ARTISTS TALKING

# 1 [21 November 2008]

I've been considering starting this blog for quite a while now - technically it would probably have made more sense when I was working towards my recent solo show at Fold Gallery, or perhaps when I first started my MA course. However, I've been having a little difficulty with the concept of it - what 'project' am I doing? What would people be interested in reading about (assuming that this is one of the reasons I'm writing it)? How honest can you be in a piece of informal text when you don't know who's reading it?

I've been having a few conversations with other artists recently, and have basically come to the conclusion that I'm interested in how they go about making work, where their ideas come from, how they develop, so I figured that other people would probably be intersted in this too. And so the blog has started.

A note on the title: I find writing artists' statements incredibly difficult. How do you formalise a series of ideas which are connected, but not in a linear form? I write things down with arrows connecting all the various strands, often ending up writing upside down on the page, to get everything in. The only time I feel that I can really explain what it is I'm doing is in a conversation with someone. And usually that takes quite a while, and I often need my notes. I've tried writing a statement as a conversation, but the act of trying to write it made it self-concious and a bit false. So basically, I'm seeing this as a way of getting those conversations I'm having with myself out of my notebooks and into an arena where they might help other people have a clearer idea of what I'm doing. And my doing that, I'll be getting my thoughts more organised, and that will therefore help me. 

# 2 [24 November 2008]

I've been spending a while trying to really get it straight in my head what is  at the core of my practice. There's loads of things I'm interested in (in fact I find it quite difficult to edit things down) but I'm trying to really gets to grips with how all these strands are connected, and why I'm interested in them.

As I think I've already explained, I don't think thoughts tend to follow a linear narrative (mine certainly don't), so instead of trying to elaborate here on all these different aspects, I've photographed my most recent mapping of these ideas. I could read it when I just checked the image on my screen, so hopefully should be okay online.

# 3 [5 December 2008]

I've been feeling a bit numb recently. I think this is mostly due to reading lots of things I really ought to read (and many are really interesting - I've got books out on concepts behind collecting, interpreting objects, installation, aesthetics and The Poetics of Space) but then finding that it's quite difficult to actually make work. I've never gotten the balance right - I either read and think so much that I can't make work, or make work, so that when I look back on it later, feels rather concept-less.

I'm trying to work out my reasons for using the materials I use, and working with the objects I'm working with. I've often worked in quite a process based way, but I don't feel satisfied with that anymore - I don't think that it's challenging me intellectually enough anymore. The trouble is, a lot of things, I think I just like them, because they’re attractive visually.

The difficulty is that everything is so inter-reliant, that it's difficult to separate things, and then I find myself thinking about ways to go about thinking - I've decided that the way to try and solve this is to plan out what I need to make and what I need to read about. Otherwise I'll just not get anything done and I hate that.

# 4 [15 December 2008]

Rather bizarre experience today – I received an email directly addressed to me from a-n about these blogs, only to find I was quoted in the first couple of lines. It’s mildly peculiar to read something addressed to you, that you’re speaking in – kind of like having a conversation with yourself. Apparently, I “dedicate my blog to a critical self-reflection” – and there I was concerned I was partaking in a large amount of self-indulgent rambling.

However, it has got me writing again – my head’s been getting a bit full the last couple of weeks, but I have made quite a bit of progress on where I’m coming from. More on that later.

For the moment, let me explain what I’ll be doing for the next week or two. I’m using a project space until the 5^th Jan, so omitting time to visit family for Christmas, this gives around 10 days to work out some ideas, and try things out. Access to the internet on site isn’t yet possible, so although I’m writing this in the space, I’ll be posting it up later this evening, along with a few photos of Day One.

The dress on the mannequin is the in-progress culmination of two months work. The idea is that a second hand dress is used to suggest a trace of a person - it is stiffened in such a way, that the fabric takes on the shape a body, whilst also being ephemeral and fragile. I’ve spent a long time trying to find a way of chemically ‘thinning’ the cotton fibres in the fabric, only to have nothing work in the manner I want so far. I’ve therefore gone for option two for the purposes of these two weeks – I’ve been through the time consuming process of pulling out individual threads from a thin fabric, hence making it even more fragile. I’m applying starch to stiffen it, so it should hopefully be strong enough by the end of the week to support itself and the shape which is has taken on from the mannequin. A note on the mannequin – I wanted it to be quite a realistic form, so instead of using a dress-maker’s dummy, I did a body cast of a friend, then created a resin and fibre-glass positive. This took a long time. A really long time.

