Blog post about not being very good at writing blog posts this term

So I'm writing them now, and learning a lot.

Little Way

The patron saint of my old school, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, was famous for her 'Little Way', a personal doctrine of seeking holiness in the ordinary and everyday, and of spreading God's love and kindness in small and simple acts. I am often very quick to declare that I have no religious beliefs, but I also recognise that my upbringing in religious schools has duly affected the way I think, and I would love to believe that St Teresa (a young Carmelite nun from the 19th Century, who died at the age of 24) has inspired my art practice.

Although romanticising its impact on my work, truly I have often thought about St Teresa's 'Little Way' when considering my approach to the world and to art. Before I began looking at dust and even unnoticed spaces, I made work about the everyday, the banal and the things that seemed to pass other people by. Now I am more familiar with the idea that art is a tool to say something, a commentary on politics or life or experience, where as when I was younger it was only about beauty and what I thought was nice to look at. The desire to observe the beauty in the everyday is still very much a part of my practice, however, and my aim (although sometimes I am reluctant to admit it, because beauty is sometimes portrayed as a clichéd notion) is to make people aware of the beauty that surrounds them in the littlest of things. I take a lot of photos day-to-day of things I think are beautiful or poetic, and use Instagram to log them. Whilst I don't consider them to be artworks, I think that they work to a similar end and might spark a change in people's perceptions of everyday encounters.

Moths that flew too close to the light

I inverted a photo of a spider web and it became a Universe

Insects that came to rest in the living room lamp

BAMS - The Process of the Medal Making

Making the medal has been challenging and enjoyable (because I enjoy challenges...). It was good to have to figure out how to make it, what worked and what didn't. We found that the medal started to change itself, because of what the materials would allow and the problems that changing the drawings into a 3D object incurred. For example, we had no idea what the cast palm would be like until we tried it, and it turned out deeper than we anticipated, making the medal thicker than we had planned. Casting the palm was also problematic because it necessitated pouring hot wax on skin. This was fine at first, but seemed more painful each time we decided to reform the shape, and meant that our attempts to get it right were limited to what we (mainly Ed) could physically endure.

 

Overall, I am pleased with the final wax version of the medal and am really, very excited to see it in bronze. The palm looked better and much more interesting than I had imagined. The very fine lines of the skin (which I hope will translate in metal) reminded me of contour lines or cracks in the Earth, adding another level of significance to the medal's meaning.

 

 

Blue Marlble

I had considered this project for almost a year before starting on it, and the layers of its meaning have been growing from then on. It began with the thought about how really there are no set colours, because they are always viewed in different settings, by different people and under different light. I was thinking about (my) bad vision, how no one can see what I see, and perhaps my version of colour is different to somebody else's. As I live in a very brightly coloured house, something which I encounter every day, I had the idea to record its colour and prove that the house is not one colour, but hundreds. The process of recording then linked to my interests in time and how it can be logged through photographs; I like how the task is bizarre and obsessive, collecting information that is useless, unnecessary, mundane.

I had first thought that the project would just be a collection of photos, either to be printed on viewed on screen as a collection. As I am an enthusiastic user of Instagram, and routinely upload photos of my work, I thought that format would really lend itself to the project. The obsessive logging of memories might actually be a comment on how people use Instagram and social media,  recording their lives with the ability to subsequently look back and trace their experiences back in time. As the photos are uniformly square, it also provided a suitable format for the blue house photos. Instagram records the date when the photos are taken so I thought that if I am to present it I can arrange it in a calendar type way, according to the dates, which would call upon the role of time in its creation and meaning.

When I came to make the Instagram account I was faced with the dilemma of what to call it. I didn't want it to be gimmick, or to sound like a ridiculous experiment made for fun, but I discovered that I was fairly limited by the usernames that were available. I remembered the Blue Marble photo taken by the Apollo 17 spacecraft in 1972, which looked back at the Earth from 45 000 kilometres away. The link with the colour seemed immediately appropriate but it also gave me the idea that my project was similarly looking back at 'home'. Viewing home from the exterior, with a separation from it. This gave new meaning to the project overall as well as providing inspiration for the name. I have called it Blue Marlble, a play on the famous photo and Marlborough Road, the street o which the house is situated.

