DEGREES UNEDITED

# 2 [30 March 2010]

I can hardly believe that it is Easter already. the time has just whizzed past and it is not very long at all until our graduate show. I am ruefully remembering some of the previous year's third year students telling me how fast your final year goes by. In our second year we had the luxury of time, for certain, and the end of the course seems a little scary from this current perspective.

I have been working in installation a great deal and from this I am currently exploring questions relating to the presentation of my work. What I need to know is whether the end work needs to be the actual 'live' installation, a video of that installation or a series of photographs of it. I find that the records of installation or performance art, such as the photos of one of these events in a textbook, can be enormously intriguing in their own right. I believe that sometimes the very ambiguity of the recorded images lends an extra dimension to the original piece. Sometimes this is a theatrical dimension and sometimes it is narrative (or a combination of these and other elements).

An example of this would be found in the Joseph Beuys 'action' called 'I Like America and America Likes Me'. Although Beuys spent three days locked in a cage with a live coyote (semi-tame, the coyote was a little less dangerous than it looked), the most thrilling moment of the performance was when Beuys goaded the coyote into pulling on his cloak. The resulting images are fantastic: Beuys created an opportunity for some truly iconic photographs to be taken, thus ensuring that the stock of his own self-created legendary persona could rise. Without the images, the story would not have been so striking: they keep an 'action' that occurred in 1974 alive today in a quite dramatic fashion.

So these are my current concerns. I have set up an installation and videod and photographed it. I have edited some of the video into a short film, which was a very useful thing to do because I can immediately see where my filming techniques are weak. For my particular work, the camera needs to move smoothly to give the final piece a professional finish. When the camera is hand-held, the shots are too wobbly, which is distracting when you come to view the film. I have seen other work where the camera-wobble was beneficial to the piece in question, but that is not going to work for this, so it will be necessary to use a proper video tripod, for smooth movement, and perhaps a dolly (wheels for your tripod and camera), to get some running shots.

I feel as if I am swimming in a sea of technicality at the moment so, if you see me waving, I have probably begun to drown...

# 1 [12 February 2010]

At this stage we have just had feedback for our first module, which began in October. My feedback was good, which seems faintly miraculous, considering the massive build-up of stress that accompanied the dreaded Christmas Holidays (add your own appropriate dramatic music here, mine sounds like the shower scene from Psycho).

In fact, I recently mused that I had never fully appreciated the meaning of the word pressure until now. I now know that it is a feeling that something is bearing down on you, crushing the air from your lungs and making it hard to keep your body upright under its influence. Cheerful, eh? Anyway, what with the dissertation hanging over my head like an axe about to fall, home life just seems to get in the way sometimes.

How in Pollock's name I passed anything I will never know, and if someone finds me collapsed on the side of a road with no marbles left at all, please escort me to the nearest pub and buy me a stiff drink (for medicinal purposes only of course...).

Hereford College of Arts is a small college, which means that we get a lot more tutor contact than most higher education establishments. This is a real boon when the final year of your degree is halfway through already and the graduate show starts to loom onto the horizon. Part of the difficulty of the degree is in simultaneously being creative and experimental, whilst being aware that the show is not far off and you need something impressive by then.

My work involves projecting videos into spaces to transform them from ordinary spaces into something extraordinary. Working in installation can be a little frustrating at times as space is always limited and it is necessary to build and then dismantle set-ups in a short space of time. I do not have the luxury of being able to leave work set up and then returning to contemplate it later. Perhaps this is pop-up art?