The other part of what I’ve been doing today is drawing lace and doily shapes onto the walls, which I will be ‘carving’ into said walls with a dremel tool in a few minutes.  The positioning of these in the space is important – they need to be stumbled across, not particularly obvious at first sight. I’m putting them in corners, creeping up the wall, hiding out of sight. They’re a bit lonely, a little lost. And that loneliness, that sense of loss, decay and fragility is what I think my practice is about.

# 5 [16 December 2008]

Today, I've mostly been using a rotary tool to mechanically scratch paint off the base of a brick column. This has succeeded in giving me a sore back and knees, but as resolutely failed to do what I wanted it to.

When I've done this previously, the layers of paint beneath the surface were a pale colour, and even if I scratched too deeply and went back to the plaster, this wouldn't matter particularly. However, there seems to be some black paint under there somewhere, which means that the entire design is looking too dark, too obvious. (And also a bit like pencil lead, which ironically I used to draw the design on the wall in the first place. The way it looks currently, I really needn't have bothered with this time consuming scratching process).   

When you get close enough you can see the layers of colour, which is interesting enough, but overall it's not working. Might try painting over it tomorrow, so all that's left is a scaring on the brickwork, a trace of the shape. 

# 6 [17 December 2008]

I’ve been thinking about how my moods are associated with my work, and how they go in waves quite a bit. I’ll feel like I’m on to something, I’ll have a rush of ideas which need to be written down very quickly, and I feel really energised. However, that pinnacle on this rollercoaster is inevitably followed by a very low dip, which brings me crashing back to questioning everything, and feeling numb and muddy in my head.

I woke up the latter this morning. When I’m like this, I find it really hard to focus on what I’m making, and really feel like just giving up on the day, but at the same time I know if I do that, then the feeling will just continue – it’s basically finding a way of working myself out of it. I achieved this, this afternoon by making myself a list of each stage I needed to do in order to photograph the dress piece and the doily carving. I then made myself work through this list, and gradually the numbness faded, and I began to think clearly again.

I realised I’d been thinking of the dress as a dress, rather than as a vehicle to suggest the absence of a person. So I’ve tightened the fabric over the mannequin, and I’ve coated the fabric with more starch and watered down PVA, so when it dries, it should be quite sturdy, and also really get the shape of the figure across. I’m not sure I like the way that the fabric finishes with the hem-line at the moment. It seems a bit sudden, like a line being drawn underneath something to divide what is below from what is above. I wonder if there’s a way of making it seem to fade away, like you can do with paint?

I’ve also been thinking about this concept of blogging again. I’ve found myself narrating what I’m thinking in my head, mentally dictating sentences to write. Does this mean that the process of writing my thoughts for this blog is having an effect on my thinking process?

# 7 [15 January 2009]

Well, it's been a bit of a while since my last post - Christmas, New Year, and having a rush of applications to complete have taken over recently. I've also been spending an inordinate amount of time sitting in front of this computer either arguing with it about colour calibration or researching various ideas.

I'm attaching a photograph of the dress piece I completed just after New Year and photographed in the project space I was working in. I've recently applied for some funding for training in alternative photographic processes (using liquid emulation and making tintypes, a late 19th century process), but for the moment, I'm trying to get the colour accurate for digital printing. Which is a mission in itself, as my computer resolutely refuses to stick to the correct calibration I've worked out for it. Anyway, until that is solved, I've attached an image to give an idea of how that last piece of work is looking.

I thought it worked quite well in the space, until my partner told me the space made him think of some sort of underground torture chamber, which gave the dress rather different connotations. I was seeing the work set up there as a chance to work out how to photograph in those types of interiors, what sort of lighting etc, and for that it worked - I'm now looking for alternative locations to set up a shoot (which preferably avoid aforementioned implications).  

I'm off to meet one of the Keepers at the Discovery Museum later today, to have a nose through the objects in their social history archives and collections. I'm looking for items which have some information about their previous owners, some sort of story attached, as I think this might be another direction to take this work - an actual history or story, rather than it all being anonymous. I was reading various theories about collecting over Christmas, and looking at some research about what sort of people ‘collect’, and what is collected. As I was reading, I was thinking about how after we’ve died, all that is physically left behind are the objects we’ve amassed during our lifetimes. So by collecting, (either consciously knowing it to be a collection, or not) is that an attempt to create a permanence, a physical grounding after we’ve gone?    

