Over a year ago I contacted eleven soap manifacturers asking to sponsor me with 2 tonnes of soap bars for a project in a former Public Baths by the river Don/Sheffield. LUSH showed interest straight away and supported me through the difficult times like when the first venue let me down last minute. The ‘Port of Sheffield’ project took me under their umbrella and found me the Grain Warehouse.
Last meeting of ‘Contemorary Construction’ was on site and we decided on some limitations. We only going to use materials and work in black, white and grey. I got feedback on the flyer I designed for the exhibition and made the changes. We took a photo of us on site for publicity and discussed advertisement in various places locally and nationally as well as clarified a few things with CADS.
Since then Katya started a special page on Facebook for ‘Contemporary Construction’ where we started to discuss texts, upload images and keep people informed about our progress.
I’ve started making different models of origami barges and want to use the soap paper where my soap bricks from GRAIN were rapped in. The one design I like best I just don’t seem to get right; there is something I can’t work out from the instructions. I’ll bring it to our CC meeting tomorrow. The barges made from this semi translucent paper work really well with light and they swimm brilliantly too. Not sure yet how they will be presented.
Also want to show my animation ‘To and From Grain Warehouse’ and that has white drawings of barges in it that are animated. So there is a connection.
In between learning how to make origami floating things I’m reading for my research topic. I need to narrow down what I’ll actually write about in my dissertation. Feel a bit all over the place at the moment and can’t wait for a tutorial. It’s not long now till our seminars and lectures start – First week in October. Good!!
I was away for six weeks over the summer and now it is bliss to be back in the studio. My new website is done now. Meetings for the MA interim exhibition at CADS (Contemporary Arts Development Space) with Katya Robin, Chris Graham and Lizzy Levy have restarted and we are making good progress.
We have changed our working title to ‘Contemporary Construction’ and I’m very pleased about that as I couldn’t really identify with ‘External Assessment’ as an exhibition title as it sounded very institutional. I wanted more of our own identy reflected in it.
We talked about creating two surreal, outlandish, strange spaces using white, black, grey and mirror materials and shapes. It will be a space to interact with what’s there and one that is changeable, dynamic and alive.
I’ll bring to it a mass of white soap shavings, white birthing balls, two 2m high hides with a 5m long telescope, possibly video of white ghost keels/barges, …
The point is not to create new individual works but to work together organising, curating, promoting a specific project that is a starting point to our MA exhibition in June next year.
Very exciting!!!
I’m in the process of redisigning my website, it looks really dated. I want to update it myself to have more control over it so I’ll leave the company that deals with it at the moment as they started charging me for evey update and find somebody to set up a new one for me.
I feel I’m in a transission period at the moment, an in-between project stage. I have proposed to take part in the Bank Street Member Show in August with two of my videos and will apply to be part of the next Prism Exhibition in the Millenium Galleries in Sheffield. For both I will need to polish existing works rather than making new work. The videos havn’t been shown before so it will be nice to see how they come across.
I’m re-reading Ann Hamilton and Josepy Beuys as well as trying to understand Speculative Realism. I find it hard at the moment to concentrate on one thing which is a bit unsettling.
Now I’ve got the ACE report finished and recieved my final lump of money and left my assessment/presentation for the MA behind me, I’m digesting the feedback I got from my tutors. It’s important now to think about where I am going with my work and reflect rather than diving into the next project as I would normally do. I will apply for the Bank Street Arts Member show though and hopefully I can show one of my videos that havn’t exhibited yet.
There seem to be overlaps between my recent work, Speculative Realism to what my friend Kate Pickering has introduced me and the feedback I got from my tutors. All that seems to point in the direction of a different criticality to do with the ralationship to space and materials. I’m trying to focus my reading towards what is relevant for my work.
I have sent off my Activity Report to the Arts Council. It took a lot longer than I anticipated but it was very usefull for me and helped me to see how the project went and what I can use for next time. I couldn’t sit with it any longer and had to send it off today. I gues one could go on for ever changing small bits of it.
It was challenging to get all the material in order and find a way of passing it on to ACE. In the end I’ve put it all on drop box and shared the folder that consists of a number of further folders, all named, with ACE.
Now I can focus on my Assessment/Presentation. The bar has been set hight by the final year presentations last week. I guess that’s a good thing for who are having their assessment in thirteen days.
I’ve mapped out a structure how I will go about the presentation and now will do the same I did with the ACE report; find a way of presenting it and make it accessable for the receiving end.
I’m actually looking forward to this!!