As colour is ubiquitous, I have observed how the project invites further connotations of other things that are blue. The sea + the world, dead computer screen, Klein + blue in art

Mona Hatoum, Rachel Whiteread and Latex Experiments

It was suggested that I look up artist Mona Hatoum, as she uses rubber to cast objects. The work that intrigued me the most is 'Marrow', 1996, a rubber cast of a baby's crib. In an interview with Janine Antoni, Hatoum says "I called the first work Marrow, as in bone marrow but without the bone structure to support it... it becomes the collapsed body. I used a honey-colored rubber which looks quite fleshy." It is interesting to observe how immediately powerful an object can be, how rich with connotations. The crib, in a similar way to Rachel Whiteread's mattresses, is unquestionably symbolic of the human body, which it has been made to hold. The crib is perhaps even more powerfully connected with the body than Whiteread's forms, as the legs and rails are the size of human bones and the frame is instantly skeletal. Hatoum also says "We usually expect furniture to be about giving support and comfort to the body. If these objects become either unstable or threatening, they become a reference to our fragility."

I love the duality of Hatoum's work. Not only is the crib symbolic of the collapsed body, but it is collapsed itself; it cannot support its own or an infant's weight. Its purpose has been removed. In this way, the work nods towards the female body, and the way it is made to support a baby; the collapse of a woman's body is also the collapse of her child (or potential child).

The use of rubber by Hatoum and Whiteread I find very interesting; it makes me wonder whether there is something intrinsic about its properties that appeal to or convey more feminine sensitivities. There are certainly connections with rubber and post-minimalism where, particularly female artists rejected the cold detachment of minimalist principles, retaining the aesthetic but with a new emotional awareness. Although post-minimalism began in the 1960s with the 1966 exhibition 'Eccentric Abstraction', curated by Lucy Lippard, it can definitely be felt in these later works of the 1990s. For the purpose of my own practice, with my use of latex, I must determine what it is about the material that makes it 'emotional'. The colour, reminiscent of bodily organs and fluids, is rich and dark and familiar. The shape and forms possible with rubber are curved, unlike the modernist materials of concrete and steel, they relate to the body. The texture and consistency is flexible like flesh, impressionable and warm. Emotion must come in understanding, recognising the material as something we know and feel. As I have found in my experiments, latex speaks instantly of skin without any intervention, the similarity is unshakeable. It would be a curious challenge to try to remove the emotion from latex, and make it cold.

 

 

 

There are very obvious visual links between some of my latex experimentation and these works because of the colour and aesthetic qualities of the material. I have also explored different ways of presenting the between-the-floorboards latex casts, propping them up against the wall in a way that resonates Whiteread's mattresses and their suggestion of limp bodies. Originally I put them against the wall, to extend the line of the floorboards up onto the vertical surface, distinguishing them a bit from the floorboards. I think this is one of the most successful ways of showing them as it connects the work to the environment in how it is reliant on the architecture.

 



Quotes taken from: http://bombmagazine.org/article/2130/

Falmouth Death Cafe - Meeting One

I was excited to be asked to join a new discussion group on the theme of death and different approaches to it in art practice. As I was involved in the collaborative Momento Mori project last year, and found exploring the topic so interesting, I am keen to learn more about it and to discover other people's attitudes towards it.

The discussion was enthralling. One thing that I observed was how vast and contrasting people's opinions were on the subject, although all of us include it in our work and many of us are very good friends (I find it curious that friends, who have so much in common, can differ so greatly in some ways). For example, some people said they are very concerned and troubled by the idea of being forgotten after they die, and feel they need to leave a legacy; where as, although I struggle with how so many people throughout history live and die completely anonymously while others are very well known, I am very comfortable with being forgotten. It doesn't really bother me that people in the future, who I don't know, should think of me or know me for any reason. My view is that I won't know either way so I don't value its importance. Similarly, some people held strong beliefs in a religious after life, and found the idea reassuring. Entirely to the contrary, I have no belief in souls and believe that human life is finite, and I find reassurance in its transience.