# 8 [24 January 2009]

Apparently, my blog was one of the most read last month. I’m rather flattered that people are reading it, although it also feels a little peculiar at the same time – by trying to discuss my work in quite an honest, day-by-day way, I’ve made a conscious decision to omit ‘art-speak’; but in doing so, it has all become more personal, which is a slightly un-nerving act in itself.

The format of writing in a blog makes this easier though, I think. By putting my ideas in this context, it’s automatically less formal, and there’s less of a temptation to add some pretention into the mix. This is also about the only time I write anything for Other People to read without asking my partner (who has a degree in writing) to look over, re-arrange my sometimes rather erratic sentence structure, and generally smarten up. However, I’ve looked back over my posts so far, and I still feel happy with them – I wonder if there’s a way of taking extracts to include in that elusive Artist’s Statement?

Looking around the archives at the Discovery Museum was great. They’ve got a fantastic collection of objects, which I could have nosed through for quite a while. What interested me more when I got there though, were not so much the objects which they know a reasonable amount about, but the ones that they don’t. There are quite a few objects which the museum owns from previous collections, when the cataloguing and record keeping wasn’t as detailed and accurate as it is now. I quite like the idea that a museum is effectively there as a place to house knowledge, but when the museum lacks this knowledge, it heightens / creates a sense of loss about that particular object.

I’m going to be spending the rest of the afternoon reading some essays about collecting, and making a few notes. There was recently a call out for papers for a conference called ‘Museums and Biographies’. They want to ‘draw together analyses of representation, material culture and personality’ and they are ‘inviting papers that can cast a new light on the study of lives, objects and display’. My work seems to fit rather nicely into this, and they are asking for artists as well as historians and museologists, but as I’ve never done anything like this before, I’m not quite sure where to begin. Hence the reading.  

# 9 [2 February 2009]

My computer decided to behave itself with regard to its colour calibration for a good hour the other day, which gave me chance to play around with colours and tones of some shots I took in the project space. I still need to get these printed to see how they work in reality, but these look quite good on my machine, so I thought I’d upload a couple of examples.

I quite like the slightly painterly qualities these images have, and how they feel much less warm, after getting rid of the yellow cast from the spotlights.

I’ve been thinking along the lines of photographs becoming works in their own right, so that they are more than straight documentation. In order to do this, it’s important that they become an object also – by this I mean that they the photograph would be more than the image: it would be the surface it’s printed on, the smell and the weight of it, in addition to the depiction of the space. If I’m successful in the funding I applied for recently, it would mean that I would be able to have some training in using alternative photographic processes. (By the word ‘alternative’, read nineteenth / early twentieth century ways of producing a photographic image). I’m particularly interested in tintype, which in layman’s terms, was basically like the equivalent of an early Polaroid, and using liquid emulsion, as I quite like the idea of being able to create photographic prints onto a range of different surfaces. I like the tangibility these processes entail, and also how using these methods would mean losing some control as to how they turn out - the prints would then be unique.

On a completely unrelated matter, not being particularly familiar with the art of blogging, I’ve only just realised that people have been making comments on my posts. Apologies for that, I wasn’t ignoring you, I was just rather slow. I’ve just responded, but rather annoyingly, despite being allowed 400 words, the comments feature doesn't seem to be showing them all after I pasted them in.

Which is a little irritating really.  

# 10 [12 February 2009]

February 12^th continued

I've tried to explain this work and where it's coming from three times in the last two days, due to giving a talk and having tutorials with both Minty and George. It's gotten to the stage that I find myself repeating particular phrases, so that now they feel like self-made clichés. I also found that during my talk, I had pretty much the same problem I have with writing a statement - a linear narrative doesn't work. I've got ideas which spin off from ideas, which then produce more. I've got reams of images, notes, essays and thoughts which influence what I'm making, and I know there are connections, but they seem vague and insubstantial. This annoys me because on one hand I like a level or organisation and exactness - I make lists so I know what needs to be done and then I can feel satisfied when I've ticked items of and have a sense of achievement. But the work itself is about the exact opposite - it's about things which aren't there, empty spaces, absence, fragility... all stuff it's hard to put your finger on, for want of a better phrase. I like making things, but I also use pre-existing objects. I'm interested in how these things are neglected, but I take care of them. I'm creating things, and yet I like emptiness. I like finding these objects, but I like that they're also lost. And so these layers of contradictions seem also to be an inherent part of my practice.