Work in Progress

The interim show has come to an end. It will be a while before I have to make an epic trip from one end of London to another at rush hour for a while. It turned out that both the drawings stayed in the show in the end, although they were one piece of work. The private view was good and well attended, as it was for the first week. On Friday we had a crit in the gallery with David Barrett. We spoke about the show as a whole rather than indiviual work. It was said that as a whole show, it was confidently hung due to our decision to get in an external curator, and it was more sucessful as a show about a show than about the individual artworks.

It was great to see my work outside of the studio, particularly as it was specifically made for the height of the walls in the Nunnery. The drawings have a different feel when they are hanging up high above the viewer, whilst also trailing onto the floor. Having one part of the work hanging in the middle of a space, rather than on a wall has certainly changed the way that I am thinking about my work, the materials that I use, and how it is displayed. In this way it was possible to walk around the drawing, someone during the crit had said that it had become a sculpture, I don’t think so, it’s still a drawing, but it could develop in a more 3D way in the future

It was most interesting for me that my work, on Saturday looked as if it could collapse at any moment. In our crit on Friday, someone noted that my work was crumbling, and how that added to the nature of how I titled my work ‘Time Passes and Things Fall Down’. As I had been painting with cement, this was beginning to crumble in some areas and gather along the bottom of the work. I liked this.

Obviously, not everyone was pleased with how these shows went and how their work was displayed. Some people also disagreed with how the show was organised and didn’t like the fact that we got external curators onboard. Some people contributed lots to the show, some people contributed very little or even nothing. The thing that annoyed me most was when on Thursday before the private view, no one had signed up to invigilate on the Saturday morning. For me personally, I was happy.

Now that Futura Bold/Oblique is done and dusted, I feel that I can get on with everything else that has been somewhat neglected over the last two or three weeks. We’re pretty much at the halfway point of the MA now, the weather is getting nicer and the days are getting longer. I’ll spend today reflecting on what I’ve done so far and then crack on in the workshops and the studio tomorrow morning. It was a manic week or so, and I think I also went to see 9 exhibition in the space of a week. I’m feeling quite deflated and un-motivated right now.

Looking forward, I’m considering where to go next:

1. Free-standing work, must be large scale to have presence and dominate the space.

2. Cut in half paintings, based around ideas of buildings that are half demolished/half standing. The structure being visible.

3. Work that is falling apart and crumbling down. Something with a temporary feeling.

4. A series of drawings or even an animation of something collapsing/crumbling. Again, temporaryness and the time passing.

Last week was part one of our interim show, Futura Bold, at the Nunnery. I stayed away from the space during the week as I had to finish my work for the following week, and also as I had spent far too much time doing other stuff for the show and it was time for the tech team to work their magic with the curator.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I arrived on Thursday for the private view. It was well attended, but I felt slightly disspointed by the show as a whole. Some of the hanging was a little odd. I’m all for hanging high and low and mixing it up, but I don’t feel as if it woked as some work was eye level and some was slightly awkwardly lower, with some really high, with one piece that wasn’t really big enough to stand on the floor (or small enough) standing on the floor. The rooms were also really light, and that felt quite sterile. The video pieces were all shown on screens rather than projected which many people agreed was a mistake, as that contributed to the light levels of the rooms and with screens, you get ugly brand names to detract from the work. As an experiment, it was worth doing, and the show did look professional, I just felt a little empty. Seeing it again on Saturday was good, as it was easier to see the work without the crowd. On their own, the work seemed strong, but they didn’t gel together too well as a group. I guess that is to be expected with this kind of exhibition.

On Friday, I finished off my large drawing for the second show, my studio space feels empty without it. I then promptly started another large piece as a back up plan piece incase the first drawing didn’t fit with the other work in the show during the installation phase. The second piece is far more minimal than the first. I like to be prepared and have a backup plan whenever possible, even though it gives me more work to do! So on Monday my first drawing was taken to the Nunnery, whilst I carried the second, rolled up, across London on Tuesday.

The installation day was great fun, I do like these kind of things, and seeing a project literally come together. I had a slot between 12pm – 2pm to meet with Julia the curator to decide the hanging of my work. I managed with the help of 4 other people to hang my drawing from the ceiling as I imagined. Ironically, I’m afraid of heights big time, and couldn’t even climb the ladder to the ceiling. I’m very grateful to the others for helping, especially Nathan, Raf and Joss. Julia then suggested something else with my work that we’ve tried out as an experiment, I don’t think it will stay as is (although I hope it does), but it was a bit of a nightmare to install, and once again involved ladders. This show has a totally different feel to last weeks show, so I look forward to seeing it completed on Thursday evening. It has a slightly apocalyptic, especially in the back room where my work is installed. I’m not suggesting that this week will be better than last week, it’s just the second part of a two week experiment. Hope to see you there! http://www.wimbledonma2011.com

I also managed to see the Susan Hiller exhibtion this weekend, I enjoyed it, especially the UFO piece, but I’m nearing the wordcount, so I’ll save that for the next post!