A few years ago I read a theory by palaeontologist Scott Sampson in a collection of essays titled 'What is Your Dangerous Idea?' Sampson's idea is that the purpose, or inevitable function, of all life is to disperse energy, to consume it and pass it on for the rest of time. This idea really resonated with me, it seems coherent scientifically and I like how it suggests that life is part of a continuous process. In the same way that the elemental particles of the medals' bronze have existed in different forms throughout history, there is something poetic about life being an accumulation of energies dispersed throughout the Universe. Therefore when I think of death, and what happens after we die, I think of energy: the nutrients that will pass on to other organisms if bodies are buried and decay, or the heat and light energy produced by cremation. The first idea I like because it is almost like reincarnation, but physically not spiritually. The notion of cremation is also very poetic because it literally returns the body to dust.

Having never experienced the death of someone close to me, I think I have a unique stance within the group. I can't properly empathise with attitudes of mourning and I have never felt grief over the definite loss of a person. However, the Death Café has made me consider how death is not an easily defined state and that it can manifest itself in more than the body's physical function. It was suggested that death can also be the loss of a place in time, childhood, innocence, friendship... all of which I have experienced in my life. The Summer after leaving senior school, I remember writing a diary entry about loss, and grief over school days and routines which I would never return to. This interpretation of death certainly impacts my art practice and my use of imagery; I photograph things a lot, write down ideas, log information, never throw things away to keep them alive and in my thoughts. I am starting to consider memory in my current projects, using photography and everyday materials to represent particular times and experiences. In my Blue Marble Instagram project, I am logging the colour of the outside of my house every day I leave it; the collection is both an obsessive extension of how Instagram is used, and a symbol of how memory is stimulated through photographs and dates.

Asked to write a summary of my input into the discussion, I wrote some words about the theme of death in my art practice:

I don't directly address the theme of death in my practice, but there are certainly many areas of the subject which interest me and feed into my work. I have always been drawn to the aesthetic of decay, of ageing and degeneration, where nature overrides all. I think my artwork deals with life, more than death, but with a view that everything is cyclical; growth and decay are one and the same. I am also interested in participating in these conversations because death is such a powerful subject that prompts people to discuss their deeply held emotions, and beliefs about the nature of the world. My pursuit of art is perhaps also a pursuit of this sincerity and open inquisitiveness about life. There are few platforms in society where talking openly about death and philosophy is encouraged besides art (and now, Falmouth Death Café!)

Budock Church Dust Grate

Reflections on the Mediascape Essay

I approached the different stages of the mediascape essay with mixed attitudes, thoroughly enjoying the research and greatly fearing the pressure of writing something I could be happy with. At first torn between Eva Hesse and Katie Paterson, I chose Paterson because her practice is more contemporary, which I thought might make a more exciting investigation.

As Paterson is yet to have a book written about her work, my research was mainly based online, in newspaper articles and journals referencing her ideas but not necessarily her practice. I enjoyed the challenge this posed, of using my own ideas and interpretations of her work instead of relying on other people's. I really love learning about artists, I find researching them always makes me appreciate their art more, as I understand it better. The main thing that I took from learning about Paterson's practice was how her works evolve, they exist in different states, sometimes all at once. Her use of technology and processes is varied, individual to the work and prescribed by the concept. Bourriaud's idea of the 'Altermodern' has really made me question how my own work might operate, perhaps online or viewed in unconventional ways that could add more layers of meaning.

I really, really struggled writing the main body of the essay. Even though I had planned it out in paragraphs with quotes and objectives, I found it impossible to write. It took me an unusually long time to find words and make sentences, and required a great deal of effort. I was finding that it could take me hours to write a few sentences, as I was focusing so much on how it was worded. I think maybe I will ask for some help on the next writing task, perhaps there are some techniques that can help with my word recollection and speed. I also felt a great deal of pressure to word the essay in an 'academic' way, which caused me to write and rewrite (and rewrite again) each passage.

I was largely happy with the final essay overall, considering how hard I found it. Although, since handing it in I have thought of things that I should have mentioned that I think would have improved it.

