For the last few weeks I have been working in Three Doors Up, the sister space of ARCADECARDIFF creating a site-specific 2D installation piece.

It has been a great opportunity for me to develop my practice, but also a huge step out of my comfort zone. Working in a public place, with people wandering in and out of the work as it was made has been challenging. I usually make work in private. What helped was that Three Doors Up feels very relaxed and experimental, so I have done things with that work in that space that I wouldn’t have done in another context. That pressure and exposure was a strange dynamic in my practice, one that has existed previously but not quite in this way. I became much more aware of the expectations I place on myself, that are actually very removed from the expectations of other people. For the first few days, I was very conscious of everyone that came into/past the space. Eventually, I realised that nobody was watching me any more than I was watching them. The longer I was there, the longer I became part of the furniture and people stopped noticing me at all: It was fascinating.

When you make work, you’re using a part of your brain, the intuitive part, that I think we forget about and is a very valid sensory receptor in itself. I often find that my work is strongly influenced by my physical environment, but also my intuitive interpretation of it. Both of those experiences are stored and processed in very different ways. I found that the more I realised I wasn’t being watched by anyone, or if I was that they really didn’t care what I was doing at all, the more reflective I became about making the work. I came with sketches and ideas about how I was going to use the space but found that in my view at least, the more successful components were those I created spontaneously and intuitively. I’m not always entirely clear about what I’m responding to. Sometimes I never work it out but sometimes I do. I recently made a series of maquettes for a show and I started painting a load of blue grids. I went to visit the place where I grew up recently and suddenly remembered very clearly the blue, gridded blanket my brother and I used to make into a “tent” and play in. I find it quite unsettling that those kinds of memories can have such an impact on my work without me being conscious of it at all.

This time, the environment I was working with was a shopping centre, but also Venice where I invigilated at The Welsh Pavilion in July. The two are quite similar in a lot of ways. Full of people, going places, to consume something. The difference is the perceived social purpose or value of that consumption, it makes me wonder about how we can denounce one and not the other. The same criticisms of consumerism, that it’s frivolous, pointless and doesn’t make you any more enriched are similar to criticisms people make about art and culture.

It struck me, while working in Three Doors Up, that people in shopping centres and people in art galleries are both looking for some kind of intrinsic fulfilment yet would condemn that behaviour in one another. We are all so alike, really, when it gets down to it.


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