possibility that would be hard to achieve if the site-specific installations were the artwork. This has certainly given me something to think about!

Where might the objects I produce and collect be located if I were to place them somewhere to be photographed? Not in the natural landscape (as Paivalainen’s are) … I think I see them being somewhere more architectural. Architectural and yet at odds with them, the polished cake tins of Glory do not belong in a kitchen – I would like to see them re-placing classical busts somewhere … Sir John Soane’s house? … in the V&A Museum?

Proof-reading the entries for the Supermarket Art Fair catalogue is a good reminder of the range of activities that artists undertake – it is far too easy for me to become fastened in my own routines and habits. Reading an article about how an artist worked with her siblings to establish two dynamic and radical contemporary art venues in Syria which since the ‘unrest’ have become domestic residences/refuges for her and her colleagues families is somewhat of a wake-up call. Both the passion to actively engage with forming a new art-scene and the practical solution to surviving subsequent national turmoil are inspirational.

So the question is “what is stopping me?” stopping me from doing everything that I can to realise my dreams. The question is particularly pertinent right now, not just because it is the beginning of a new year, but also because after two years studying Swedish I now have to get on with building a life that felt rather ‘on-hold’. In a recent feature about a designer’s home was a photograph of a sentence written across a wood-burning stove, it reads: the best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up. Again, there is something about the relation between ambition and pragmatism, and it is perhaps this that seems to be hooking me in.

I am in an amazing position right now; I have very few responsibilities, just about enough security to maintain the studio, I am at a prestige school, and I am relatively naïve about the scene here so can ask questions that Swedes would not. Perhaps the question is not about what might be stopping me, but rather what do I want to do – really want to do!

We have one final assignment for the Making Matters course – to write and present a draft research proposal. After a year of wrestling with the concept of artistic research I feel ready for it and am looking forward to working the assignment. My intention to see if I can produce something which successfully combines my artistic dreams with the pragmatism of institutional frameworks. If I pull it off then there is no reason why it could not be the basis of real project*.

It is hard for me to say what I want, not because I do not know what it is, but because I am scared that by daring to utter it it will become vulnerable. Somehow keeping it locked away inside me can become a way to keep it safe. The inherent foolishness of this is clear to me – I cannot expect anyone to know what I want, and therefore to help me achieve it, without me sharing that information with them. If I want to have shows I need to let people who can make this happen know that I am interested. Working with the exhibition space at the studio it has been interesting to read the letters we receive from artists hoping for an exhibition. The easiest ones to respond to are of course those that describe both the artwork(s) and the intended exhibition clearly and succinctly.

Every year I think that this will be the year when I learn how to get an exhibition, learn how to speak with galleries, learn how to make successful applications. As the Supermarket fair approaches it is a good time to remember that there is no “best” way to do things as subtle/random/personal as this, for me thing is just to do it! Wake up, turn up, and say hello!

Please get in touch if you will be visiting the fair (14-16 February, Stockholm) it would be great to meet you, and I can pass on some tips for surviving a weekend in what can seem an expensive city! I highly recommend Supermarket for anyone engaged in artist-led initiatives, it is a great networking opportunity, not everywhere is as economically stricken as the UK and well-conceived collaborative projects can really benefit all partners.

*And here I do mean ‘project’, not a single artwork or a series but a piece of sustained work with its own processes and outcomes.

www.supermarketartfair.com

I have passed my Swedish language course – I got my results on Monday morning. So that is it for the adult education courses, on paper at least I am now capable of studying at degree level in Swedish. Obviously there is no way that in two years I have achieved the command of the language that a native 18 year old has, however it is a very good start. Now it is just to keep going.

The Friday before that we had what should have been our final Making matters (Artistic Research 2) session. However we will meet once more in the new year as the majority of the group felt unable to make presentations. This was a bit strange to me – I was expecting to make a presentation, though as I had a cold was quite glad not to.

The concluding of these two courses means that next year I can really focus on what I should have been doing at Mejan on the project programme. It can be frustrating when my part-time attendance coincides with teachers meetings and their other commitments. Next term I can be more flexible and focused. Though I have to say not having a studio to ‘retire’ to when work in the workshop is suspended is hard to deal with. Today I am using a computer here at school while paint dries … if I had a studio I would be there getting on with something else.

I had a few hours at the studio yesterday and am (finally) getting around to re-arranging it since it became fully mine. In my mind I imagine it being a place for both production and contemplation. Books and packed up old artworks are on one side, while on the other are materials and work that is being made. The table is in the middle, being a little bit ‘order focused’ I can imagine sitting on opposite sides of the table to do tasks that more or less belong to either side of the room. What I have not yet figured out is whether to sit facing the books, and therefore actually on the practical side of the studio, when I am contemplating. Or to sit on the contemplative side looking at the work in progress … and, of course, vice versa. Why do I even think that it is necessary to decide something like that? I know that often I like to have established orders to take care of simple things and thus free up time for more interesting things. I have the same thing for both breakfast and lunch each day otherwise I could easily lose a few hours wondering what to have.

There is still a nagging doubt that I am not doing ‘the right thing’ at Mejan, that the Casting Shadows proposal is, despite everything, a red herring. Maybe I am just too aware of how valuable this year is. Making things (sculptures?) from scratch is certainly a challenge. I miss the input from my materials, I miss that sense of collaboration. The other day I wondered about trying to introduce second-hand materials in to the process. To measure the amount of glass needed for casting a form you use Archimedes’ principle – putting glass nuggets in a jug of water until the internal volume of the mould is reached. As I was standing before a shelf full of second-hand vases in a charity shop I wondered if I could measure the volume of the vase, then use the same volume of wax to make form that would eventually be cast in the crushed glass vase … Something to test out next year! It certainly feels more ‘me’ than ordering glass from a Czechoslovakia.

Had a good tutorial with Rolf yesterday. It made me think about how important critical distance is, and how difficult that distance is when I am in the making process. This might well be at the heart of my wrestle with artistic research. Rather being ‘resistant’ to research as a form of rejecting the concept, I am finding it necessary to defer the critical distance – and therefore also the research aspects – of my work until I am well clear of its particular creative process. Can I be, do I want to be, both inside and outside of my processes at the same time?

Presenting my work to Rolf’s Research Inquiry students had some unexpected benefits – not least Rolf’s responses to seeing a broader range of pieces than I have presented in the research group. Another was being able to listen to myself (so I managed a bit of critical distance there then!). I planned to mention the names of the colleges I attended, however I explained in some depth Dartington’s unique Art & Social Context course. In the process of doing this it occurred to me that my education is quite different from artists of a similar age who studied more traditional fine art courses. In many ways Art & Social Context was a research based course – not that it was referred to as such, and I wonder if that is why I am somewhat perplexed by this new discipline – it is not ‘new’ to me! Throughout the course we gave account of and made claim for our practice and process, we communicated it within the field of interest and to those working in the wider community, we located it in cross-disciplinary and problem orientated activities. I might see if I can find anyone else who has re-thought what we did in the late eighties in the light of the more recent development of artistic research.

Yesterday I took a further step towards actually making something at Mejan! I used my ‘Heath Robinson’ lathe to cover the rough polystyrene forms in plaster. Working in the sculpture workshop in my old green overalls took me back to being at Dartington. Reflections on my time there seem to be very current!! I do enjoy sculptural processes – the hands-on-ness of it, the step-by-step-ness of it; I drew a shadow, which I then mirrored and traced, from this a template/profile was made, now I have a positive 3D form from which a negative (mould) form will be made so that I can make more positives. There is something about the backwards and forwards between positives and negatives that I find attractive about casting.