Our degree show at Brighton opens to the public on 9th June. We however, must have all our work installed and ready by 25th May, so that it can be marked by external examiners. Writing this out makes it seem more and more necessary that I sort out my practice, which is currently a bit all over the place.
The others on my course would like me to present a proposal on my work next week. My ideas all revolve around the gallery space and the way in which it is used by visitors. Some of my ideas involve manipulating the space, this will have implications for our entire show.
There are only 16 people on my course, but the nature of CFAP (critical fine art practice) means that everybody’s work is very different, in media as well as content. Our practice is informed by the theory we read, and everybody reads different things. This means that creating continuity in a group show is difficult.
Luckily we have the chance to experiment with our ‘preview show’ outside our studio in a cabinet. We have titled this show ‘Yoke’, and I will talk more about this next week after it has opened.
The issue with my more intrusive ideas, as well as it affecting other people’s work, is that I was planning to use just one of the two studios that will become our gallery. This of course affects the continuity of the entire show.
Basically, I am greatful to have kept this blog, and hopefully I can use this to come up with a proposal about my work.
My crit on Monday went pretty much as predicted. The major issue with the work that I presented was due to it being unfinished work presented as finished. This meant that there was a level of confusion over what was being looked at and how the work was supposed to be received. The title ‘Experiments With Gallery Design’ caused people to question if it was a proposal for work to come or was a fully resolved piece of work. There was more confusion caused by the floor plans on the wall, as the centre plan, which was of the structure that was partially built and partially marked out, was not in proportion to what was physically present.
I expected the work to be confusing. I do not see it as a resolved finished piece of work, more as a way for me to experiment with ideas. It was this that made it confusing. However, I have plenty of ideas to think about and lots of useful feedback on the presentation of my ideas that I can now continue to work on.
Over the next two weeks I want to look at two ideas that move away from physically altering a space and look at other aspects of the gallery that I have thought about during my research. These will be gallery guides and the chairs at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.
The cardboard test of my gallery designs has been built. Instead of cardboard however I have used lining paper to make up the walls as it looks far neater and is more suitable for my crits next week. Unfortunately, I appear to have built myself a white cube space, which is not what I had intended. I have made some other changes that are intended to help me explore other ideas relating to my gallery space research. Instead of building the complete structure as originally planned I have build only half. The other half has become a floor plan of what I was going to build drawn directly onto the floor. I have been considering how my drawings could work as pieces, and one of the most appealing ideas was to transfer them to the floor in this way. I am also considering trying this with maps and routes around a gallery space.
Another change I have made is inside the ‘room’ that I have built. Rather than leaving the walls bare I have drawn (in the same tape as the floor drawing) some of my initial floor plans on the wall. Again this is to experiment with how these drawings could be used. I have also painted a square of a colour that I had been thinking of using for the original design ideas on the wall. I’m not sure that this does much to dispel the feeling of white cube within what I have made, but I am hoping that these pieces in their entirety can go some way to showing my process during the crits on Monday. This is particularly important to show at this stage as I am not presenting a fully formed idea, and am also not allowed to speak to explain my work until the end of my allotted time.
I am currently struggling with a title for the work, I will not separate the elements of the work for the crit, so the title must encompass everything as well as helping the viewers to understand what they are critiquing. Currently I think it will be along the lines of, ‘experiments with gallery space’ or ‘Gallery Design’.
I’m feeling really positive about my work at the moment. However; we have cross year crits next week. They are an opportunity to see what is happening throughout the years and to get feedback on your work from people who have not seen it before. They happen every year, and every year it has been a rush to get work together. The problem I am having is working out how to get my work to a finished standard. And how to show it in a crit when I cannot talk (this is how our crits run, the artist is not allowed to speak until the end). I am going to use the cardboard space that I have designed as a starting point. I am undecided as to whether to put work in it to be looked at or to get people to crit the space itself. This is particularly after yesterday’s tutorial.
I have begun to build the space, today I marked it out on the floor and began painting the cardboard for the walls, I am only painting them white for now, I am going to get samples to try out colours. It looks a lot bigger in real life. Planning it out has also allowed me to think about some of my other ideas that I mentioned yesterday. Particularly in relation to my floor plans. There is something really interesting in seeing them marked out on the floor in real scale, and I may consider this as an alternative to physically building the space. My heads a little all over the place, hopefully when the structure goes up tomorrow I can begin to sort out what I want to do.
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“Hi Rosie, forgive me if I state something you have covered earlier, I have not yet had time to review all your posts. I have skimmed this most recent page and it strikes me that your plan drawings make for very good art in their own right, even if their original purpose is not known. I could certainly see them presented as a serial work recording an exploration of space. Of course, making the gallery experience a reality is (I think) very important to you, but the work recorded here in this blog is important too.”
This comment on my last post from David Riley is very similar in ideas to what I talked about with my tutor. So thanks David, this has been really useful to help me think about things. I’ve found writing this blog incredibly useful as a way of thinking about my practice, and it will probably form a large part of my documentation that I must submit alongside my degree show work.
I have been concerned that I’m getting ahead of myself with my plans to build a gallery space. We have been reminded a lot recently not to get too hung up on one idea at this stage as we could end up ignoring other (possibly better) possibilities. I’ve kept telling myself that I couldn’t think of any other ideas, but I think that really I just wasn’t making the effort. I seem to have jumped straight to the most obvious result of my research and it is perhaps a bit clumsy and also unnecessary. I may go back to these ideas, and I am still going to build a cardboard mock up that will help me explore my ideas around designing a space.
But for the next few weeks or so I am going to concentrate on ideas that have arisen following my tutor’s advice to make a list of as many ways I could think of to physically alter a space. My head has been so set on building something that I have missed other things about my practice that work well. As David said in the above comment the drawings I have made of floor plans are quite interesting in their own right and not just as rough plans. I also want to look at other ideas which I will test in the studios and the cardboard space that I am going to create this week.
I’m quite excited to be looking at other things, especially as I have been having doubts that building something in the way I have been thinking may not work. I hope that this post doesn’t make me appear to be feeling negative about my ideas to build a space, I will still keep that idea in mind. But my research has lead me to think about a number of different characteristics of a gallery and by building my own space I offer only one solution. And it is a solution that has been done time and time again – build a different gallery.
