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!)