Katie Paterson - Mediascape

Katie Paterson is a British artist born in Glasgow in 1981, who creates conceptual and multi-media installations regarding the Universe, natural phenomena, human limitation and the transience of existence. Recently I have been drawn to the poetic beauty of her work and how she allows the concept to guide her choice of medium. For clarity, it is necessary to determine my understanding of ‘medium’ for the purpose of this writing as being “the means by which something is communicated” in the context of art making (Aarts, 2014). In terms of its stance between traditional and progressive, Paterson’s diverse use of media poses some interesting and potentially challenging questions about how it might be defined. As her practice is relatively new, with very little critical analysis to be found on her work, I am forced to consider my own ideas on Paterson’s position. Nicolas Bourriaud’s proposal of Altermodernism will serve as a starting point before I observe three prevalent themes occurring in Paterson’s work: collapsed distances, science and transience. Forming an understanding of historic lineage and current standing, I will contextualise how each theme is communicated.

 Nicolas Bourriaud’s idea of the Altermodern, put forward with the 2009 Tate Triennial Exhibition, presents a compelling account of contemporary art practice within the vast modern mediascape. It is suggested that artists are making work in response to a new “globalised perception”, created by international communication, travel and cultural exchange, which extends the potential of artwork in all directions of space and time (Bourriaud, 2009). One factor in Bourriaud’s manifesto is that a work of art no longer has a singular identity, limited to exist in one physicality or moment in time; rather, artists present an artwork as a trajectory of an idea, using different mediums and allowing the concept to traverse many states of being (Bourriaud 2009). Katie Paterson’s inclusion in the Altermodern exhibition is telling of a comparable approach. Indeed, Bourriaud’s description of the art scene as a “wave of displacements, voyages, translations, migrations of objects and beings” might well be a depiction of Paterson’s own practice.

Collapsing distance and time is central to all of Paterson’s work (Benjamin 2012). Connecting places through telecommunication, ideas through mental imagery and contracting time through the found object often intertwine, almost rendering the mind itself as the medium. In her 2007 gallery installation, Vatnajökull, a neon sign of a phone number was displayed which could connect the viewer (or caller) to a microphone recording an Icelandic glacier. Distance collapses through real-time technology, extending the limits of the body to witness a process occurring hundreds of miles away (LaBelle 2006: 232). A fascinating predicament arises from this example alone, of where the work begins and ends. In traditions of sculpture it is the neon sign, in canons of Conceptualism it is the viewer’s perception of the sign’s message (Popper 2009), in sound art it is the detached noise of the shifting water and in ecological art the work begins and ends with the awareness of the melting ice. It is clear, however, that Vatnajökull bridges all of these attitudes at once, existing across the world as physical object, audio, real-time experience, and conceptual artwork, playing out even after the exhibition finishes, both in the mind and in the glacier’s ongoing dissolution.

One particular characteristic that pre-dates Paterson’s practice is the invitation to involve the mind in the work, with emphasis removed from the aesthetic and placed instead on the concept. As Behrman observes, the work’s completion relies on urging viewers to use their own imaginations, just as many Conceptual artists have done since the 1960s (Behrman 2010: 24-25). Walter De Maria’s installations bare many resemblances to Paterson’s in their propositions of time, space and knowledge, not least in his 1976 Vertical Earth Kilometer ; the top two inches of a kilometer-long brass rod, planted into the ground in Kassel, Germany, are all that can be seen of De Maria’s intervention, anticipating its ability to “activate desire and the correspondent imaginative function” in the viewer (Pahapill 2006). De Maria’s work certainly issues the same sense of wonder and unassuming drama that is felt from Paterson’s appeal to connect times and places together in the mind. The premeditated omission of visual or written information to stimulate thought is a concept I am investigating in my own studio work, promoting the subjective connotations of materials and personal interpretation.

