Artist Statement for Assessment

I had a bit of a nightmare with the artist statement for assessment. The printers not working and having to rewrite it because of a computer breakdown didn't help, but I also found it very difficult to write in the first place. I had everything that I wanted to address down as bullet points that I wrote a few weeks ago, and I'm pretty clear on my ideas at the moment, but when it came to putting them into a well-written sentence I struggled enormously. Its the same problem that I am having with the dissertation...I'm so worked up about it that I can't approach it with a focused mind. I have no clarity on any activity that I do at the moment, my mind is so scatty from thinking of so many things at once. Additionally, the thought of other people reading it and judging it on the grammar and my choice of words etc. seems to completely immobilize me. I ended up writing a statement that I think communicates a few of the ideas,but not all, that I wanted to mention, and to a standard of writing that I'm not so happy with. I would definitely consider rewriting this for my website or if I were to submit the work to anything.

"The Light In My Eye is a collection of works testing our relationship to light, darkness and vision. Hinting at the fragility of our ocular connection to the world, a collection of used and damaged contact lenses lies at the centre of this inquiry. Preserved through photography and museum style displays, the viewer is invited to reconsider the usually discarded lenses and their perceived value. The collection rests, like defunct bones in a box; activated only by the camera's aperture and the projector's bulb, their presence relies on light like the eyes they were designed to aid. Dislocated, surrounded by complete darkness they are a memento mori of vision.

Opposite to these intangible images, darkness and light are made into solid objects, an attempt to measure the immeasurable and comprehend the abstract. Darkness is explored in language, a realm of communication beyond vision. The darkest hues from different paint companies are assembled with their titles; blackness discerned through association. However, lens-less dark-ness is not flat domestic-shaped matt, Pitch Black sat snug against the walls; not the deeper grey of a Silent Sea, nor the glossy bars of Railings. Darkness without eyes is the depths of deepest space, a place beyond knowledge and without understanding. Set alone in a vast black, backdrop a macro photograph of a single lens exists like a planetary body, and indeed to somebody it once was the world."


I don't like speaking in first person in statements, I find it becomes quite colloquial. I also don't really like writing in third person, so I decided just to explain the work from an impersonal stance. Although in my self-evaluation I comment on how this is quite a personal project, I don't like the idea of alienating viewers in work that is so specific to my experiences; I want it to be open to interpretation and people's own imaginations. In the last sentence I write about the contact being to 'somebody' a world - obviously that somebody is me, but it would feel embarrassing to put that, making it overly sentimental and less mysterious.

Assessment Set Up

Fear Itself

I watched a really interesting film the other day, produced by the BBC...and when I say watched, I mean listened to (partly because it was scary and partly because I had other things to do on the computer). It was called 'Fear Itself' and was a film narrated by a girl describing how horror movies make the viewer afraid. I've never come across a film like it as it was almost like a documentary in how it was set up as an inquiry, but it was narrated in such a creative and poetic way. The script could have been a poem in places, and I could definitely use it as inspiration for writing things about my work. A it was a description of horror films, she mentioned darkness and light a lot which particularly caught my attention.

"I mean silence and darkness are just names we give to the moments when our eyes and ears let us down. If I look out into the night and can't see anything, it doesn't mean there's nothing there, just nothing I can make out"

I think again, this trying to explain and understand darkness is immediately thought-provoking. \In the context of the horror film , the darkness is very much about the unknown, and something to be feared. Directors use darkness to build fear and anticipation, making light a precious commodity for revealing what is there.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0351g0z/fear-itself

Thinking About Who To Make Art For

In the crit we had with Jonty ages ago he raised the question, as research for his phd I think, of whether we think about the audience at all...Whether it is important to consider who the viewer is and what they might think. This question plays on my mind quite a lot, and I have revisited even more recently when trying to set up work for the assessment. I really enjoy researching and creating some depth to my work, but it is also important to me that the work reaches people who have very little specific knowledge of the topic. I suppose this is where the poetry and the beauty come in, as they resonate with everyone.

I realised that during the process of researching and experimenting I make work for myself because I enjoy it, but when it comes to presenting my work I can't not think about the audience. I was just saying this to Ed and he pointed out that we 'exhibit' and 'display' final works, that is the very nature and purpose of a them, so to think about who you are exhibiting too and that the work is on display is inherent to the concept. I have spoken to a few people who go into such detail about their work and intellectualise it so much that I'm not sure it can be accessible to many viewers...or a large amount of their intentions will be lost anyway. I wouldn't want this for my work; in my current project anyway, it is important that the work is a communication, that it successfully transfers meaning.

A Reflection

Me:   Why are you looking confused?

