Inedible Culinary Exercises

The subject of attending University for the purposes of developing your practice is not without documented debate, and is a debate that highlights the contrasts of learning through academia against learning through intuition and life experiences. One school of thought suggests that developing artistic practice – something intuitive and which can be used as a tool for which to comment on the failure of academic systems – simply can’t be developed meaningfully within an institution. Another school of thought suggests that a university offers a platform for which to develop practice within a suited environment – and as such encourages collaboration, knowledge exchange, and all the apparatus you need in order to apply your skills to the wider world.

With regards to experiences of attending university in order to complete a fine art (or similar) degree, a tangible pattern can be traced: The first year provides a basis for which a displine can be explored, that discipline begins to be developed in the second year, but becomes stilted by the confines or an institutionalised, formal, and objective marking scheme, that sees the need for creative practice to fall within restrictive boundaries. By the third year, the student is disillusioned: Either producing work that blindly adhreas to marking schemes for the sake of a good grade, or producing work in direct conflict to the marking scheme at the sacrifice of a good grade, but with integrity. I know ten accounts of graduates that can identify with this pattern and, whilst ten accounts is by no means comprehensive, it provides a little insight into the shortcomings of attending university.

So, given the urgency a 17 year old feels with regards to attending a University from their respective college, is their faith in academia misguided? Well, yes and no. Let me explain.

Whilst there may be advantages to gaining knowledge through artistic endeavour at university, I believe a problem arises: Not with what is being taught, but the fact that you are left unequipped with any knowledge concerning how to apply what has been taught to a wider context. Nothing is said of how to establish professional contacts, how to get your work seen away from the university environment, how to sustain the interest of contacts and there is little guidance with regard to professional development strategies.

Yet in the interests of balance, and because of the fact that, on reflection, I am satisfied enough with my university experiences, I do not wish to simply wish to sully the good work done by universities. Instead, I will simply accept the fact that they can’t do everything. It is up to the graduate to forge a meaningful career out of the knowledge gained. But the feeling of disillusionment and confusion in the first months away from university can daunt, overwhelm and even allow you to lose faith in your abilities and knowledge entirely.

So, how do we combat this feeling? Well, by providing some kind of interim platform, not constricted by an academic establishment. How would such a platform manifest itself? Well, I’m still connecting the dots on that question. But an artist studio, tailored to the needs of graduates and with a programme of cooperative events, critiques and workshops, sounds like a suitable starting point.

A happy and prosperous New Year to you all. Now that the formalities are out of the way I would like to swiftly introduce you to fourteen things I wish to do in order to develop my career in 2014:

1. Produce a quality body of work. The nature of my work is temporary, subject to mould, decomposition and rotting. Whilst I wish to retain this, I also wish to create a disciplined and permanent body of work, which will be informed by my previous endeavours. I wish to expand on the theme of subverting the genre of still life by focussing on specific avenue of empirical enquiry.

2. Sell my paints. I’m not talking about a few one-off sales. I wish to establish these products as part of my identity, and if the product is unique and of good quality then my identity will be enhanced.

3. Go to more exhibitions. This is a simple one and probably something that all artists wish they did more. Intrigue, inspiration, networking and the possible instigation of collaboration can all derive from going to more exhibitions and workshops.

4. Go to more restaurants. As an artist directly involving food, and the experience of eating food, into my work, I think it is appropriate to eat at as many restaurants as possible – not to mention a good excuse.

5. Carry out my upcoming exhibitions with success. Bit of an obvious one this, but worth pointing out nevertheless. I want my work to be well received, to make a bit of money and for it to lead to other endeavours.

6. Look for opportunities. Kind of obvious, again. But any opportunity that grabs me should be applied for. I want to get involved with as much stuff as I can.

7. Become better at networking. This is something I need to work on: Whilst I am ok at online networking, networking in the real world is something that I still shy away from: Probably due to my lack of experience. Well, this year I want to change that.

8. Do more workshops. One big revelation of 2013 for me was the value of workshops. Not just to the participants but to your own practice. I already have to paint making workshops lined up next year. But the more of them I do, the better.

9. Make a book. I’ve wanted to make an art book in the style of a recipe book for years. This year I’m ditching all the excuses and going for it.

10. Link my practice to a strand of the local community. Or rather, I wish for my work to be relevant outside the art world. Food, of course, will forever be an essential part of human endeavour. I would think that linking my practice directly to an organisation that deals with food in some way to be mutually beneficial and could develop my practice in a way that corresponds to the local community.

11. Improve my website. Actually I wish to improve my online presence in general.

12. Hire a venue for a call for submission. I have wanted to instigate a call-out to artists to submit work under the theme of ‘Video Games’ for ages. This year I hope I can achieve this, or at least move several steps towards it.

13. Find relevant part-time work. Something that I can use to inform and develop my practice whilst receiving a consistent monthly wage would be lovely.

14. Make money. Experience has taught me of the stigma attached to appropriating yourself as an artist who actually wants to make money. Experience has also taught me to disregard these stigmas and seek to achieve your own goals.

I think these goals are relatively modest, and can help lay a foundation for an established career as an artist. I am still very much at the beginning of my career, but am taking steps to become more prolific and more successful.

