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