Also Me:   Erm, I was just thinking about my new journal post on how pervasive metaphors about vision are in everyday language and dialogue.

Other but Also Me:   Ah, I see.

Comparing Photos

Having just edited some more of the contact images taken with the help of the MNHP student, it seems necessary to compare the different outcomes and measure up their different successes. The first three photos below are ones I took in October using a borrowed macro lens and with a SAD lamp in my bedroom for lighting. I also had no knowledge of photoshop at this point so the images are edited very poorly, the background is just bleached by heightening the curves so there is probably a lot of detail missing from the surface of the contact itself. The main problem I was experiencing in taking the photos was that it is impossible to get the whole lens in focus because it is curved - I hadn't heard of stacking images and didn't know whether it could just been done with a better knowledge of how to work the depth of field (is that a thing?). Although the image has many faults, it does still capture a level of detail on the parts that are in focus that I thought was extremely promising; in particular the crystal-like structures on some of the lenses. There are a few of these earlier images that I think are still worth using...for slides perhaps. However better the qality of the more recent photos, I still didn't manage to recapture these specific crystal shaped structures shown in detail below; this was a real blow and makes me want to carry on trying until I get the perfect image.

This image below is an edit of the more recent photos I took with the help of 2nd year Marine and Natural History Photographer, Max Thompson. I put a post on the facebook groups and he was one of a few to reply... I'm really glad I managed to get hold of someone and he was so helpful and knowledgeable, it was really wonderful to be able to use someone else's skills and learn about a completely new area of image making.  However I'm still a bit torn about whether lighting tot from above instead of putting on a light box was best - I'd really like to get back in contact with him and try out some different configurations in order to pick up different aspects of the surface and to reduce the reflection of the light.

Selecting the A1 Image

I decided to print some of my favourite lens photos out on A3 so that I could make the decision of which to have printed on A1. It was a bit nerve racking collecting each one from the printer because I quickly realised that there is only one that I really like and would want as my main image, and I felt a bit disappointed in the rest. Working with really long processes like this is very frustrating because I can't just go back and take another image _ for that i would have to arrange to meet with Max again, set up all the equipment, take the right shot, stack the images, edit them etc etc...it could take a week. 

The image I really like is the one in the middle below (or the final right image). This is because it has no reflection from the light so it looks as if it the moon and not a contact lens.The others are too bold, too obvious, too shiny. I also think I printed them a little too large on the page, and for the large format print I will make the lens smaller so that it is floating more in an expanse of black. 

Details

Now that it is coming up to deadline time and I need to be refining and finalising some ideas, I am being faced with many little but significant decisions. This image below posed the question of what kind of crack, what shape of fissure is the most poetic...what relationship is subtle or harsh enough for what I am trying to put across. Perhaps the composition will not have such a dramatic impact, but I think that it is necessary to consider all aspects of the image I'm presenting, especially as it will be so enlarged and bold. 

One Sentence Journal Post

I wonder if a birthday candle burns enough wax to fill a teaspoon...

Cartography of the Moon

I found a really fascinating book on mapping and naming the moon, which has a huge range of different drawings and etchings of the Moon's surface. I love the idea od doing a similar thing for my contact lenses - there is something so absurd about the idea of mapping a contact lens, but I think it would make some very cool drawings and hint at how the contact is something that allowed me to experience and negotiate the world myself. The other main point that really excites me is that mapping is all about learning and discovering, as is drawing as you are using the eyes: throughout this project I have thought of sight meaning the ability to know, and how vision enables one to learn, so mapping the contact lens would be really fitting.

I edited some contact photos to make them a bit more like the drawings in the book. I definitly intend to make some drawings when I continue with my studio work.

Text

I've been thinking a lot about using text recently, more so than usual because I have considered how words and language are separate from vision. Although written words are visual things, their meaning is accessible to someone without sight. Watching the videos of Tommy Edison, particularly 'Intangible Concepts to a Blind Person', made me think about how language is able to transcend sight, allowing someone to understand something without having ever seen it (this applies to explaining unknown concepts to sighted people as well). I am also interested in words and how we learn them to begin with; to me language has intrinsic associations with childhood learning, building up letters into more complicated arrangements and meanings, and thinking of letters as individual entities not a means to an end.

I have been considering writing some pieces about the horizon and displaying them so that the text is written out around the room, as if a horizon line. I think this idea might be a little cliche so I wanted to investigate how other artists have used text in a more material and spatial way, perhaps displaying it in a way that is specific to the site or concept.