I have been considering the use of the found object by artists such as Cornelia Parker, Stefan Gek and Mark Dion, who call upon the identities of objects to create meaning and link ideas together as sculptural metaphors. In Paterson’s Fossil Necklace, 2013, she sourced 170 fossils before having them rounded, polished and strung together into a piece of jewellery that spans millions of years and thousands of miles within its beads. As in Vatnajökull, where the glacier recordings are treated as found object, the beads are used as symbol, representation and relic of a larger phenomenon and of another time and place (Behrman 2010). First use of the found object can be traced back to Duchamp’s readymades in 1917. Furthermore, the collection of relics and objects with representational value is an age-old inclination inherent to humankind but not to fine art practices until very recently. Cornelia Parker’s The Maybe of 1995, an exhibition displaying the personal belongings of famous people, illustrated how objects become relics, the juxtaposition linking disparate identities, and connecting times and places together; as is the necklace’s magic (Klein 2007).

Paterson’s fascination with geological remnants and the involvement of them in her work, discloses a growing relationship between the once-polarised fields of art and science. Artists are making work to learn about the world, as they always have done, but with unprecedented attention to scientific accuracy, procedure and technical collaboration (Werret 2008). Although this might sound limiting, it functions as a new creative outlet for artists who are configuring their work from “idiosyncratic sets of ideas that they seek to embody, test, represent or critique”, instead of merely responding to established philosophies of fine art through traditional mediums (Quaintance 2012). Far from restrictive, with this cross-discipline approach Paterson has sent a meteorite back into space, conceived the only existing map of every dead star known to man, and collected images of ‘ancient darkness’ from far-reaching places in the Universe. The latter, History of Darkness is an ongoing work started during the artist’s residency at UCL’s Physics and Astronomy Department, this itself significant of Altermodern attitudes. With cutting-edge technology, Paterson has archived hundreds of photographic slides depicting darkness from throughout space. This piece exemplifies a poetic duality that is present in all her ideas, a deep respect and enjoyment of scientific discovery together with an astute awareness of its inevitable limitations (Behrman 2010). As Pehapill writes, regarding De Maria’s Vertical Earth Kilometer, “our desire to know is all that can ever be materialized” (Pehapill 2006) and this is often the tone of Paterson’s creations. The darkness to me poignantly represents the ambiguity of the beyond, existing as both boundary and open space, impermeable limit and infinite potential.

The relationship she has with science is wonderfully multifaceted, as Paterson uses high-tech processes, collaborates with technical specialists and acknowledges forwarded-thinking theories, but pairs them with commonplace, antiquated, household technology in an attempt to explain the incomprehensible. Cornelia Parker can once again be called upon as a contemporary precedent for this way of working. In ‘Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View’ (1991) for example, Parker used the everyday objects of a garden shed to make a four dimensional ‘diagram’ of the Big Bang, existing in both time and space (Searle 1991). Of course the exploded shed is not an exacting interpretation of creation, but the suspension by wires of the objects in space certainly gives a visual indication of the supernatural. In the article ‘Material Girl’, Jacky Klein describes how Parker enjoys “measuring the epic with the everyday, the monumental with the mundane", which is exactly what Paterson does in her 2008 installation Light Bulb to Simulate Moonlight (Klein 2007).

Depictions of nature and celestial mechanisms have been a constant throughout the history of humankind, so it is curious to observe the recent shifts in how these subjects are being addressed. Less representational approaches began in the 1960s, with conceptualism, Land Art and site specific practices; in Hans Haacke’s renowned Condensation Cube, first produced in 1963, he harnesses nature itself, presenting the process of water transforming as art. Similar uses of natural phenomena include De Maria’s Lightning Field (1977), Andy Goldsworthy’s Snowball Drawings (1992) and most recently Sonja Bäumel’s Cartography of the Human Body (2010), elevating the growth of bacteria to exhibited artwork. Paterson verges on this way of working, presenting natural processes, such as ice melting, with only minor physical interventions. In one article, it was questioned whether her works should be classed as “mere scientific experiments” instead of art (Egere-Cooper 2008), deliciously exemplifying the need for new terminology, such as Bourriaud’s Altermodern.

