Information
Last week I had my penultimate bursary meeting with curator Matthew Hearn. I have been terrible at updating this blog, so at some point will do some back tracking to previous meetings but let me pick up with where I am now!
One of the things Matthew suggested about my work, is that it is to do with ‘information.’ I replied that no-one had said this before. Then I remembered that I have some work in an upcoming exhibition where, now I think back to the invite to show, it included the text:
“It is the idea of information and centralization that is pushed forward as the premise of this exhibition. The artist that are chosen for this exhibition are all working with worldly information, pulling this to themselves and projecting it to world, universalizing it again. The focus here lies on concrete data-notification in opposition to personal mythologies. By using data in a way that it becomes a subject itself an abstraction is created. This can give a new view on reality, or even a suggestion for a new reality.”
How many times do you need someone to tell you something about your own work?!
I suppose that when working as an artist you have a lot of different things going on in your head. Often I find that when somebody makes a suggestion it’s easy to think of the exceptions rather than why their comment is pertinent (i.e. sometimes my work does include personal stuff). The bursary meetings are definitely making me think more about active listening and how to take on board what people are saying, rather than just hoping that they will say what I would like to hear! Another of Matthew’s comments was that I should query works/formats that I don’t like or that feel ‘wrong’ for my own work and question why.
For a while I have had the sense that I talk about my work slightly wrongly. I have got into the habit of saying that I am an artist who uses text/language and that I often work site-responsively. But I am not sure if this is the crux of things. So now I need to think about this idea of ‘information.’ How is it useful for me?
After meeting Matthew I visited the exhibition ‘Learn To Read Differently’ at NGCA. It was an accident of good timing that the meeting coincided with this exhibiton by Circa projects and Information as Material. I know iam’s work to some extent already but of course the conversation with Matthew made me think about my relationship to what they do slightly differently. A short tagline form their website suggests they are an: “independent imprint that publishes work by artists who use extant material — selecting it and reframing it to generate new meanings — and who, in doing so, disrupt the existing order of things.”
This particular exhibition starts from a premise of language being both a material and social signifier, that art cannot be purely conceptual but is always aesthetic as well. This is an idea that I agree with. The exhibition also got me thinking about types of information – from the literary to the vernacular – and about where my work sits in relation to this. I have no grand conclusions but definitely food for thought.
…and continuing the theme of ‘food for thought’… I also went on the Baltic to see Heather Phillipson’s current exhibition there. One of her videos muddles the words ‘French Cuisine’ with ‘French Kissing,’ there’s a lot of wordplay in the soundtracks to her videos. The image tracks are apparently all made using video footage culled form elsewhere (a form of visual ‘information’). I really like how she plays with words and references to the body and physicality. It is in an aesthetically very different way to what I do but I find some resonances and things for me to learn from her approach.
