Bath School of Art and Design

Free Range

In July, two weeks after the degree show at Bath Spa, thirty of us are taking part in Free Range, an eight-week series of exhibitions of art and design graduate shows from around the country.

It takes place in The Old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane in East London, and runs from May 29^th to July 16^th, with each week dedicated to a different discipline including, among others, photography, fashion, and design.

As part of the organising committee I went along to the venue to check out the space.

It is huge.

So, armed with floor plans and tape measures, we set about sizing it up, measuring every last detail to bring back to the rest of the group – on the basis that you never know if someone will want to make an architectural intervention, or use the window frames for a piece of work.

Meanwhile the curating committee was huddled in the centre of the room, engaged in heavy debate about flow, sight-lines, and whether to use dividing walls between pillars or leave the entire space open.

It’s all very exciting – we get to have a show in London, with all the publicity that comes with taking part in Free Range, and we get an idea of what it’s like to organise such an event.

It’s hard work too; trying to organise committee meetings, fundraising events, transport and more, but ultimately it will all be worthwhile when the work goes up in early July.

We also get the expense of it all. The space alone costs around £7000 for the week. Add to that the costs of transport, opening night booze, catalogue, and the dreaded clean-up, and you can bet on us smashing the 10k mark by the time it’s all over. There are a fair amount of us that are willing to help out, but an equal number that are yet to show willing in that area, and so to anyone planning on taking part in Free Range or something similar, next year, I say get fundraising as early as you can – start during second year if possible, and take suggestions for names from the very beginning (beware, opinion will be divided somewhere between twenty and thirty ways on this one). Oh, and take a deposit of £200 per student that wants to take part. That should keep them interested.



Anagrams in MDF on the CNC router

For the past two years I have made a lot of text-based work, all of which has been presented in vinyl on the studio wall. Finally, at the beginning of year three, I have branched out into three dimensions.

As happens so rarely (for me) this idea has its roots in its visual effect. I mentioned to a tutor that I had been thinking about how text might look on a large piece of MDF board (painted or coated in something nice and glossy), or even cut out of it. He suggested I take a quick class in Adobe Illustrator and design something to be cut out with the CNC router they have in woodwork.

I had been considering the effect that an anagram might have – cutting a word out of a piece of wood, forming an anagram out of its letters, and presenting it alongside the cut MDF. I struggled to come up with an anagram that meant anything, then I remembered that early on in the year I had realised that I was thinking myself OUT of making work, and that this time I had to just MAKE SOMETHING in order to get the ball rolling; to see whether my instincts about the visual aspect were right.

I needed something short and snappy, with an easy anagram that might at least raise a smile, if not an eyebrow. I went with ELVIS LIVES. At this stage it’s only a trial piece, and I have since come up with a few decent anagrams, which I think I will probably make, as I really like the look of ELVIS LIVES.

Two steps back, two and a half steps forward

In two days I have learned that a bit of negative feedback can act as a soul-crushing setback or it can spur you on to do better next time, and that my own frustratingly amateur workshop knowledge can do exactly the same.

On Monday I met my tutor to discuss the mid-year self-evaluation I had recently given him. It went well, with the exception of one section, in which I had expressed my scepticism about entering the art-world (although I’m sure I really have no idea about what the ‘artworld’ really is).

I doubt that such scepticism is peculiar to me; as artists we are trained to question everything, in fact, we may even be artists as a result of our inquisitive nature. It just happens that, the day I completed my form was the very worst day of a bad cold that had already rendered me house-bound for two or three days. Suffice to say, my morale was not exactly soaring. I ended up writing that the debates around my work were of no concern to me, because I was going to make the things I wanted to make, regardless of context. My tutor pointed out to me that these claims I made are not even true – his write-up says I have a ‘firm grasp’ of the context and debates surrounding my work. I would argue that my grasp was a little looser than firm, but I digress; His report pointed out that writing such statements will always come across as naïve, and perhaps even arrogant, until such a time as I have established myself as an artist who is fully grounded in theory and context. In order to critique the establishment, one must first enter into that establishment.

Almost three whole years of studying art, and I choose my final self-evaluation to have my little moment of sticking two fingers up at the institution. Silly me, I think I just about got away with it.

Today I was all set to make a huge text piece out of sheet metal – the kind that rusts. Not really knowing what does and doesn’t rust (iron aside, of course) I asked the metalwork technician for a sheet metal that would rust. I was handed a square metre of very shiny sheet metal, which I cut into my large-scale letters. Two hours later I had my text piece ready to go. In conversation I mentioned that all I had to do now was wait for it to rust, to which the technician replied, ‘Oh, that won’t rust.’

‘Huh?’

‘It’s aluminium, it might tarnish eventually, but it won’t rust.’

Great. There was a slightly too long silence, during which my body language clearly illustrated how I was feeling. He cut it short, adding ‘Oh dear…there’s a palpable sense of disappointment in the room!’

So, not only had I spent £18 on a square metre of Aluminium that was now unusable because I had chopped it up into letters specifically for a piece that would rust, but also, it was Wednesday, and our university has recently implemented the ‘Wednesday afternoon is for sports only’ rule, meaning all workshops now close at half twelve on Wednesdays. I retired to the studio for lunch, and eventually managed to crack a smile about it – I know I’ll find some use for my aluminium text, and if not, then I guess I learned to make double-sure that I fully explain all of my requirements to the technicians before I go spending money on the materials they offer up to me.