Lawrence Weiner

Someone recommended I look at the work of Lawrence Weiner, who is considered to be one of the leading conceptual artists emerging from New York in the 1960s; however, I was interested to read that he considers himself more of a sculptor than a conceptualist, especially as his works (that I have seen online) seem to be nearly all 2D, painted or transferred on walls, My surprise at this is not a criticism  - the works seem to occupy the space as much as any three dimensional sculpture might, in their meaning being interpreted jointly with the space, and their imposing presence. Weiner mentions in one interview that writing in the city "becomes archaeology rather than history" because of how it is always being covered up by other writing. Naturally I find this quite a poetic notion, of words being buried, in other people's words and in time; but even though they are buried they still exist, the words still read, the letters still have a relationship to each other in the way that he decided that they would. I found some relevance in Weiner's text to my own investigations (in particular the above work which hints at the horizon); Weiner uses very familiar words of known concepts, but in ambiguous sentences that juxtapose monumental and mundane ideas, as if the words are metaphorical or allusions to something else. 

I wonder whether the meaning of his work would be dramatically different if it was in a different format; surely 'a wall pitted by a single rifle shot' is doing the same job as Cornelia Parker's titles in that it is conveying information about an object. Perhaps the text being large and bold instead of small and unimposing is a clarification that the words themselves are the work, keeps the emphasis on them.... but then is the emphasis on the words as visual symbols or on their meaning? I think perhaps in Weiner's case it is both. 

Joseph Kosuth

Kosuth's 'Art as Idea as Idea' align with my thinking really rather a lot. Last assessment I used dictionary and reference definitions in my work as a away of suggesting that language is relative, and that associations are variable. I've been thinking a lot about metaphor and how one concept can represent another in everyday language. In his work, Kosuth was interested in how art is about making meaning; pointing the viewer towards definitions of words, and in the context of an art institution, highlights how meaning is made in a language-led society, and  also how it can be passed on. 

Kosuth has stated that it is the definition itself that is the work, even though it is shown in galleries a photographic print of the definitions in written text. I suppose, in a similar way to Weiner, this is something that will inevitably be questioned with text works. There is something problematic about language being presented in an art gallery as a 'picture' because it automatically references other conventional 'pictures' and their aesthetic properties. 

John Baldessari

I am still working on understanding John Baldessari's work as I think it is really complex, but as he often uses text I thought it would be worth logging him as a relevant artists here. It seems that he makes a lot of pieces which are self-referential, or convey an awareness of the space or setting in which they are shown. Baldessari uses irony and wit in order to dismantle ideas about the art institution and established norms. In all the works that I have seen of his, he uses capital letters for the text; I wonder if that has any significance at all, maybe in eliminating hierarchy between the letters and words, making it a most basic form of text. Indeed, i might observe that in the majority of text works I have seen by any artist, upper case is usually used and mostly with white writing on black or black on white. It is an obvious observation, but this high contrast focuses the text. It does not fade into the environment, but stands out, bold, as an artwork. I wonder, in the 60s, whether this was necessary to give it credibility as art.

Jenny Holzer

I saw the work of Jenny Holzer twice over the Summer, firstly at a solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in Bruton, and then in the art gallery section at Dismaland. Its very different to the minimalist, very black and white works that I have so far mentioned - instead using rolling led screens of neon-coloured letters. The way the writing is displayed, and the connotations that accompany them, are as much a part of the message as the meaning of the words (unlike Kosuth). Holzer's works are compelling, there is a sense of suspense that draws you in as you wait for the text to unfold on the screen. If the writing was there in a big mass perhaps the viewer would not be so captivated; but because it is fleeting and the viewer is not in control, it is necessary to stand and wait and actively participate in/with the work.

I'm not a massive fan of Holzer's presentation for my own work - it is very effective for the politically charged messages that she uses, but such drama and theatricality would be inappropriate for the themes that I am looking at. Subtlety and delicacy are really important to me - I couldn't draw attention to the inconspicuous and mundane with such a showy and overbearing presentation.

Katie Paterson

I look to Katie Paterson's work often as I am really interested in the themes she explores and share a similarly minimal aesthetic. I was surprised when I recently looked on her website and discovered a new work I knew nothing about, but which is really very close to my current thinking and the way in which I approach my practice. These pieces are 'Ideas', works that cannot physically be made but are cast in silver as poetic haiku-like sentences. They remind me of the piece I presented for my last assessment, 'Not A Hair Out of Place' (gold-leafed dustpan brush bristle), because the text encourages the viewer to imagine the work even though it does not exist. I really love this work, it is so simple, so poetic, once again about futility and the limits of human capability, but also really true to the ideas process. I often have ideas that sound really beautiful but are very unrealistic, even impossible to make 9'Cube of Darkness' for instance. These sentences are also examples of the kind of 'high-contrast' statments that I have been working with, where two very different concepts are put together to say something about the other (such as I mentioned with Weiner).

