Work in Progress

My head is still everywhere. I know what I am doing within my research and studio practice but still feel out of sorts with everything. This week I had the use of the Centre for Drawing again (no one else wanted it!), I was sharing it with Katie who was making a film, and I was making 3 big drawings. It was a nice few days listening to BBC 6 Music and talking about our work and how we were feeling with everything. I was still playing with the idea of perspective lines, and using pigment to create various grades of tone with it. I’m not too sure how this will develop but I’ll stick with it up until the assessment. I want to bring all of the strands of my work together.

It was ‘Animatation Week’, and the plan was to show some animation related work in the Centre for Drawing on Thursday for a crit. My idea was to make a series of drawings that could potentially be 3 frames of an animation. It was based upon a youtube video of a tower block being demolished. Inevitably, the Twin Towers were mentioned furing the crit. The feedback was generally good and this idea of creating frames may continue within my practice.

We had an MA show professional practice talk on Friday afternoon with Paul Glinkowski. It had elements of ‘how not to present yourselves’ talk with video examples and lots of research. It was interesting and also slightly scary. The research article/pdf is available on Axisweb here; http://www.axisweb.org/atATCL.aspx?AID=896 and I think it’s worth a read if you have a degree show coming up, or any artist led show for that matter. We were then shown our timetable from now until September when we (hopefully) graduate. It seems very real and it worried me a little.

I’m now playing with the space in the studio and working out different ways of hanging my work. How I want my work to be seen. I don’t want my work hanging on the wall, so they are floating in the middle of the space as the moment. I expect there will be lots of playing around with this and a few late nights over the next week. If I’m hanging the work in this way, I will have to make each drawing double sided. It’s an exciting way to work though and it is opening up some fun new ideas.

It’s been the first week back after our two week Easter break. I spent the whole two weeks in my home city, Bath. It was nice to escape London for a couple of weeks and to recharge my batteries, it was odd getting back on the tube again on Monday. I was getting pretty tired at the end of last term. I did have to spend the two weeks writing my research paper, but I was able to do most of that outdoors due to the ace weather that we had. Now that I have been back in the studio, and handed the research paper in, I feel I have a little more direction in where I am going. I always seem to get a lot out of writing these essays, and my bibliography is now rather long. We had a research statement/poster event today where each of us on the course produced our statement and displayed it, which then formed a discussion. My statement follows below along with the image I used on the poster. I need to write a new artist statement (my “current” one is from last April and so out of date now!) and this research statement can be my starting point.

Research Statement

Within my studio practice, I am exploring structures that are reminiscent of those found within the urban environment. I am interested in structures that are imposing and have a sense of eeriness about them.

Within my research, I have been exploring how people experience certain aspects of the urban environment. Anxieties such as claustrophobia and agoraphobia that both became a prominent illness during the rise of modernism were a starting point. The questions that I am now forming concern not only urban spaces, but sites which have a historical significance, and perhaps a sinister history.

Does the history of a site effect those that come into contact with it? Is nostalgia associated with ideas of utopia, or a failed attempt of building a utopia? If these spaces have such a negative effect on people, are the spaces in control? Do people belong in here? Is there a conflict between the user and the man made environment? This is reminiscent of science fiction where man’s creation turns on its creator.

Last week was the final week of term, and also Events Week. There were some worshops and we had some alumni working in the project space on a short project about being visitors. One of the highlights was a meeting that a few of us had with some Chelsea MA students about setting up galleries and studios. We’ve decided that we’re going to do something fun and a bit different as well as slightly scary (for me) in June around London. I’ll write more about that nearer to the time. It is a little crazy.

The main plan for the week was to use the foyer space and the Centre for Drawing to display work for a crit on Thursday. I jumped in and got myself a wall in the drawing centre to make something new for the crit. I wanted to have a bit of fun as it was the end of term so I decided to just play around with the space and not worry about what the outcome would be.

I’m still thinking about the history of different kinds of buildings and structures, and what they stand for, and that is forming a fair bit of my research at the moment. I’m still quite unsure where all this is going, but hopefully I’ll be way clearer after an intense couple of weeks of reading, writing and researching over the Easter period. For this piece of work, I kept things simple and opted for a Nazi watchtower, as I kept coming across lots of Nazi related topics over the last week or so in films, books and on the internet. A sign perhaps?

I still believe that there is mileage in the perspective paintings that I was working on a few weeks back, so I wanted to build on that, and work with it on a larger scale. I also wanted the photocopies to remain present due to their aesthetic value and edgyness. I decided quite randomly to work with string, and make a large perspective drawing on the wall based upon the watchtower image that I had. I wanted all the perspective/working out lines to be part of the work and create its own space and shapes. Interestingly, the perspective lines look like search lights from the ground that illuminate the tower. I quite like that coincidence. I used a complicated method to work out how the shadow should look, and at one point had string coming from the wall out onto the floor to work out how a shadow may look, which I made from photocopies of black paper. I wanted the shadow to stand out and be quite physical compared to the string, you notice the shadow on the floor before seeing what is making the shadow. It wasn’t the best thing that I’d done, but I had fun doing it and made the most of having a different space to play with.