On the plus side, tomorrow’s to-do list has just written itself – I shall remake the piece with sheet steel. I hear it’s a lot less forgiving that aluminium when it comes to delicately clipping the edges off to make giant lettering, so that should be fun!

Wall Piece (Studio Exercise)

When we moved into the third-year studios, our first job was to repair and re-paint the walls – the degree show had taken place there a few months earlier, and most of the graduates appeared to have cut and run as soon as it was all over. Some had even left their work behind!

As it turned out, my studio wall didn’t need much work, so I sort of just sat around for a day, removing the odd screw for someone, or sanding down people’s hardened poly-filler.

I thought that before I changed the wall’s appearance forever, I should document it, and perhaps get a piece of work out of it. Anyway, I hired a camera and started photographing it, square on, up its entire height.

One of my interests is the cross-over, or layering, of representation over reality. I’ve been looking for two years for a piece of work that touches on the subject. I realised that I could stick these images together, in photoshop, and print it life-size, then drape the composite image over the wall so that I would, in effect, have a representation of the wall layered over the top of the wall, acting in place of the wall.

I even thought of a clever name – ‘Wall and Piece’ – but I soon remembered that pun had already been made by Banksy, so I shortened it to ‘Wall Piece’.

I knew I wanted the representation to be seen as clearly a representation, rather than something that was attempting to be the wall. This piece is not intended to fool you into thinking it is the wall, rather that it reveals itself as a copy – by virtue of it being a composite of different-sized images, surrounded by a white border. Also; there was also no way I was going to recreate the white of the studio wall in photoshop.

An extension of this self-revealing fakery is that I also photographed the floor, so that the image now rolls out across the studio floor, curling up as an effect of it being rolled around a tube while in storage.

I like the end result, and have had several positive tutorials around it, but now that it’s done – and it is something that I had to do, regardless of whether it makes it out of the studio – I’m kind of wondering which, if any, direction I can take it in now.

Self-Evaluation

‘I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like’ is the backup of someone that doesn’t know much about art. As students, educated in the mysterious craft of objectivity, we do (or should) know much about art, so we must wave goodbye to such reactionary terms as ‘I don’t like installations’. We are taught to take a step back from our instincts in order to facilitate an unbiased criticism of the work. Then, once a year, we are expected to turn this new weapon on ourselves, and unpick our own practice, considering our own successes and shortcomings.

I finished my breakfast (egg on toast, scrambled with cream instead of milk – oh the hedonism) and while my laptop whirred into action, I brewed a coffee and started reading through my studio journal, trying to discern any sort of improvement in my methods since last year. Before long I had put that down and was lost in online social media, clearly seeking diversionary activities, but I did eventually open the document that has sat in the centre of my desktop for three weeks: SELF EVALUATION.doc

Self evaluation is not as simple as just talking about your work; I cannot say, for example, ‘I take the kind of stuff I wrote down in notepads when I worked in supermarkets and call centres, and stick it on the studio wall and call it art’ despite the amount of visiting artists that have described their practice as pretty much exactly that. Until such a time as you are the visiting artist, or at least until you are no longer an art student, you will have to answer questions about your work’s ‘conceptual and formal elements’, and ‘the development of appropriate methods and skills in the realisation of your work’.

Too often I have arrived at this stage and become dispirited, closed the document, slurped up the last of my coffee and headed for the studio, but not this time. I plunged another coffee and began.

One section asks about my ‘critical and evaluative skills’. Well, I know how to conduct myself in a crit (see earlier post, ‘crit-etiquette’), but how do I fare when tasked with locating that much vaunted objectivity when evaluating my own work? The short answer is, terribly. It is not uncommon for me to have to wait until the work is made and shown before I can understand what it really is, and how it functions as art/a thing in the world. Here’s a thought: does the fact that I have acknowledged this failing via my self-evaluation report mean I will be commended for such self-criticism of my ability to self-criticise? Does it even matter?

Another section, titled ‘Your understanding of your working context and the concerns and debates that inform it’, is probably the most important one. By ‘working context’, I guess they mean ‘which other artists work like you, and how does your work relate to theirs’ – I mentioned Keith Arnatt, a conceptual artist whose great talent was identifying the narrative or philosophical potential of an inanimate object. For the ‘debates surrounding it’, I turned again to paraphrase many a visiting artist and speaker; ‘I never read about my work, I only make it’. I didn’t actually write this, but it seems fair comment, although it doesn’t hurt to have an idea of who else is covering similar ground. Is it acceptable to resort to cliché? ‘I must make what I make, regardless of the thoughts of whoever may encounter it.’

I considered writing a ‘how to wing-it through self-evaluation’ kind of piece, which I am certain a lot of students would appreciate, but as I filled in each section I realised that I was taking self-evaluation quite seriously, and learning things about myself and my practice in the process. I know that one of the details of my first year ‘manifesto’ – not making art for art’s sake – is an ideal to which I now adhere without a thought. I realised that, despite my early-year revelation of following more projects through to completion, I have made only one of my half-dozen ideas in the first term. The other five are currently bundled under that handy catchall term ‘work in progress’, which, translated into honesty, means anything from almost ready to almost begun to almost forgotten about.

I’m off to submit it before I change my mind.

Good luck, self-evaluators!