Lost For Words - My Work

I showed 'Dust From A Doctor's Waiting Room' in a reconfigured form in Cafe Morte's Lost For Words exhibition. I made about 120 microscopic slides with tiny amounts of waiting room dust glued to each, and presented them in rows. Happily there were these wooden plinths available, which happened to be the same kind of shape rectangle as the slides so looked very fitting with the work - a few of us agreed that they worked well with the clinical nature of the piece too. I had several people saying to me they really thought the plinths were made especially for the work because they worked with it so well. After the private view I also received some positive feedback on how thoughtful the work was. I wonder whether people remembered it from the Schism show, or whether it can be identified as a very different piece in this format and within the context of this exhibition.

When I showed up with the work on the first day back I must admit I was really worried that for some reason it would not fit or work with the other pieces. I think because a lot of the work had already been positioned, and they are all very very different to mine in subject and medium, I wondered whether mine was a bit of an anomaly. The plinths seemed to bring it all together, and we positioned Ed's video piece next to it, which worked very well. Ed and I had previously discussed how his and mine are like different formats of the same idea - both showing fragmentation, talking about looping life cycles and with visual similarities.

Photos above by me, photos below by Glad Fryer

One thing I really enjoyed about the work being shown at Woodlane is the proximity to the waiting room from which the dust was taken. I love the idea of it being site specific and with a relationship to the visitors of the exhibition. Indeed in my statement I wrote how visitors might well see fragments of themselves in the work. I feel this makes it more powerful and poetic, it makes it immediately relevant to people and helps to drive the idea that dust is everywhere, all of it once a part of something or someone else.

Artists who look at sight and vision

I just typed 'artists who deal with vision' and 'contemporary art about sight' into google, and then realised how silly this is - pretty much all artists deal with vision...in order to make their work, and all work is to do with sight because that is how the majority of all humans experience the world and contribute back into it. But how does this help me contextualise my practice?

I need to find artists who convey an awareness of the fragility of our sight, and therefore I suppose our connection to the world. I have realised recently that my work is a 'memento mori' but of sight and seeing - a 'you might not be able to see forever', a 'this is really precious', a 'consider how lucky we are right now'. Of course this is fueled by my own poor vision and dependence on lenses. I wonder if there are many artists who use their bad sight to make work, or whose art is directly affected by their lack of sight.

The first artist who has made me think about seeing is James Turrell, especially in the work I encountered at Tremenhere Sculpture Gardens last year. Aqua Obscura (2013) - below, made in an old Victorian water tank is a large camera obscura that projects an image of the leaf canopy above onto one wall of the very very dark space. We did not know what we would see when we entered so it was a real exploration of vision... you're never sure if it is your eyes or your mind that is making you see things. Being aware of  your eyes slowly adjusting to the darkness was quite a magical thing - taking that time to reflect on darkness I think had significant effect on my thoughts leading me to investigate vision more this year.

Stationery Works

Some works I really like involving stationery. I just really enjoy how mundane they all our. Its automatically funny because their such ordinary objects. It would be interesting trying to make a somber work about blu-tac or prittstick.

John Baldessari - The Pencil Story, 1972-73

Daniel Eatock - Prit Stick Stuck on Ceiling, 2008

Martin Creed - Work No. 79, 1993

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I reached it somewhere, but its impossible to say where.

Making the Cafe Morte Work

My intention was to disperse the dust, to dissect it and present it on microscopic slides to hint at it being viewed under a microscope, and therefore examined in closer detail. I was hesitant to start making the slides because I didn't know what glue to use - I really didn't want it to be smudgy and obvious like the awful Schism/perspex incident...... I used some sort of fabric glue because it dried pretty clear when I tested it out on plastic and then glass. I dabbed a tiny bit on with a paintbrush and then sprinkled some dust over the top. It seems to have worked fairly well, the glue is more obvious on some slides than others but I am reassured by people asking how the dust is staying on, so it can't be too conspicuous.

My aim by the exhibition was to have photographed each slide individually (like the one below) and to have made postcards from the images so that people could take them and in a way the dust would be dispersed back into the surrounding area and beyond. Unfortunately I didn't have the time or access tot he right equipment to do this - I really need to invest in a camera that takes good quality macro images, I need one so often in my work. I tried first on a dslr camera but even the macro setting wouldn't pick up the detail. I then tried on my phone because I had taken the one below quite successfully using it, but the quality wasn't good enough to make postcards. it is really frustrating to have to give up on an idea, bt if the work is to be shown again I will definitely give it another go because I think they would make really lovely images.