I have started to realise that in trying to make my work really honest I have perhaps been making work that is a little idealistic and detached from life and the things I am trying to say. It’s very ambitious to try and make art that is completely pure but in doing so I loose the very human feeling that I strive to incorporate in my work.
I am not sure how to get around this but I think continuing to work and questioning it, I will naturally see the answer …
I had a really good chat with a lecturer yesterday, generally tutorials are very formal and I find ones that are just conversations… that flow from one idea to the next… work a lot better for me, they are really engaging and informative.
We discussed what I think is important in my work… honesty…. etc…
I am trying to work out how I really work, rather than how I would like to and thinking about these ideas of honesty etc I think I am going to work in the space as soon as I can get in there and create the show that way.
Trying to work out how I can convey all of the things that I have learnt to an examiner that will never have seen my work before seems like quite a big task but I am excited about how the show will look and I imagine everything I have learnt about and read about will be in the work in a subtle way.
I had a really interesting conversation with my friend yesterday, I was saying how reading is really important for my work, it is what really inspires me and I was saying that sometimes I find what I am reading really affects what I am making, say I am reading about a certain theorist… suddenly I find myself making work that somehow incorporates what I am reading about and then get frustrated because I realise I don’t even fully agree with their opinion!
He is a writer and was saying it is exactly the same, reading books and then realising that his style of writing has changed somewhat from being influenced by another author… or just from being in a different mood, the way it is written changes and he has to go back over it.
It is to same for my practice, depending on my mood, what I have been reading and what I am thinking about the work can be totally different, I suppose every artist has that? I have been reading about Carl Andre, he seems like quite an interesting person and I have always enjoyed his work… he said in a Frieze article in January ‘an idea in the head is not a work of art. A work of art is out in the world, is a tangible reality’.. I think that is something I really need to hold on to, I tend to go through large periods of not making a great deal but thinking incessantly and then at the last minute just making something spontaneous.
My friend and I were also discussing how important it is to question what you do, we realised that we question the world, who we are, why things are the way they are etc etc and the same for our work, I often wonder if my work suffers for this constant questioning but I am inclined to think that it doesn’t… I make a sculpture and then I think ‘is this really any good?’ ‘Is this really worthy?’ ‘Is this something I would like to add to the world?’ fairly often the answer is no and I take great pleasure in painting over things, planing wood etc and starting from scratch… this often leaves me feeling like I have little tangible evidence of my growing understanding of my practice but I suppose this way of working is just evidence of my indecisiveness and constant questioning…
Occasionally however, I ask those question and I think actually, yes these things are valid, these are interesting ideas and actually this does work….. which is often replaced a few days later by different questions, not necessarily better.. like… Do I even like how it looks? (Do I need to!!?) Is it interesting? (How does it need to be interesting to?) BUT REALLY… IT’S A BIT OF WOOD WITH PAINT ON.
And on it goes…
I went to see the Sterling Ruby show in London over the weekend, I first saw his work properly about six months ago and I was immediately captivated by the monumental sculptures, some looking really dirty, many dripping down over their base, they had a real unfinished look to them that I really enjoy in art works.
When I was reading about him I was also interested in his background as a pro skateboarder and playing in punk bands, having spent most of my teenage years with a group of male friends who all play in bands, skateboard and frequently discuss politcal and social issues for whole evenings at a time… there was something strangely familiar about Ruby’s work…
A while back, I can’t remember if someone said it or I read it but basically the idea of everyone needing to relate to art works and that perhaps you would only like works if you related to it, I didn’t feel (at the time) that this idea had a lot of weight and was thinking that really you can relate to any work of art because it is you looking at it and interpreting the information, so how could you not?
I suppose Ruby’s work has really made me go back to that idea and consider how important that is to me and to other people… it has made me think about where my work really comes from and that perhaps I could benefit from thinking about the importance of how I relate to my own practice…
Anyway, the show was amazing, my favourite pieces in the show were the fabric collages in the second gallery, they were made of old bits of clothing, rags from around his studio and scraps of fabric, I have experimented with ideas of using the spilled paint, old scraps in my studio to create work and it was great to see an artist working on similar principles to create some really exciting and sucessful works. The resulting compositions were really interesting and transformed the materials into something completely different somehow.
Yesterday felt like a very productive day in the studio, I was really getting into working with the materials and I felt that one of my older sculptures was a really good reference point for a new work..
I made the older one with an interest in how the plain wood worked against the loosely painted red bits of wood, I was thinking about the idea of something being intentionally left before it is fully covered and how that might be a subtle and interesting way of incorporating colour into my sculptures….
This led to me trying out paint along the thinner side of the wood and although it was no longer loosely painted the effect of the thin coloured side against the plain would was very striking, it began to look almost as if the plain wood was a shadow.
I suppose these works are exploring how I can create work regardless of how well they ‘fit in’ with other things I have made, they are a direct observation of how sculpture works in a space… I have always been fascinated by the way an object can affect a space, even if the object is really small or in one corner etc… I dismissed this as just an inevitable element of creating sculpture but I am starting to think about how this is actually a really massive part of why I make work.
Another student mentioned that while I am working in my studio I am having to work around the objects, stepping inside the triangle again and again as I paint things and make decisions about the work. He also said that no one can ever be sure with my objects whether they are fixed together or what will happen if they are touched… I am really interested in this idea and happy that they have this effect, a lot of what I am thinking about when I am creating the work is whether they need to be attached to the wall or the floor… leaning wood on the wall has led to various experiments with my work and I think that in making people unsure about their stability it gives the work a kind of life, a power that further dictates how you can experience them in a space and the space itself.
They completely dictate how I can interact with my own studio space.
