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.