The crit was good fun, and there was a good atmosphere. This was probably due to the fact that we had loads of beer. Somebody mentioned that my work is too physical, maybe the string should be replaced by lasers. Some people though it was strange that I was talking about my work as if it were a drawing. I think it is a drawing though.

I really feel as if I should be getting my head around everything that I’m doing and working towards now that we’re heading towards the assessment. I’m compiling all my bits of research and writing together for my research folio, and I’m hoping that in doing this, along with all the other reading and essay writing that I have going on, that things will become clearer for me.

Last week ended with me installing a large piece of work made from photocopies in my space. I was still interested in the horizontal brushstrokes that has been present in my work over the last few months. I was also thinking about readymade panels/prefabrication and repetition. There is a funny/bad perspective element to these pieces too. I’m not sure how I feel about them yet. There is still this towerblock feeling about it.

This week a number of MA students from Wimbledon, myself included, had a little exhibition in Battersea. I wanted to do something experimental and build upon what I’d done last week in the project space and on my studio wall. I took a corner space and installed some photocopied brushstroke panels into a funny perspective based upon my piece of work in my last post. I struggled with the floor, and tried a few things including paper and more photocopies, but in the end, I opted for a taped outline based upon last weeks projection lightbeam. As I was installing this piece of work, I noticed the stairs, and how there was a divide due to the walkway from above. I decided to make a load more photocopies and install a similar thing in this space. The reason I tackled the stairs was because the space went knowhere, kind of back on itself, at the top of the stairs, there was no exit. I found this quite interesting. In retrospect, I should maybe not have followed the contours of the steps and should’ve gone straight and flat, altering the space slightly.

I had a tutorial today and it was very useful. I was worried as usual about not knowing enough about what I was doing. My studiobased photocopy work seemed to go down well came across as being more edgy than using cement. There is also more milage in the persective paintings. I will now go about combing the two and trying to tighten a few things up. Although my experimentation has been good, I need to be specific about what building types I am using, and why I am focusing on them. Should I focus on a building with a history to it, for instance something like Auschwitz? What do different types of buildings mean and do different buildings cause different anxieties? Lots to think about and get to the bottom of before Easter. Our next assessment on the 28th of May is the diploma stage of the course and is hugely important, so I want to be completely on top of my work and ideas by then.

Time to catch up with myself

Last week I was able to banish my thoughts of being in a mid-term slump. I was reading about Architecture and Disjunction and was reading about Labyrinths and how people get confused with things being not as they seem. For example, in a Labyrinth, there can be confusion between what is a doorway and what isn’t. How the mind creates illusions of things.

Looking back over my work from recent months, I thought it was about time that I played around with making perspective drawings based on my exisiting works. This seems to link back to what I was reading about the Labyrinth, as I was creating what seemed a mess of perspective lines accross became maze like and I found myself creating my own structures in my mind when looking at my work. My peers also said the same thing. There was a stage when things were all looking a bit too Julie Mehretu, so I perhaps should go easy on the colour. I was also introduced to Alexandra Road in a screening of ‘Utopia London’ at Chelsea last week. It is a long building/street in London somewhere, I’ll need to make a visit very soon as it could give me some interesting ideas for my work.

I was lucky to have the project space for one day yesterday, so I could try out different ways of displaying my work, following on from the interim show. I also booked out a projector to play with the back of my hanging work and to add some feelings of movement and passing time to my drawings. Most of the day was disasterous and everything I did looked terrible. I was overcomplicating everything. Once I pulled it back and went about things as I would a drawing and kept it more simple, the results were better and have opened up some interesting new possibilities. The more sucessful peices took place in the corners of the space. My idea for this came from the feelings of looking up at a structure that seems to go on forever, or of a building/road/room that goes on forever. I have a long way to go, and will quite possibly look back at this in a few weeks and cringe.

In other news, I will be showing some new work in the Aquire Gallery in Battersea Park next Tuesday and Wednesday. It’s all very last minute and at an odd time of the week, but it gives me an opportunity and also a bit of extra pressure to try something new based on what I have been doing over the last couple of weeks.

April 5th & 6th 11am – 6pmPrivate View Tuesday 5th April 6pm – 9pm

Aquire April 5th & 6th 11am – 6pm
Private View Tuesday 5th April 6pm – 9pm

Aquire Space
155 Battersea Park Road,
London,
SW8 4BU