University Campus Suffolk

I’ve been down yeah, but I’ve come back brighter…

I’ve had this knocking about the studio for a long time now, it’s a taxidermist mounting shield that is used to present skulls and busts of dead animals, I made it a few years ago when I wanted to present my work in a unique way, it’s just a piece of pine, cut, routed and stained. I have always liked it and over time it has had many things on it. I happened to have a sheet of veneered chipboard that used to be a drawer and UCS had recently unveiled the Langlands and Bell Question Mark sculpture at the Waterfront Campus building in Ipswich, it was a slow day so I made a mini replica from the veneered drawer. The idea was to just use it as a little model but then I found myself making two speech or quotation marks also, I can never remember which is which, and with these I then placed them on the wall within a frame, I think I wanted to quote a question or something like that, anyway the speech/quote marks have been in my locker for a while and so I thought I’d transform the mount one last time… I am mounting speech!!! Or… I am mounting a quote!!!

I think visually this is a very strong piece, painting the flat part of the mount enables the marks to really pop, It has a certain street art appeal, an attack against the establishments that ask us to hold our tongues yet listen to all they say. However, it has been commented on that the marks do resemble a six and a nine, adding sexual innuendo in the mix and a natural want off of myself to say every time I look at it: ‘Sixty-nine dude’, in reference to the classic Bill and Ted line (but you have to do the voice otherwise you will get odd looks). I decided to name this piece ‘Glow’, (I am rubbish with names for my work) the reason being that; Glow is the name of an album by Reef, on said album is a song called ‘I Have Something To Say’, I felt this was the essence of the piece, although a long way round to get to the name.

I suppose this entry crosses over from the catch up posts to the more present day as it was recently sold at an auction we set up to help raise money for our end of degree show. But I kind of miss it not being hung in my space, by no means am I precious about my work usually but I had grown attached to that piece of work I made, through its many transitions it had reached adulthood and I had to let it go free. I have since been approached about a commission to make another one and although I am more than happy to, the transitional process of getting to the final stage will be skipped, losing what I consider to be its well-formed character.

I will see you cats on the flip flop later!!!

It’s only words and words are all I have, to take your heart away… or my heart as it turned out.

I never saw myself as an artist with an agenda; I guess I liked the idea of sitting on a rather tall fence looking down on the confused faces of artists who were confronting a cause within their work. I think the only thing that was close to an agenda was adding humour into my work as a way of expressing how ridiculous certain aspects of life are. From the second year of my degree I found myself creating work from daily newspapers, both tabloid and broad sheet, I was taking the serious stories of war, conflict, government behaviour and other serious headline stories and crossing them with the rather nonsense stories that red top tabloid papers choose print. My aim was to address the issue of real stories but add a ‘pun like’ twist to them. The red tops have the ability of taking important stories and dumbing them down, adding humour to the article in order to appeal to their chosen mass market. I was in no way making fun of the stories themselves; it was more a case of addressing how red tops approach stories.

I chose to continue with this idea at the start of my third year. I think I have accepted at this point that I tend to see the finished piece long before its made, I can visualise the presentation of work and the stages I need to get to that point and in my second year I was hanging these finished newspaper prints a certain way and knew that It would create a very visually appealing installation space, however, it doesn’t always work out how you see it (I realise at this stage that a lot of these posts will appear very romanticised and I’m sure the way I address this blog will change dramatically when I have caught up). I was creating work in very much the same way, cutting text stencils, preparing the newsprint and spraying through the stencils to give me my finished image… BUT (added anticipation), something seemed to not be working like it had been last semester, but why, what had changed? A few I’d made before had kinda worked, I felt the idea was still strong, so what was it? Then during a tutorial with my tutor he had made it clear to me, I’d made it too personal, I’d added my own feelings to the headlines, I’d forced my opinion on to the viewer, basically I’d taken the idea of appealing to the masses and become the Daily Mail!!! Suddenly I had become an artist with an agenda, I had become political within my work, I was protesting against tabloid red tops and forcing my views on to people and that is something I never thought I would address. This is the start of a rough patch of unknown terrain, how do I address this within my practice? It was clear I needed to do a lot of reading on political art and as I was about to start my dissertation it seemed that would be how I would begin to understand it, so I chose political art as a subject for my dissertation, specifically concentrating on protest and activist artists leading me in to the deep unknown.