This last week has mainly concerned getting ready for our two interim shows. I’ve spent a few days working on my exhibition piece, which is going to be a large drawing/wall piece. As it stands it is pretty long at 7.4m, and is quite challenging to work on in our shared studio space.

In terms of our show, Futura Bold kicks off this week at the Nunnery. This is the first of two shows, I am in the second show, so I have a little longer to finish my work off. Yesterday the van left with a load of work, I guess it’s being installed now as I write which is quite exciting. I took on the job of compiling the online catalogue for the show (http://www.wimbledonma2011.com/catalogue) it has been a big job, but if I didn’t take it on, it wouldn’t be done. Fortunately, Lok Yi has also done loads for the website too and it looks decent enough as an online presence for our course. I plan for it to develop, along with our tweeting over the next six months until our MA show.

I’m not sure what else to say apart from I feel quite swamped by the course at the moment, I need to desperately get back on top of my reading, which has slipped over the last few weeks due to the interim show. I’m also going to be treating myself to a couple of gallery days over the next couple of weeks to absorb some inspiration.

The private view for Futua Bold is tomorrow (Thursday) 6.30pm – 9pm. Please feel free to come along if you are in the area. Futura Oblique is next week, this is the show I am in, once again, feel free to come along. All the info you need is on the website and it’s also advertised on Interface too. /events/single/1089…

A pretty standard week last week. I spent most of my studio time working on the two boards that I made up and prepared the week before. I attempted to give them the feel of time passing or of time having passed. It’s not that successful yet, probably because of the smaller scale that I have been working on for these pieces. One of them is quite colourful too, and then distrurbed by a big block of cement.

I’ve also had confirmation of what I can do for the interim show, which is a wall length drawing piece, so I’m going to be flat out doing that for the next week or so. My other idea at the moment is to make a broken stretcher piece which plays with the space in which the work occupies.

I also had my first critical practice tutorial last week which was great and I have now got a much clearer direction of where to take my studio practice and my research and I’m quite excited by it. I plan to get through ‘The End of Temporality’ by Fredric Jameson at some point today. In the meantime, I need to get cracking on my 5 metre drawing.

I was and still am reflecting on the assessment feedback from the last couple of weeks. I spent Tuesday building supports for new pieces of work and then an absolute age preparing chalk and half chalk grounds for them. It was very time consuming but very nice to work on. I am just working my way through my ideas at the moment and seeing how they materialise in the work. I’ve been thinking about things that have partially collapsed, like half demolished buildings that are crumbling away. I took a saw and cut a painting in half. I am interested in the exposed structure and the way that the cement and plaster that I used as paint are crumbling away. Half a painting works better than the two halves together, or the piece as a whole. It’s got me thinking.

It’s a small world

On Thursday, a load of us from Wimbledon headed across the river to the interim MA show at Chelsea. We had been to St. Martins’ show a couple of weeks before, at the Bargehouse. It was quite a mix of work that I enjoyed, and the building lent itself to the experimental nature of the work. The space was huge, and seemed to go on forever, floor after floor. For Chelsea, they had the Triangle space, and each artist was given a triangle shaped space to present their work. It seemed to work quite well, and was refreshing not to have work on the walls, but either placed or suspended with the triangles. The highlight of my evening was literally bumping into Tom, my friend from my BA in Exeter, with whom I’d shared a great studio space in the Spacex Gallery throughout our final year. I hadn’t seen him since 2005, and we lost touch a couple of years ago when he liberated himself from Facebook. It turns out that he is doing his MA at Chelsea, we had a quick catch up and compared our recent postgrad experiences. It was a nice suprise.

Friday was quite intense with a lecture about capitalism and communism and how art fights against it, or something along those lines, followed by a reading group about the gaze, which was rather good as I was able to relate it to my studio practice.

The curators for our interim show visited us on Friday to select who would be in which show. I am going to be in Futura Oblique, the second of the two exhbitions which is being curated by Julia Alvarez. The private view is the 10th of March at the Nunnery, please feel free to come along. There is loads of other info about it and or course the first show here: http://www.wimbledonma2011.com

On Saturday I made the most of the nice(ish) weather for a walk around Hyde Park on my way to the Serpentine to catch the Philippe Parreno exhibition before it ended. I first came across Philippe Parreno’s work in 2002 when I went on a trip to Paris when I was on my Foundation course. He had No Ghost Just a Shell in the Paris Museum of Modern Art, and it just really struck a chord with me, and I’ve been unable to forget that piece of work since. The Serpentine Show was ace, each video had it’s own room, and it was a great example of how an artist can control the way a viewer sees the work as only one room had a video playing at any given time, once it ended, you followed the sound to the next room. It worked really well and related back to Firdays reading group. Invisibleboy and June 8 were my favourite pieces.