Bath School of Art and Design

Some Work (2012)

Some projects never make it out of the studio. Perhaps they are under-developed and abandoned before they get the chance to become work. Other projects are over-developed, banged out of shape by an over-thinking that scares us out of showing them to the world. Some work is a joke.

Some work (2012) is a joke.

We were summoned to a year-group meeting, in which the head of third year presented us with a slide show on what the final few months of our degree had in store. This included much timetable information, and a couple of opportunities for exhibiting work in the run-up to the degree show. He also explained (for the umpteenth time) the marking criteria, and how much of a portion the studio module would constitute, in relation to the overall degree score.

The big screen paused on the marking criteria, and what a student would need to provide in order to achieve such unreachable grades as 90-99 and 85-89 (Outstanding and Exceptional Firsts, respectively – or were they the other way around?). He moved on, but not before his attention was briefly diverted from the screen as he fielded one or two questions about percentages.

The screen froze on the description of what a student would be expected to provide in order to obtain a score of 1-9. Has anyone ever been awarded such a low grade? Probably. The specific text, held there on the big screen for all of a minute and a half, read as follows:

‘Some work, containing virtually nothing of any relevance, depth or merit.’

‘What a wonderful description’ I thought, and jotted it down. Some work was born. I had a large chunk of cut-off MDF from ELVISLIVES (see post #8) and thanks to Graphics departments recently acquired vinyl-cutter, a cheap and easy way to make immediate text work. That afternoon I drew up the text in an Illustrator document and by the end of the day the piece was complete.

It’s such an in-joke that I doubt it will ever go beyond the studio, but it’s great having it there, leaning against the studio wall; useless.



The Personal Statement

Recently, all of my writing time has been taken up by press-releases and exhibition blurbs. On top of that I’ve been trying to write my personal statement – 500 words that go in the front of my research folder, that sum up me, my practice, and my work, all at once.

Part of being an artist is being able to explain why you do what you do. Some of us may feel affronted when asked to explain why our work exists, but artists have a responsibility to understand what it is that they are aiming to achieve – even those of us that are merely groping in an area should at least be able to describe the area in which we grope.

Not that I begrudge those artists that present a bohemian aloofness, when met with the ‘why’ and the ‘what’ questions. God knows, in three years of study I have seen my fair share of visiting artists that have taken that approach. While one is a student, however, one must justify one’s every turn, be that in tutorials, group critiques or a written personal statement that is assessed at the end of the year.

But how?

Having read the personal statement of every student that took part in last year’s Free Range show, I can see that quality varies greatly, and not just in use of language, but in the extent to which the artist clearly defines the parameters of his or her practice.

I started thinking about my key considerations when making work; themes that regularly appear, and concerns that I feel ought to be brought to attention. I use text a lot, so language comes into it, along with interpretation. But what is my work about? I think it’s about everything, but that is easy to say and difficult to prove, because it’s always about something. So it’s about specific things, like how language constructs meaning, and how interaction imparts narrative to all sorts of phenomena. If my work is about language, then it is also about cultures, and perhaps how language and culture are inextricably bound in a kind of feedback loop, where one is constantly informing the other, and vice versa. Authorship is a big issue too; at the beginning, where I take words or phrases that are already in the world and bend and re-present them to suit my needs; and after the work is presented, especially in my more recent work, like Cards, which is about the viewer continuing to have a direct experience of the work after they leave the gallery, and therefore continuing to construct the meaning of the piece long after I have made and shown it.

It’s not an easy task, talking and writing about your work, which is probably why so many of those early student crits are filled with awkward silences, and why so many of those visiting artists just refuse to make anything remotely resembling a personal statement. It is, however, essential to becoming an artist, and that’s the plan in the long term; to figure out the what’s and the why’s, until we reach a point where the work says it all for us, and we no longer have to worry about fitting our entire practice into 500 words for assessment.

UNTITLED LETTERPRESS PROJECT

I took an induction into letterpress at the beginning of the year, and lost myself in the process. That is to say I spent days – weeks even – in the letterpress room, trying out the range of possibilities that this new (to me anyway) technology presents.

I tried printing; I tried embossing; I tried a combination of embossing and printing. I tried repetition, the same phrase printed over and over;

…It’s never too late It’s never too late It’s never too late….

When writing, my natural state is to pour it out and edit later, and in that way I can produce a thousand words really quickly, and come back to refine them the next day (unless it’s a blog post, which are better off posted immediately after being written), but when it comes to making my thoughts visual, the editing becomes even more dramatic, until often I’m down to three or four words.

Untitled Letterpress Project involves taking phrases, sentences, or combinations of words that I have had floating around for a while, but for which I could never find the appropriate medium. Indeed, it may be that letterpress is still not right for these ideas. We have a crit next week with Des Hughes, so we shall see.

I have three pieces. The first, It’s never too late, is printed in black ink, with the exception of the word never, which is embossed. The piece is a response to the old clichéd attitude of it being too late, the embossed ‘never’ implies a whisper – over the shoulder or in one’s own head – reminding us to never give up; that there is still time.

The second, The Blue Hour, is printed deep blue. Its origin is the old Norse term for dusk, and was intended to be presented alongside a stack of Cards (see previous post) which had the word Dusk printed on them, but actually, I think I prefer to leave the origin or meaning ambiguous.

The third, exquisite tenderness, is entirely embossed, and like the others, its materiality leads its reading in a certain direction.

In terms of presentation, I first strung them up with invisible thread, and had them kind of floating in front of the wall, on two tiny bulldog clips. I realised that the invisible thread became a feature in itself, and so resolved to remove it, and simply nail the small clips to the wall, and hang each piece from just one bulldog clip. This method seems to work; the clip is what it is, and no attempt is made to hide the way the pieces are hung, thereby minimising the attention drawn by the framing.

My thinking around these pieces is kind of just beginning to take shape, and I am still in the early stages of bringing my text down off the wall and into physical space, be that on pieces of MDF (see ELVIS LIVES post), or embossed into handmade paper. By all means comment and give me something else to think about.