Project Me

The last couple of weeks in particular at work, that is my paid work / employment, have led me think a lot about the artwork that I make and just how difficult it would be for anyone – individual, company, authority, or institution – to own a piece. Currently my artworks demand the kind of commitment that is very off putting. They are things that are carefully balanced … I mean literally rather than metaphorically, things that are prone to collect dust and or fade, things require my (or a technician’s) presence for installation / hanging. Not things that are easy to move from place to place, nor things that perhaps will endure exhibition for more than a few months, nor handling by a public or employees, nor a simple wiping down with a lint-free cloth to keep them looking fresh.

This raises some really interesting questions for me … many are not new but they have acquired a certain poignancy and urgency as I note the discussions regarding the maintenance (or lack of it) of artworks’ material qualities. I have mentioned before my long-standing ambition of being an artist with works stored in proper crates … what I thought was a bit of daydream might be something deeper. How do I care for my work? If something is going to be packed away for a year or more between exhibitions what needs to done to make sure that it is doesn’t get at best damaged and at worst destroyed while it is back at the studio?

The very least that I want to investigate are some ’entry level’ archival cartons for the textile works. Not just investigate but actually invest in them too! I have a feeling that this will then require deeper shelves to accommodate the broader flatter boxes. Rearranging the various archives at work is inspiring me to rearrange things at the studio … to take stock of what I have – both finished pieces and raw materials, as well as tools and equipment, and to see if I can make things better here too.

The question of what I actually make and how it is presented needs also to be addressed if I want to be more widely exhibited and or bought – both of which I have absolutely no objection to.

Returning from my mini residency / open studio / days at the artists’ club, and in preparation for the mini residency at Köttinspektionen I have tidied away the ties that were hanging on the studio wall as well as two artworks that were hanging above them. It makes such a difference having clear walls … it feels as though there is space to breath and to make. I must remember to give time to putting things away and to restoring order after exhibitions, events, and projects. This is certainly where more order in the storage portion of the studio would be an advantage – and one that I can make happen. I also need to remember to label the boxes so that I can easily identify where things are when I need them again … and / or periodically check that it’s still relevant to have a box full of whatever it is that I haven’t touched in six months or a year.

I used the mini residency at the artist club to begin unfolding the contemporary context of Verdandi’s 1907 Spring Exhibition – who were the committee members at that time, what was happening in society, what was happening in Uppsala, and what were the connections between these things. There were / are connections … some strong … some tangential … some of my own creating(?), some maybe not recognised at the time. Now I want to concentrate on materiality for the Köttinspektionen residency. So was a go around the studio I start to identify things to take with me. These include as yet unused materials – I can’t say new materials because the pile of pillowcases that I have in mind are not new in themselves though they are relatively new to me, and have not yet been a part of an installation or project, I think that I want ot take some ’used’ materials too – things that have been used in other installations and projects, for example Mr Dandy Blue’s suit, hat and shoes, the blue camouflage net from M: meeting place, and the plastic green-house from Hot Housing.

There is both a comfort and a concern in taking used materials. The comfort is that they are already a part of my vocabulary. The concern is that belong to already executed projects. There feels to be an equal measure of comfort and concern in the material’s familiarity. That familiarity might be a meaningful starting point … a point of departure for a new journey …I don’t have to start from noll … if I know where I am leaving from then it be easier to know when I moving on – even if I don’t know when of where I will arrive … departures and arrivals!

I do enjoy being at the studio over the summer. There are very few of us here and it makes it feel somehow even more special. Those of us who are here get on well and enjoy each other’s company over lunch or chatting in each others’ doorways. There is definitely something intimate about being just three or four in this sprawling building. There is also an uncommon calmness to it all.

At work yesterday I had just been speaking with a doctor about re-hanging and complementing the artworks in the eye department of the city hospital when my manager AB called me. He was also at the hospital and invited me to join him looking for shelves in a clinic that was empty and awaiting refurbishment.

I was leaving a room when a small box caught my eye – it was on a shelf that wasn’t the kind that we were looking for. I took the box down – it was obviously old … a very particular shade of green … it was small and sat comfortably on the palm of my hand. Walking to the next room I flipped the two metal clasps open and lifted the lid. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking at – a pair of ’jewel’ decorated things … hair decorations?

AB took a photo and did an image search … it turns out that they are a pair of (potentially) 18th century shoe buckles. We had been told that we could take anything we wanted from the rooms so, along with some shelves that we subsequently found, the shoe buckles came with us.

Back at the office I typed ’shoe buckle’ into google and the first thing that came up was the children’s rhyme One two buckle my shoe …. I got a cold shiver – Elena’s most recent work is called Five six pick up sticks … a continuation of the same rhyme. What a very odd coincidence … what a correspondence!