Transience and the consciousness of time’s passing is an integral notion in Paterson’s work that seems to permeate every aspect of its conception and its receipt (Venables 2013). Sense of physical scale in relation to the Universe’s incomprehensible expanse is also paired with an acute awareness of time, and the relative brevity of the human life. Langjökull, Snæfellsjökull, Solheimajökull (2007) is undoubtedly one of the artist’s most beautifully poetic formulations, where recordings of three Icelandic glaciers were pressed into records and cast in the glaciers’ own frozen meltwater; the sound of the real glaciers melting degenerates as the records slowly thaw. Immediately, links can be drawn with American composer William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops (2001), albums carrying the sounds of orchestral melodies progressively deteriorating as they play out on fragile magnetic tape. There are many things that can be discussed about these powerful conceptual works, not least their use of time as medium. Holland Cotter writes that “Art is all tied up in time. Time is its subject and its substance.”, encapsulating the self-referential nature of both events, where decay and mortality are played out in the work and as the work (Cotter 2006). What is also interesting is how an artist and a composer have come to make very similar works that test the boundaries of their respective fields, suggesting a corresponding shift in creative practices even beyond fine art.

The transformation that art has undergone and the state of flux in which remains might be explained by the rapid and ongoing development of electronic devices throughout the 20^th and 21^st Centuries. As Charlie Gere observes, from the very beginnings of civilisation the use of technology (tools) has been intrinsic to art-making, and the history of art is likewise the history of technology (Gere 2006: 13). Therefore technology tells the story of what it is like to be alive at any point in time. Paterson’s use of technology is not just functional, it is integral to the concepts of time and mortality that she explores; it is also curiously divided in two contrasting applications that marry closely in her works. (Benjamin 2012). Firstly, there is the use of cutting-edge equipment and advanced astronomical electronics that enables her to probe into the Universe, exposing with each discovery, how fleeting our lives and our Earth is in comparison. Then, there is the inclusion of slightly familiar but outdated communication technologies, such as record players, cathode ray TVs, even handwritten letters, which serve once again as self-referential embodiments of how technology, life and function subside. It is only with time and retrospect that these connotations of obsolescence can be accumulated; thus, ironically, Paterson’s use of antiquated technology, similarly with that of notable contemporaries Tacita Dean, Tris Vonna-Michell and Susan Phillips, is a characteristic that identifies her practice as unquestionably modern.

In this essay I have discovered that temperaments of Bourriaud’s Altermodernism feature in all of the themes I have discussed; globalisation is the greatest example of contracted distance and time, Paterson’s relationship to science and astronomy epitomises the modern hybrid practice, and nothing could describe the sentiment of altermodern processes better than programmed transience and an awareness of time’s passing. In unpicking the peculiarities of individual works I have come to understand how she appropriates processes and skills from other fields of research and uses them to communicate her ideas; this will inevitably contribute to the shifting artistic mediascape. Connections with science strike me as particularly prevalent, and have already started to demand new roles and methods of joint research. Technology as medium can be observed as a most interesting example of how art is continuing traditions of adapting to the inventions of the time, whilst simultaneously being approached with forward-thinking but backwards-looking attitudes.  I have also encountered aspects of Paterson’s practice that are shown to directly descend from historical ways of working, such as Conceptualism and new-media art, but they are largely used in partnerships or amalgamations, which add an often poetic complexity to the work’s ongoing trajectory.

 

KNOL Ontwerp, Heidi Bucher and Kim Morgan - Contextualising Latex 'Skins'

KNOL Ontwerp - Skinned

 

 

 

Heidid Bucher

 

 

Kim Morgan

 

 

Emerging Themes

Abjection v Beauty

Fear + Phobias

Discarded (artists like Michael Landy)

Memory + History

Nature

Sonja Baumel

I came across the work of Sonja Baumel on Pinterest, on a board that was recommended to me by a friend. Her work was in amongst other images of 'Textiles Sculpture', and caught my eye particularly because of its reference to the human body which I thought could link to my investigation of skin and surface. On looking up these initial mages of 'Crocheted Membrane' (2008/9) I learned that they are taken from scientific data of the body's temperature, translating it into textiles. The wool is the most dense where the body requires more insulation. I love how the work combines art and science. I don't view it solely as science or technology because it is presented in such a way that it also calls upon more conceptual, poetic notions. It is also delicate and beautiful, and impractical.

