Rebuilding and Refocusing

As September ended, Katie Goodwin and I took some people around Bermondsey on a South London Art Map Last Fridays tour. Living in South-East London, I was already familiar with the SLAM. I’ve explored most of the Peckham and Deptford routes, although I’ve never been on a tour before, so it was kind of new territory for me.

Although we only had a couple of days notice, it was enough time to familiarise ourselves with the route, the galleries, and some of the artists’ work that we would encounter. Although we did get slightly lost looking for one gallery on our recon mission before the tour, we made it to the meeting point on time.

The tour began with CGP in Southwark Park, with an exhibition called One and One and One curated by Outside Architecture. Once everyone had a few minutes to look at the exhibition, Mary McClean, one of the artists from Outside Architecture gave a talk about the show. This talk was particularly relevant to my practice as it touched on topics that I have researched in the past, but have not thought about for a while such as temporality. They then went on to talk about incompleteness, and ruins, so incompleteness after completeness and raised the question ‘what does it mean to be incomplete?’ There is a sense of feeling awkward the when faced with something that is unfinished, and this can also can apply to open space in terms of architecture. This left me thinking about how I use empty space in my work.

Relating to One and One and One was Lost Properties at the Coleman Project Space. The space is used by artists that have been invited to make new work. Disorientating shadows and slightly awkward architectural responsive work was the order of the day here. It had a homely feel, which added to the sense of disorientation.

After a brief stop at the Vibe Gallery, we headed around the corner to V22 for the Young London 2012 exhibition. This was probably the real gem in the tour and blew the minds of some of the tour goers. I’d never been there before either, so I was instantly amazed at the scale of the space. The exhibition was set in a vast corridor space and two massive gallery spaces. Although architecturally similar, these were way more impressive than the Tate Tanks. The highlight for me was work by Rochelle Fry, small bronze works with a fragility and sense of miniature monument that really struck a chord with my recent studio experiments . The visit to V22 concluded with a performance, Lecture Apathy by Toby Huddlestone.

Things started to turn slightly pub-crawl-like as we headed to Westlane South for Bottled in Bermondsey, a show celebrating the galleries first full year programme. This featured specially brewed, limited edition beer!

The final leg of the tour was Horatio JR, a gallery that used to be a pub called the Lord Nelson, I’d visited here recently. The space works well as a gallery, with a series of rooms used to display work, on this occasion paintings by Stuart Cliff. After asking for directions from a passer by (my fault for taking a slight wrong turn) the baffled pub goer tried to get us to go to ‘The Ship’ as that pub was open. He didn’t believe us when we said the The Lord Nelson had re-opened as a gallery.

Overall, it was a really enjoyable evening. Although we’d never taken people on a tour before, it seemed to go down really well. As well as introducing others to new spaces, I discovered a few myself, and also got some extremely useful information and ideas for my own practice.

Through the conversations that I had with the tour goers, they took the opportunity to go on the tour so that they could discover new places, and go to galleries and project spaces that they would otherwise would not know existed. It’s also much nicer, and perhaps easier to go to gallery openings as part of a group, especially when attending private views and late night openings, as these can sometimes be a bit daunting, I think that is where the real benefit of these SLAM tours lies.

September Crits – Part 2

(continued from previous post)

The following week, I attended another ‘crit club’ organised for staff at the Tate. It was a really good and useful experience maybe more so as I didn’t really know anybody that also attended. Benedict Drew was invited along as a guest artist to lead the session.

It was a slightly surreal experience at first, as this is a very new club, there was only five or so of us. In fact, at first I was the only one who had brought work to show (although later in the session another artist decided to show her video works via the internet and my laptop).

As I was prepared, I presented some work first. Having focused on my paintings the week before, I took this opportunity to show my installation/structure works. I showed documentation of Remnants at first, but then later ended up showing all of the structure works that I had made over the last 18 months. We spent something in the region of 80 minutes discussing my work, which was incredibly useful. I’m very thankful for that.

We spoke about my use of paper in these works, and how they ‘clad’ the structures. They are reminiscent of those fake building façades. Like those that are used to disguise unsightly buildings as something much grander. Although I think my work is doing something different here. This is something that I need to focus some of my research on. It was interesting that one of the other artists suggested that I experiment with sound. I had been thinking for a while about how to ‘open up’ my work to allow for more of an experience, without going too theatrical. I expressed my concern, as well as my interest in experimenting in this way. I was afraid to go down the ‘fake’ sound route. I don’t want to use recordings of creaking or anything like that. Benedict Drew suggested that I could amplify my work using tiny microphones, which would pick up and amplify any small sound of creaking of paper moving within the structure.

I talked about materials, and how I felt I should be using metal girders in my work, mainly because I hadn’t yet, and because large building projects use these in their construction. The response form this was that such materials could prove to be unnecessary, and would detract from the shack-like and precarious quality that my work has. At the same time, it was argued that such materials would be too much about grand skyscrapers, which in turn would be a highly political statement perhaps. As soon as I start making huge works with girders, it would be about terrorism, war and political unrest. My structural works at the moment suggest haphazardness, a sense of mystery and confusion, as well as abandonment and incompleteness. All things that I intend the work to stand for.

I can’t stress how useful peer critique sessions are. I am really fortunate to have these sessions available to me. Thinking back to my years between the BA and MA, when I had little or no critical feedback from other artists and arts professionals, I was just lost and my practice was ill-informed. Mainly due to the group of artists that I graduated with last year from Wimbledon, this wasn’t something I had to worry too much about. Having a supportive network around me is the the most important part of my practice. It helps to inspire me, motivate me and push me onwards.

September Crits – Part 1

The other week, Katie Goodwin and myself hosted a peer critique session at ASC Studios. This was the third in our post MA Wimbledon roving salon/crit series. We were a little overdue with this one, as the previous two were held in January, and late March. There were 8 of us that showed both work in progress and finished work.

It was a good way to end the Summer as a group, catch up with each others practices as well as giving and receiving feedback. It was a good and constructive session, everyone there contributed both by showing work and by giving feedback to others. I feel that we all got something out of it.

I decided to bring some paintings to the crit. I hadn’t shown them before and I was quite nervous. In fact the day before I was having a crisis with them, nothing I was doing was working. I even went to the extreme of hiding them in our studio so nobody would see them. In hindsight, I think I was just un-focused with them and was trying to do too much with them at once. For this crit, I decided to hang two paintings on the wall. One larger painting and one small painting. The two that I felt most comfortable with, the two that I felt were most complete. The other 6 or so small paintings were just placed on the floor leaning against the wall.

Some of the points that were raised during the evening, with the simplicity and the flatness of my new works. How messed-up can I let them get. They almost look too clean at the moment. I spoke of my choice of materials, and the tradition of painting, albeit with a slight twist. I am painting with cement-egg tempera on canvas that I prepared with my own gesso. Traditionally, you would use a hard surface for egg tempera paintings, but my use of canvas can potentially highlight the fragility of the materials. Some of the paint was beginning to crack. The look and cold feel of the paint seems successful, the imperfections and air bubbles almost fool you into thinking that this is a harder surface. In fact, almost everyone wanted (and did) touch the canvas. I did encourage this though. The physical feel of the work related directly to my structural works.

Other points that came up in the discussion was that I need to perhaps re-think and consider further my use of materials. Could my paintings be seen as objects, and become elements of the structural work, such as bricks or slabs. This point was raised after my descision to place the smaller paintings on the floor. I was also told that I was ‘painting a wall, and then making a painting on that wall’. This was interesting as all my structural pieces have drawings attached, and Remnants also featured boards, that had been painted in cement.

(continued in the next post)