University Campus Suffolk

I am now in my degree show space, I have finished pulling out the screws and painting the board and I have been trying out different ways of interacting with the space.

I am still not sure yet how the final show will look, I just know that I want the work to reflect the things that have interested me over the last year. It is essential to me that the work interacts with the space I have for the degree show.

I think at this point it would be good to reflect on my experience of the Fine Art degree and think about what has gone well and what I will change in the future.

The course has been a very challenging one for me and has felt like it is pushing me to my limits on various occasions. My work has changed so much throughout the three years and I am now really excited to see what kind of artwork I produce outside of art school, I feel much happier creating work away from the public nature of the university art studio and I think being able to work privately will be really beneficial to my continued practice.

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For a few weeks now I have been doubting the way I work and stressing about creating the work when I am in the space.This is the way I work, the only way I can work, so I just had to keep telling myself that it would all come together.

The first few days didn’t go well, shifting objects around and trying things out, nothing looked right, I had too much stuff in the space, it was impossible to start from scratch.

I emptied the space and started again, this time I created a very minimal intervention, it fitted much of my criteria: interacted with the space and reflected my explorations over the last year etc I was happy with it, until I came back the next day by which time I was questioning how interesting it was as an object, how honest it was in its interaction with the space, I had gone off it entirely, I felt like it was too cool, too minimal.

Again, I emptied the space – which was stressful at the time but I am pleased that I did this as it really does truly reflect my working practice and how when something isn’t quite right, the studio needs to become a clean slate before I can resume working in it. This time I brought in other objects and started leaning,stacking and arranging them with some of the objects that I wanted in the space, I was interested in how this things worked together.

It became as much about how the pieces of the sculpture related to each other as it did about how the sculpture related to the space. Fairly quickly I felt like I was getting somewhere, moving things around and then sitting down and watching them, rearranging them and then going for a walk before soming back to examine how my perception of them changed with that distance. Eventually, I settled on a sculpture and then finally on a second. It was really helpful when another student arrived and we discussed the work in the space and what worked and what I could try.

At first I was apprehensive about the colour of the pieces and how that worked together but quite quickly I realised that the clash of colours was really interesting and in many ways it represented the different parts of myself that I have been starting to understand in the last few months. Halfway through my final year I became really aware of the monochromatic nature of the work I was producing and I felt that it didn’t look like my work, I felt it needed to represent my humour, my enthusiasm for life etc and how could I possibly do that with no colour? However I have realised more and more that I am not that simple, people are not that simple, there are many different sides to me and they don’t all need ti e in every work, aspects of them will naturally find their own way into the work!

For the Snip exhibition we have to answer three questions that will go into the catalogue, I found this really helpful as just trying to understand it and talk about it from no starting point can be difficult, I found answering the questions fine because I knew which bit I was focusing on!

Which artists have been your biggest influences during the past year and which of those are continuing to influence you now?

I think Phyllida Barlow’s work has been really inspiring throughout the last year, the scale of her work and the raw finish of her sculptures. I also find her interest in the ‘presence’ of the sculptures being felt, this idea is similar to my own interest in the way the object work in a space and with the viewer.

Do you feel happy with where your practice is at the moment or are there things that you feel need more time to develop?

I think the transient nature of my practice and the way everything always comes together at the last minute makes it difficult for me to feel that a am moving forward and it does make creating art very stressful! I hope that after university I can work purely on my practice and forget about reading and explaining for a little while to see where it leads the work.

If you saw a show tomorrow that you really wanted to apply to, would you feel ready?

At the moment I don’t feel ready to show my work, I feel that my understanding of art and my interest in reading about it has progressed a lot over the past year but I feel that the practical work needs to catch up with these things.

It is through watching documentaries like these and reading interviews with artists that I realise I am not alone in the feelings I have when making work and when I can understand an artist’s particular language about their work it often reveals to me important elements in my work and direction in which the work must go.

I am watching documentaries about some sculptors and I thought it would be good to document it here, I have realised that due to the large volume of publications that I read and the various artist interviews and documentaries that I watch, I haven’t actually documented very much of what I have been looking at. I think I will publish a blog entry soon entirely dedicated to the artists, interviews and ideas that have been my main influences and inspirations throughout my final year, I think just to have them all together in one place will be hugely beneficial for me, it will allow me to see a main interests and common themes that I may otherwise miss when I am researching people independently of each other.

I am currently watching a couple of documentaries, one on Richard Wentworth and one about Alison Wilding. The Richard Wentworth one was very interesting, I have often looked at his work and been intrigued by it’s apparent simplicity. The documentary shows him looking through piles of old discarded objects and also shows his studio which is filled with watering cans, chairs and various old objects. His work seems more relevant than ever now I am trying to incorporate ready made or found objects into my work, his comment that ‘ he feels his studio with things that he think might be useful to him ‘ -and later makes decisions about which objects will work for him and which ones are kind of resistant to the things that he is trying to achieve with his sculptures.

This got me thinking about how interested I am in the decision making process of making art, the idea that everything is a result of these decisions that you make throughout the works conception. I suppose my work that was created through moving things around the studio, stacking things up and making compositions with objects was largely a physical manifestation of this interest. It also occured to me that although I have been aware for some time that I am interested in off cuts – of broken things, unwanted items, bits cut off a sculpture etc- I hadn’t quite realised its significance in terms of my practice, I think this fascination with off cuts is a really important thing to draw on now I am aware of it and really start seeing what I can collect, include in my work and what is produced as a result of these seemingly insignificant things that I find so compelling.

The Alison Wilding documentary – that has been put on pause for now – is really interesting, the introduction describes her work as ‘pure sculpture’ that is simply interested in ‘object and space’ got me thinking about how important these are to me, HUGELY is the answer, I suppose I thought that those things are inherent in sculptural practice and therefore didn’t perhaps pay enough attention to its importance in my work. The way the objects work together in a space fascinates me and I am intrigued about the decisions I make that lead to the objects looking the way they do and being placed where they are placed. Space is a major element in my practice and I think naturally I create works that communicate with their surrounding, either through echoing elements of its architecture or complementing elements of its physical nature or its usage as a space.

What particularly interests me about Alison when she talks in this documentary is the way she describes her relationship to her work, I find with my own practice it is something that I have to do, it frustrates me beyond anything I have known and some days I just stand and stare at my work wondering how anyone could be interested in the things that interest me!! However, when suddenly something works, it is as though someone has lifted a great cloud from in front of me and I can see again, I get such pleasure from moving forward with my work and learning about it/ understanding it that it is incomparable. Alison echoes these feelings in her own relationship to her work, she describes going into the studio and just staring at her works, feeling worse about it and feels unable to do anything until she gets over that point…which she describes as a ‘psychological hill’. I totally understand how she feels!