I referenced Baumel's work when examining the relationships between art and science in contemporary art practice for my mediascape essay.

Collaborative Latex Work

After doing my initial latex floor experiments, Ed suggested we collaborate on a cast of our house's vestibule floor. This would combine his ideas of intervening in (and simultaneously highlighting) architectural spaces, and my exploration of surface. Ed had been looking at this particular area already and I was interested in it because of the patterns of the tiles. I also think it is a really curious space, because it is passed through many times a day but with very little attention given to it; its purpose is ambiguous, usually only accommodating the swing of the door and someone leaving or arriving, their mind intent on somewhere else. For my part of the experiment, the accumulated dirt is also worth thinking about - what it is, how it gets there, who it belongs to. Unlike other places in the house, the dirt is likely to come from outside, blowing in or being trodden through on people's shoes. Is it as close to the exterior of the house as possible, a passage way, an orifice. 

 

 

The latex had to be left to dry for two days, which created an obstruction that Ed and I consider to be part of the work. It is particularly relevant to his ideas, as it restricted movement in the space and changed how people moved through the area. I really like how the work relies on time to be created. As my interests are in making and process, I love the notion that a work can be temporal in its creation as well as its existence. Although the latex was spread across the floor, taking up the same area as when it had dried, it was not the work; time acted like a physical component in the work's completion. The product is also a documentation of the physical transformation; I suppose this is true for the majority of artworks, which are an accumulation of processes, but here this is consciously emphasised.

In my essay research, I came across a quote by art critic Holland Cotter, which in part describes this concept.

"Art is all tied up in time. Time is its subject and its substance. Art records time, measures it, manipulates it, invents it. Art also exists in time, is composed of it, is swallowed up in it. The idea of timeless art is sweet. But there is no "timeless." And the longer a piece of art outlives its time, the more clearly it speaks of ephemerality, what is or will be gone."

 

 

Peeling the latex film off the floor reminded me of a snake shedding its skin. There is definitely something inherently repulsive about the material in this state,, and I wonder it is to do with its similarity with skin and the body. As I found with the rope experiment, it was a process that could only be done at a certain pace dictated by the material, removing it any faster would have damaged the sheet.

I was enormously excited by the results we ended up with. We removed the skin in the morning when the sun was bright through the front door, and the latex held up to the light looked phenomenal, with undeniable visual connections with stained glass windows. I consider the work to be very, very beautiful, in spite of how repulsive the materials are; this is something that has been voiced by many other people as well, but I am finding it difficult to discover exactly what it is that makes one think this. In a crit, one person said it looked like an ancient relic, something innately beautiful but mysterious. Indeed many other people have found it hard to understand what they are looking at when they see the latex. This has been the case in previous works and is a characteristic I am pleased to put forward; mystery and surprise are powerful tools for sparking people's imaginations and subsequently having a strong reaction to the work and its true meaning/identity.

I am particularly delighted with the final product and how the architectural and geometric shapes of the tiles contrast with the near formlessness and organic qualities of the latex. Moreover, the lines set in the surface of the rubber are of dirt and grime, while the pattern they make up is from decorative tiles, put there to improve the look of the room. There are so many intriguing contradictions made with the material and semantic connotations. Our plans are now to try out different arrangements for the final presentation of the work and to photograph it properly with careful attention to the lighting.

Walter de Maria + Arwenack Avenue in One Step (Started October 2014)

My latest tutorial was very useful as it helped me unpack my interest in Arwenack Avenue and why I find it fascinating. I started the project thinking about how the space is used in the process of rope-making, so I looked at rope, cast it in different materials etc. but was not entirely satisfied with the potential of the results. However, Jonty's questioning made me realise that it is also the distance and the expanse that draws me to that particular place. This links with my love and awe of vast spaces, where you can see a long way into the distance. We discussed how puzzling it is to be able to look back on where you have just been, making you consider time, space and distance. I have always been baffled with how at one time I can be at a certain place, and then minutes later could be looking at that spot from far away.