I would like to think that the above list resonated with you in some way. And I would observe that my overarching goal, like the goal of every professional artist for this year, is clear: Do more.

In the midst of the excitement of reaching our Kickstarter funding (An embarrassingly big ‘thank you’ to everyone to contributed and who helped spread the word, incidentally) I have shamefully neglected to describe and assess the recent open studio event I participated in at my studio at KIAC. So here goes.

I have only been involved in one other open studio event prior to this. It was at University a few years ago. It consisted mainly of drinking tea and waiting for someone – anyone – to show up. Inevitably, no-one did, and I left the event with the assumption that all Open Studio events would be like this.

However, last weeks’ open studio, thankfully, was different. Whilst naturally it still involved drinking tea, at least this time I had people to share a cup of tea with. Whilst the amount of people visiting my studio was by no means vast, all involved certainly responded and identified with my work and by concepts. And the simple act of talking to a stranger about my work helped consolidate my ideas and conceptual principles.

Indeed, something I learnt as the event progressed, is that talking, in this context, is a powerful tool: It is used to generate and sustain intrigue, to sell both yourself and your work and to establish connections with others, which in turn may lead to something grander. In a studio environment, it is harder for the work to speak for itself: Work isn’t visually isolated, with accompanying text and an underlying theme. It is up to you to fill in these gaps in order to pull the work from it’s physical trappings, thus allowing it to be contemplated and identified with, if you wish to succeed in an open studio event.

However, my experience was by no means perfect, and I think that’s partly down to me. My studio could have been tarted up somewhat in order to make it look more appealing to the visitors. I vaguely attempted to arrange works of art in an orderly fashion, but many visitors simply glances at my studio and proceeded to walk on by without any additional thought. I think I could have made it look more appealing and more engaging in order to achieve a more positive initial response from visitors.

I also wished to sell jars of my own paint at the event. This did not happen and was a bit of a missed opportunity. I could blame the fact that the empty jars I needed in order to store the paint were only delivered to me on the same day as the event itself, but really it’s my own fault. I knew when the Open Studio was going to be, and I simply didn’t order the jars quickly enough. As I say, this was a bit of a missed opportunity, and one that should have been seized in order to generate more interest in my work.

Anyway, lets not finish on a downer, it was still a worthwhile and enjoyable experience. And the negative elements of the experience are small enough to learn from, without having to label the whole event a all-encompassing, abject, vomit-inducing failure. And that’s always good.

If you have been wondering where I have escaped to for the last month or so (and let’s face it, most of you have) I can joyously claim that I’ve actually been getting some bloody work done. The last few weeks have been a relentless pursuit of finished articles before the bite of winter renders the studio I work in uninhabitable. I find it a bit of a struggle to exact a balance between making stuff and networking. Often I fluctuate in preference between one and the other. Over the last few weeks though, a very tangible rhythm has emerged that has resulted in a relative abundance of finished works.

So where the bloody hell are these finished works, I hear you cry. Well, I’m not going to show you them all. Instead, I shall tantalise you simply by producing one piece of work at a time. So let’s start things off in style shall we? Ladies and gentlemen, I give to you, a spice rack. Yes, a spice rack:

This is not just any old spice rack though. Here, I wish to initiate a discourse between the nature of paint and painting. Applying meaning to paint by attaching experiential sentiment to the bottles the paint is contained within. The painting itself is passive, acting merely as a reference to the bottles. The painting is completed to allow an audience to further identify with the paints, but it is not a means to an end in its own right. It is within the bottles from which meaning is attached, and so the idea of commercialism and the prospect of purchasing memory and sentiment that is removed from personal experience is called into question.

I am toying with the idea of presenting it for the John Moores painting prize next year. I believe it challenges the idea of what can be considered a painting and as such, it certainly possesses a level of intrigue. What do you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this piece in order for me to attain a reasonable understanding of an audience’s response.

Wednesday is a good time for me to blog. It is the one day of the week at I can always entirely dedicate to artistic practice. For some parts of the week I have to be a librarian in order to pay the bills, other parts I must adhere to the trivial humane necessities such as ‘socialising’ and ‘shopping for clothes so that I don’t look like a tramp’. But Wednesday is very much ‘Studio Day’ and as such, a whole wealth of creative development needs to be documented, analysed and reflected upon. So let’s get going.

Nutmeg, again, takes precedence over my empirical exploration. I am beginning to develop the idea of merely visually translating sound into an emerging investigation regarding how memory, and the connotations surrounding memory, can be rendered visual. I want these works to be poised on the axis of a reality that can be remembered and a reality that never existed. It intrigues me that there are similarities between imagination and memory, for neither of them presently physically exist.

My work seeks to create discourse between the audience and the audience’s perception of eating. For although the work is a description of the tactile and aural sensation of eating, grounded in memory, the work itself is created using nutmeg, known for its hallucinogenic qualities. This allows the audience to call into question what is being viewed. Is it rooted in reality, or fantasy? It exposes the idea that memory can be unreliable, tentative and sometimes based on nostalgia. It also suggests that the senses can be fooled, and that what is being seen doesn’t necessarily reflect what is being experienced by other sensory outputs.