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.

Skirting Board Sunset

This was just a very quick experiment I did with a mini projector as we had one around the house. I intended to project the image on a window with darkness outside but quickly realised that that wouldn't work because of the reflection of the projector light (some things are so obvious with hindsight). I was looking around the house trying to think of poetic places to position the projected image of the contact lens, perhaps somewhere which would hint at it being the sun or moon or a planet. I've used or looked at the living room floor in several projects (first year sellotape sculpture, second year written piece) so probably felt a draw towards it - the wall above is also the only bit of blank wall in there to project onto. I started playing around with the angle of the projector and pretending the sun-like shape was setting. I really like how the image stretches when it reaches the floor, as well as the colours on the different surfaces. 

The main thing I took from this was the juxtaposition of the monumental and the mundane... the sentence 'A small sun sets on a skirting board horizon', which I captioned the work on Instagram, involves the enormous, incomprehensible notion of the sun with a really banal/familiar, domestic feature. There is a really curious mix of scales and relationships within this. The connection between the sun and light, with the contact lens and its function as a vision machine is also compelling; when the sun goes down there is less light / without the contact lens there is less sight.

I wanted the sun to rise again in the gif, maybe to create a sense of hope, but moreso because then it would loop back to the beginning. This repetition is a very poetic feature of the gif, and I am interested in using them for that purpose - to convey my sense that growth and decay, and life and death are cyclical.

I've just realised how funny it is that I'm looking at sunsets because, although a bit of a cliche image, I always think of sunsets when I think about how I try to make people notice everyday things, I have a very clear memory of being in the car with some friends when we were about 13. there was an incredible sunset as we left school, the sky was so colourful with pink and orange and yellow and I found it so incredibly awe inspiring; none of my friends cared however, they saw it too but they didn't see in it what I saw or felt in it what I felt. Sunsets or bright moons or blue skies always place me, they make me think about my position in the Universe, and therefore all the deeper mysteries that go along with that. I wondered, and to this day still wonder, what it takes for those friends to feel that same intensity, to match my silent euphoria - what in life makes them feel how I do when I see an incredible sky? I think about this often because it reminds me that everyone thinks in different ways and has sensitivities to different things.

In the Beginning There Was the Word

I was sitting in bed on Christmas Day listening to the service at Westminster Abbey on Radio 4... and I began thinking about how my religious upbringing might influence the way I speak/think about things. S many times, the Archbishop spoke of light and darkness, and used abstract concepts or metaphors. There's a lot of this in the Bible and having gone to very religious schools, I think maybe it has had an effect. I think you could note some similarities in the way I caption and title my works to how things are spoken about in the Bible, pairing the abstract with the everyday and trying to explain huge things with smaller everyday things. The monumental with the mundane.

I googled a few passages in which light is spoken about in the Bible...

I've been thinking recently about how religion, especially after hearing people talk of 'paradise' and 'hellfire', is so powerful and these abstract concepts are so compelling because they are so vague; it is up to the individual's imagination to picture paradise, and theirs will be unique too them - their very own tailored paradise. Referring to concepts such as darkness and light in my work might have the same effect - they can be interpreted very differently and it is up to the viewer what they get out of the work.

I also thought about the line in 'The Sound of Music' song about Maria, "how do you hold a moonbeam in your hand". There is a formula to why that is a poetic sentence - because it is mixing something intangible with something extremely familiar - the juxtaposition is stark. I am also reminded of the art medal we made 'Remnants of a Supernova Fitting Comfortably in the Palm' as it refers to holding something vast and entirely out of reach. One last point about the moonbeam is the futility of that sentence - hopelessness is poetic.