Tune in same bat time, same bat channel… for more.

Easy now…

Calm yourself…

As it has been a ridiculous number of months since I have last posted I feel it is my duty to inform you of what I have been up to and why the big pause (said the barman to the bear (you won’t get that reference if you haven’t heard the joke)) between then and now. A very basic answer is that I was so busy concentrating on getting my dissertation done that I kind of let everything else slide… Of course, the fact that I had an extension for my dissertation hand in date could suggest that that wasn’t entirely the case and the true answer was I was lazy and kind of forgot the importance of recording my third year journey.

So, I am here to make a mends, trying to reflect on the past few months, discussing my dissertation, my research and ‘critically’ analysing my work, getting into the mind set of recording my journey for the final couple of months left of the course.

Back tracking…

I have something to say…

Throughout the second semester of my second year, we were tasked with a collaboration project, something I very much dreaded. Looking back now I suppose it was a learning curve, getting the students to talk about their work, present ideas and work with an outside source. There were several avenues I thought about, but I ended up working with the Students Union here at UCS. Now I wouldn’t say it was a total fail working with them, but no final work from me was ever put up, although it was all ready to go just needed their go ahaed, communication broke down and I was forgotten about amongst a Union staff reshuffle. My emails were answered by the interim events organiser who mistook me for someone else, instead of talking about and organising the next steps for installing my artwork, he was emailing me about the possibility of hiring a mobile fridge unit for the Union Bar so they could have their freezer cleaned.

We progressed nowhere from that point, my emails weren’t being replied to and the artwork was lost, never to grace the walls of the Union Bar. The work is based on a Martin Creed quote and it was my reaction to the connection he had with UCS and also the fact that as a university, students often let stress take over, it was my way of letting the students know that they are not alone in their worries.

I suppose I wanted to write this entry as a reminder that when working with an outside source you really have to be on top of everything in order for it to work out right, but occasionally things are out of your control and you just have to suck it up and start again.

Better late than never…

Do you ever wake up in the morning and wonder why you do what you do??? I’ve spent the past 10 years wondering and it still doesn’t make much sense to me. I make art, or that’s what I try to do and it has been the itch that just won’t go away, as much as I have tried to force it out of my life, it has continued to cause me both satisfying pleasure and tremendous headaches.

I suppose this is because I can have too much to say, too many ideas, too many opinions and I get so wound up with all the thinking that I seem to do, I become stuck when trying to make the work.

That said, when i do make work it tends to follow the form of reacting to things I see, things I read and questions that I have asked myself.

During the second year of the degree I concentrated on producing work using the ‘readymade’, I love the idea of taking an existing object and changing its context in some way, however small… You see a golden cage with lemons inside, I see the past 8 years of my life concentrated down and contained within my studio space. I spent a lot of my time reading about Martin Creed and how his work follows a reaction process, he knew he wanted to make a sculpture from paper, so he did, albeit a screwed up piece of paper, but it went through that process, so it has the right to be called a piece of art or does it? I’m not going to try and answer the age old question of ‘what is art’, everyone has an opinion. From this it led me to work with newspapers, again a readmade object, particularly the broad sheet and reacting to the stories I read. I chose to explore reacting to these stories with tabloid red top style headlines which I then printed over the sheet of newspaper, this became my reaction to the way in which tabloid red tops report more on the celebrity and less on serious world events. I am in no way making fun of the serious stories I have printed over, more the way in which certain papers disregard these stories over a one about Cheryl Cole being the new Diana.

But I find it very difficult to talk about what I do; I seem to have moved very much into a texted form of art and more importantly a political stance. For my dissertation i have chosen to research the topic of political art, which if I’m honest, i wish I’d have stayed well away from as its so broad. I am very much enjoying the research into political art, I am reading about Peter Kennard and his photomontages, his trips to Bethlehem with Banksy, activism against the UK government and Korea in the 70’s. An artist I’ve just come across Hank Willis Thomas, so will be doing more research on him.

So i will be using this blog to express ideas, research and just place general thoughts. Comments are very welcome.

Karl