I finished work and immediately called Elena. It was the second odd coincidence that she had heard that day. An artist friend and collaborator of hers has just found out that a rare and expensive medicine that she has been prescribed for years (after much toing and froing with the NHS) is derived from a particular sub-set of the same marine species that she was been researching – her PhD project. She has had no idea about this but her subject has literally been in her blood for year! A far greater coincidence than my shoe buckles … really makes me wonder about why we are drawn to particular themes and subjects … and how we should follow our instincts even when we can’t explain or rationalise why we are doing something. Sometimes there are other things at work … things that we, as artists, need to embrace without recourse to logic or reason. This seems a truly timely reminder for me as I continue to turn over the material that I am gathering inspired by Eugène Jansson’s 1907 appearance in Uppsala.

In the meantime my mind is full of questions about shoe buckles …

I am fascinated by connections … and by gaps – my short research-based residency at Uppsala Artists’ Club is revealing plenty of both. The residency is giving me time to focus on the new chapter of my Following Eugène project. I find it easy to lose myself in history. This week is about the history … I hadn’t realised quite how much I would be focused on looking at what was going on, who was involved, who knew each other – or who were at least in the same place at the same time.

A morning at the city’s public archive revealed that artist Richard Bergh was a member of Verdandi … so was art critic and collector Klas Fårhaeus … as was Frey Svens(s)on a doctor who after Nils Santesson’s high profile court case (1907) advocated for homosexuality (or perhaps more accurately homosexual acts) to be redefined as a sickness rather than a crime. Nils Santesson photographed both Eugène Jansson and his naked models at Eugènes studio and Stockholm’s naval bath house.

Bergh was also a member of the Opponents, later the Artists’ Union, several of whom exhibited in Verdandi’s exhibitions … Eugène Jansson was also a member of the Opponents and the Artists’ Union. Unfortunately the minutes from unions meetings 1905 – 1909 are missing, so there’s nothing relating to the 1907 Uppsala exhibition.

Why do I find it so interesting when names pop up in various different contexts? I think it has to do with the Venn diagram-ness of life – the overlaps … the possible meetings and exchanges that might have happened between people who happened to be in the same place at the same time … that I begin to appreciate the complexities and randomness of things that with hind-sight seem important … significant … pivotal.

I am allowing myself to enjoy this research and these reflections. At the same time I wonder what do to with this information … this stuff … how does it become a contemporary project that has worth and meaning?

Two fantastically productive, inspirational, and enjoyable days with Elena Thomas here at the studios. We really got into our stride on day two – making something that existed between our individual practices. Day one was more mapping and testing … seeing where things overlapped, where they corresponded, where they were in dialogue, where they retained their distinctions. The occasions where distinctions persisted were (of course) of less interest to us – the point of Elena’s micro-residency was to play with correspondency.

It was great to have the more neutral space of the project room rather than being in my studio. Now I wonder what it would be like to apply for a residency elsewhere with Elena … somewhere neither of us is familiar with – that’s another idea for another day!

The exchanges were very material – starting almost modestly and developing (by the end of day two) in to something that occupied all available space. The first table top installation was something that was looked at – literally looked down on. The final installation was something that invited … required … demanded … to be walked through, it was something that was impossible to comprehend from a static position.

We had multiples of materials: ties, wrapped twigs, curtain clips, shirt pockets, lengths of string. Collections of small things rather than larger singular things. We are both collectors, so this combined with the practicalities perhaps contributed to the aesthetic more than any conceptual imperative.

Over the time we withdrew* colour resulting in an unexpectedly monochrome palette. Black and white – the palette of correspondence … black** ink on white paper. Perhaps is we had continued colour would have re-emerged. Both Elena and I are working with ready-made colour materials – secondhand garments and textiles. Was the stripping out of colour a way to focus on form?

Our time together in the project room became quieter – fewer verbal notes and queries were exchanged. The ’reading bonnet’ incident being the notable exception – reducing us both to uncontrollable laughter. That said there was / is (for me at least) also something very poignant about this particular object – its performativity and its image.

For me it was great to work materially … for the physical materials to determine the outcomes. It’s far too easy for me to get caught up in overthinking and over determining conceptual and contextual aspects. It reminded me that some of my best work has come from playing with materials. Materiality is enough!

I think that it would have been tough to have had longer in the project room. After two good intense days it felt necessary to let those things rest … to give ourselves time to digest. If Elena had been here for longer it probably would have been good for us to take a day or two to do our own thing before continuing together. It’s useful to reflect on this in case we do a longer residency together. As it was we continued to do things together, it was just that they were other things – we went to the first day of Örebro’s Open Art biennale, and the next day we saw an exhibition in Stockholm. It would have been very interesting to return to the project room after these shared experiences of other artists’ works.

