More Measuring Spoons

Having now become more familiar with my degree show space (although the wall is still up so I can't quite picture it entirely) I am pretty set on displaying the measuring spoons of darkness and have been testing out some formations. It makes the most sense to me that I would arrange them from light to dark because then that gives away the theme and is easily understood. However I am undecided as to whether they ought to be arranged in a grid on one wall, in lines, or in a continuous line at the same level around the space. I think it will be one of those things that I will decide once I have prepped the space and can know more what it might look like.

Degree Show - First Work Complete

Its all coming together, yeeeeeey.

My slides arrived in the post and I've set them up in their cases and had a quick look at them on the projector,,,,I am so happy with them, the colour is beautiful and they are such good quality. So wirth the extra money (....thanks Mumma Russ).

Also very excited to have my first work finished so I don't have to think about that one at all anymore. I love the feeling of the pieces slowly fitting... I have been making rather thorough to do lists for the past week and I am very much enjoying crossing things off one by one.

A History of Ideas - Woodlane Library

I'm so pleased I was able to show this work before I left Falmouth. It was also a bit of a learning curve in how it is worth spending more money to be happy with the work - I had the choice of buying more expensive A2 prints, or cheap A3 ones....I went for the more expensive and to be honest it was a real relief because I was happy with the outcome. I have spent so much more this term on art than I have probably in the whole time I've been at uni, but I think it is reflected in the improvement in quality, which is necessary for becoming more professional and taking my art seriously. I'm still learning about this side of my practice, but it is smaller exhibitions like these which allow me to work these things out without much pressure.

I recieved some really great feedback about the work from a whole load of different people. I really hope there were some students who sat on the computers below the work and had a little daydream about the people to whom the dates are connected. 

I know the work does looks slightly dodge (not helped by my poor quality photos) but that was another thing to learn... the work was always going to be inhibited by the library itself, but that was almost the point. There was no way really that it might start looking like a formal contemporary art environment, but neither did the art look like it belonged in a library. By positioning it in that space it was almost undermining, but also showing off, its own setting and context.

I was pleased to have snuck a Dartington slip in there, just as an extra little message for those who are concerned.

Screen Print

I'm so happy with my print! The process was so enjoyable and Tom was so helpful at teaching me. Certainly wish I had gone in there earlier and included print more in my practice. I found the whole process really fascinating, how the mesh works and how the screen is made.

I think the image works really well in these medium, and is far nicer than just having it printed digitally - it seems more poetic, although I'm not sure why - possibly because it is something I have made myself and taken care over.

Planets

Candle Stubs

The rest of the candle becomes the work and these sad little remnants are left behind.

Roni Horn

I looked at Roni Horn's work of the Thames River initially. I was thinking about in relation to my maps of the surface of the contact lens because they both seem equally pointless and futile. Horn's because the water to which the annotations relate only existed in that one photograph - what does it even mean to view water as a still thing in an image? Its useless, its gone - and mine because its absurd and nonsensical. Annotating my map or numbering it like Horn's might make it more about the concept rather than the aesthetic - I don't want it just to be a map just because it has visual similarities, I feel there needs to be more.






Horn's annotations touch on the kind of solemnity and poignancy that I associate with my own way of thinking, as she mentions abstract notions and poignant events. This is all clouded in great abstraction and mystery because we cannot really know the context to these short descriptions. It is, as I have been researching with titles, between the text and the imagery where the meaning is made by the viewer. The gaps in knowledge, the space for the imagination.

I found this quote from Roni Horn on metaphor, which I thought was interesting because metaphor for me does not distinguish the unknown, but ties things together in strange ways to make something other, not the truth, just an image of what it might be.

"You use metaphor to make yourself feel at home in the world," says the artist in this clip from the episode. "You use metaphor to extinguish the unknown. The problem is the unknown is where I want to be."

Although I really like the idea of doing a similar thing to my map with annotated phrases, or including text in some way, I immediately encounter the issue of what to write that doesn't sound too dramtic or over-thought. I always struggle with writing anyway and tend to avoid it if i can because I never know, and hate that I can't know, how somebody will read and interpret it. Aside from this fear, I have been thinking about what I could write, and I really don't want it to sound as if I am preaching or suggesting that the work is about something. I think the beauty of the visual element is that people can see a load of different things in it without me being at all prescriptive. Writing, although in many cases, and indeed as i am wrote in my dissertation, can provoke the imagination, it may also limit it.