It reminds me of John Berger's description in 'Ways of Seeing' of how humans (particularly women, he says) have a kind of dual-vision of the world; in the same moment viewing the world around them, and imagining the world viewing them from a different perspective. If for instance I am walking a long a beach, I see my surroundings as I walk and experience them in real-time senses, but when I turn round to look at where I have just walked I view the space in a different way, recollecting it in a memory as well as imagining seeing my journey through the space as if from a third person perspective. Arwenack Avenue invites this manner of thinking because it is a long expanse, each end visible from the opposite one, and invites the imagination to depict the journey along it.

 

It has occurred to me that this concept, of being stimulated to imagine and remember, is also true for photographs for spanning larger amounts of time. People use images to remember the past and in doing so relive a moment that traverses space, distance and time. This is fitting with how I routinely record things for memory's sake, photographing my bedroom to remember what it will have used to look like, as well as regularly looking through old photos to find what I was doing this time last month, last year etc. For four years I have also kept a video log of myself talking into a camera every few months to record my appearance and mannerisms in order to look back at myself in the future. This obsession with recording the present very much links to and inspires my Blue Marlble Instagram project, but I have been looking for a way to express it in my studio work and link it to my other themes.

 

I have been interested in Walter de Maria's work for a while, discovering 'Lightning Field' in the first year temporal practices seminar. I am particularly drawn to De Maria's investigation of distance and measurements of the world. I observed this in my mediascape essay, comparing his Verical Earth Kilometer in Kassel, to how Katie Paterson constricts time in her practice. I also saw De Maria's 'Apollo's Ecstacy' at the last Venice Biennale, where lengths of bronze rod were displayed on the floor of the Encyclopedic Palace. I started thinking about the way in which these lengths described something bigger (the world) and how they might be used to extend the imagination to a different place.

 

 

I wanted to make something that would condense the length of Arwenack Avenue into a tangible object or a work that could be experienced in a single moment, something entirely opposite to the place itself but taken from it. I watched a feature film recently called 'Exhibition' in which one of the characters described how a yard is a 'human measurement', there is something significant about it because it is a unit based on the human body. Indeed Wikipedia informs me that:

 

"Some believe it derived from the double cubit, or that it originated from cubic measure, others from its near equivalents, such as the length of a stride or pace. One postulate was that the yard was derived from the girth of a person's waist, while another claim held that the measure was invented by Henry I of England as being the distance between the tip of his nose and the end of his thumb."

 

The human experience of the space seemed very relevant to my ideas about Arwenack Avenue so I decided to create a work using the average length of my walking stride, or footstep. Thus, I made 'Arwenack Avenue in One Step' - rope the length of a footstep dissected and stretched out to the length of Arwenack Avenue. This involved a lot of calculations, how many lengths I should split the rope into etc. It also necessitated me walking up and down Arwenack several times whilst counting my footsteps. It was also quite a tricky process as the rope lost a lot of structural integrity once it was unravelled, returning to loose fibres. Although this was difficult to work with, I like how the rope became its own opposite, unable to hold things together and very fragile. Having researched 'picking oakum', a form of punishment where prisoners, slaves and children in the workhouse were made to unpick old rope into small strands, I also thought about how labour-intensive the task was that I had set myself. Time, however, was a central part of the work; taking a long time seemed to make it more significant.

 

I have not finished the work but because it will take a long time, wanted to reflect on it properly before I continue. It always feels like a risk embarking on a work that will take a long time when the outcome is unknown.

 

 

November 2014 - I have decided that I wont complete the rope work as I don't think it is strong enough to take forward. In the recent group crit, people said that my most successful experiment is casting between the floorboards with latex, because of the mystery surrounding the dirt's history. In a tutorial with Jonty, he also mentioned how it is good to leave the viewer enough space to make up their own meaning to the work, which the floorboard idea does but the stretched out rope does not. I now think that the idea is too obvious, it reveals too much without saying a lot, and because of its site specificity probably wouldn't invite people's imaginations as they might not know about the place that it describes.