Whilst travelling we talked constantly – not so much about what we had done, not directly in any case … more tangentially about other ideas, projects and experiences. Having time with other artists is so important to me – it’s one of the reasons that I choose to be in a studio association. The conversations can be so brilliantly thought provoking.

I am incredibly grateful that Elena took the initiative for this micro-residency and made it happen.
I have lots of questions about what happens now / next … what shape might our Correspondence project take. I guess that the answers to these questions will evolve through our on going discussions.

Thank you so much Elena!

• Things of interest / points of excitement:
  Working / making together
  Inviting in other artists
  Exhibition / event
  Timescale

• Things that have stuck:
  Turning pockets inside out
  Binding / wrapping
  Reading bonnet
  (guide)lines
  Multiples

*’withdrew’ in this instance seems a pertinent opposite to ’drew with’
** the Swedish word for ink is ’bläck’

ps. it is so fitting to be writing this here – this after all is where we met all those years ago – in a-n’s blog community.

… and suddenly May is ending.

In my mind it has only just begun. Flipping through my diary I can see what it feels like that. There’s always follow-up work to do after Supermarket, there was collecting my work from Liljevalchs, then there was the screen-printing course … more on that later … my participation and presentation at the Verdandi student association Biennale … more on that later / in upcoming post …then there was the Market Art Fair, an unexpected deadline (half self imposed, half not), and making a very minimal artwork for the artists’ clubs members’ show. In addition the Saab needed both a trip to the mechanics and it’s MOT, I needed to renew both my passport and driving license – life in Sweden is seriously curtailed if one doesn’t have a valid form of ID and with the UK having left the EU my UK passport has limited currency here. Renewing such documents means booking times to physically visit the appropriate authority and / or the police. There was of course a good smattering of other small and necessary tasks, events, and activities both art related and not.

This past Tuesday was the ’Welcome Meeting’ for new members of the Uppsala Print Workshop. Now that I had completed an introductory screen-print course I was eligible for membership which I applied for and received. We were only two of the seven new members at the meeting so it didn’t take as long to go through all the procedures, hints, and tips for everything from getting in to the building and using the communal kitchen to where various pieces of equipment should be stored (and where they often are to be found if they are not where they should be) to buying one’s own equipment and materials.
As a member I simply book myself in to work there as and when it suits me, there is basic equipment and materials that can be borrowed and / or used at very cheap rates. I think I would like to team up with one of the other artists on the course for the first few times that I am there without the watchful eye and great support of our tutor Gijs.

The course was organised by the cultural development part of the County Council (a sister department to the department where I work half-time) and was for practising artists. We were six though one dropped out after the first session due to other commitments. The first of the five sessions began with a study visit to the Medical History Museum – a wonderfully curious place a short walk away from the building where both the print workshop and my studio are – these and many other buildings were once parts of Uppsala’s psychiatric hospital. The museum and the enthusiastic, relatively recently appointed, director proved a wealth of information which we were tasked with taking inspiration from. Back in the workshop I felt something I imagine akin to what the students I worked with on the textile collage project seemed to experience – an overload of inspiration in tandem with being asked to respond in a new medium.

I finished that first session without a clue as to what I would do. That evening, in conversation with L, I realised that I am not used to producing a two-dimensional image – I work with three dimensional materials even if they result something very much concerned with image. My chatting with L led to me deciding to make a type of fanzine booklet combining different sources of inspiration from both the museum and my own (good) health. The second session was spent making the layout including ink drawings on acetate, a stencil cut from black card, found text treated with vegetable oil to make the paper translucent. Gijs diligently led us through the stages of preparing the screens with UV sensitive emulsion. Some fellow participants worked rapidly and managed to create their first screen that evening. I was happy that I had created the layout for my tiny publication. While others got on with printing their first colour and making their second screens I did not have much success in either of the third or fourth session. My ambition to try out different variations of stencil was causing multiple difficulties. So everything was resting on the fifth and final session. Thankfully I learned from my mistakes and had good guidance from Gijs … which meant that by the end of that evening I had an edition 72 little fanzines drying on the racks. I picked up the dried prints on Tuesday at the Welcome Meeting.

I’m this first person to have made a fanzine at the workshop – which struck me as odd as the place has been running more than four years now. It also struck me that made an object rather than an image – old habits die hard!

The format of the fanzine – a single sheet with images on one side folded and cut once to create an eight page booklet – really appeals to me. I like the idea of producing similar things in conjunction with future exhibitions and projects … a kind of limited edition, yet low value, give-away that replaces a traditional exhibition text.