Is This Thing On? Post PV

Incredibly, in spite of the snow people came to see the show, many many thanks to those who braved the cold weather for it! Altogether I'd say it was a bit of a success, fantastic to see our work up in a real gallery situation out in London, first of many to come hopefully. I'd say though, for networking's sake, I really need to get some business cards, some people were interested in the work, and it would've been better if I could've given them a card to keep them updated, so for future people who will get this website, welcome to my blog.

The participatory piece where I got the audience to shout at a piece of paper with a megaphone was successful, quite a big mark was made as a result of the soundwaves, I really want to develop this idea. It's been suggested that I simplify my idea a bit again, so I'm not sure where to go next, but I'm thinking more simple, but much bigger, perhaps stepping in to the relms of installation? Definitely with an element of audience participation though, maybe try and draw on some inspiration from other artists I've been told to look at.

Here are some pics from the exhibition for those who couldn't make it..and those who just want to see it again in all it's glory :D

Is This Thing On?..UP!

It's finally up, after 5 hours of mounting and massive amounts of stress it's all up there, so I took some photos of the work before the night, but I'll take some more tomorrow on the actual night, after the performance done by the audience on the newsprint with the megaphone. Very excited about this show! Just really hoping people come despite the snow.

Life Drawing with Dagmar Glausnitzer

Here are some photos of an extremely unconventional life drawing workshop which I took part in recently led by the fantastic Dagmar Glausnitzer. The excersises ranged from 5 second drawings to lying in the foetal position drawing the model. I found that by doing these seemingly random excersises I was forced to move away from drawing habits, turning the drawings slightly more into performance than anything else. The group was quite small so we were able to take a whole day to direct the model ourselves to work in ideas from our general practices, which was incredibly useful. So here are a few examples of the work that came out of it in the end.

Demo-lition march 10.11.10

Found this on the guardian website, a photo of Kingston University, our banner and demonstrating! It's been an incredible day, even on the way to the train station you could see the students gathering with placards and banners. Once there the march was peaceful, the turn out - incredible, some saying it got up to about 40,000, with an intially estimated 20,000 people, this is epic. It was fantastic to vent some of the frustration over the whole issue. Sadly some people made it turn violent later on, but to be honest, I found it all very refreshing and it felt like it cut through all the bullshit politicians send our way, they won't listen to us, generally are rubbish at answering questions, and really what did they expect if they were going to put the fees up by 3 fold. They keep saying that they're moving the threshold to pay back up to £20,000, but then we have to pay back at the full whack of the tax rate, and to be honest paying back £30,000 is not an enjoyable prospect. We're also told that they're going to help the very poor, the rich are fine, so what about the middle class? I think it's going to create an elitist system, where the richest are the most educated, god knows how the rest of us are supposed to get an education. And of course the poor tutors at uni's are losing the teaching grants (except for the maths and science ones), so we're supposed to pay £30,000 for little or no teaching? People are raging on the news about how violent we all got, like that wasn't going to happen?? Of course it was going to happen, we all voted lib dems under the impression our fees were going to disappear or at least go down substantially, now having voted in the democracy we supposedly live in, this has happened, without even a referendum. The people rise up in demonstration, given no other choice, and we're belittled and fobbed off by more political smokescreen answers. I'm personally proud to have taken part in today, and sincerely hope something comes out of this, if nothing else a serious pang of guilt for the lib dems would be fantastic!

Is This Thing On?

Thanks to a particular student in my year 14 of us are exhibiting in the Dreamspace Gallery in East London in a months time. VERY excited about this, as it's a first step out in to the real art world outside of the university and Kingston in general. It's a showcase of work by us to show the response of artists at this time to the times we live in, not for a particular audience, or an institution, purely for the passion behind the work. So the private view is on 2nd December 6.30 til 8.30, and the exhibition will run for a week from 29th Nov - 3rd Dec. Hopefully it should be a good turn out!

Manifesto for the exhibition by Adam Jones:

With budget cuts, high intakes of students and an underwhelming amount of prospects it’s becoming an increasingly daunting prospect to start a career within the art world. With artists such as Hirst and Emin achieving such fame and recognition and making London once again the art capital of the world there is massive pressure on the new young artists to step into their shoes.

By showing different responses to the current post-recession climate, work is produced that speaks for a new generation of artists. This is how art is today, right now, not how the art market likes to tell us its supposed to be, not what the collectors are buying and certainly not what you would find in a commercial art shop. Instead this is art that is created with a passion, motivated by the possibility of success and most of all a focus on creating work most relevant to current issues facing contemporary culture.

What is vital for the artists involved is that who they are or where they come from should no longer matter; instead the art can speak for itself and for the individual who created it.

20 Strange Sculptures

I've been rubbish about keeping up with this blog over summer, BUT have just found a really cool website, where someone has listed 20 weird and wonderful sculptures from all over the world. They're quite funny so I thought I'd post the link on here...

http://jassyworld.blogspot.com/2010/02/20-strange-sculptures.html

This one is without a doubt my fav though, the explanation is on the website but if you just want a small preview of one of them...this is a sculpture in Prague, it's mechanically operated so the men move a bit, in particular their penises move in order to spell out quotes from famous residents from Prague. There's also the possibility to send in text messages, which are then spelt out by the sculptures before returning to their original job of quoting the locals. Utter genius.

(http://villageofjoy.com/20-strange-sculptures-part-i/ accessed 05/08/10)

Summertime

Summer has arrived! I'm planning to carry on with my art over the hols, still on the lookout for instruments in charity shops, got beaten to the punch the other day having seen a guitar in the local Oxfam by some person, but the charities of Pimlico await :D I suppose some interesting news, is that the other day an artist let me in to the studios she works in, which was great because it feels like it's this humungous feat to continue working as an artist after leaving uni, but actually, having seen these studios now, it doesn't feel so far fetched that it's doable to just be an artist. Obviously you would have to get a small job on the side, before making millions later on of course haha, but then she was saying how it's only £20 a week to rent out the space, which isn't horrific, I get the impression these kinds of studios are just dotted around the United Kingdom, so there is hope!

Next up in my practice, I'm on a mission to make it all a bit deeper now, having moved away from my initial obsession with concepts, I've gone a bit the other way, so SOMEHOW (not sure how yet), I need to contextualise a bit, so I shall keep you posted.

First Yr, Fine Art, End of Year Show

Putting up the End of Year show

After endless amounts of marking on the walls to measure everything out, and developing a close relationship with my spirit level and tape measure and possibly a mild case of OCD, I finally got everything up hopefully nice and straight, looking as professional as a I could make it. It was interesting to do this though, as you realise how much you have to take in to account the other artists around you, in order to make it work together as much as possible. Some other tips were:
- keep the space below the painting (piece of work) larger than the one on top
- when trying to make it straight use a measuring tape AND your eye, don't just rely on one or the other

Here are some photos of my work after I'd put it up. There were some problems when arranging all the electrics, but I made a plinth to put the CD player on, then last minute made a hole in the plinth at the bottom so that the wires could run out of it efficiently. I still have to do some touch ups on the painting at the bottom of the walls but overall this is how it's going to look on the night :

Finished all the orchestra pieces!!

This took a looooong time over Easter but finally all of the orchestra experimentation boards are done!! I think they reallly helped to experiment with the paint, whilst still having music on the brain in the process. I don't think they have quite as much depth as the performance paintings because of them being more representational, but then that's not so disasterous because in this process I learnt a lot about use of mediums in the paint and the huge scope of opportunities that surround paint in the the way you can use them.

As a whole though, I'm not sure they entirely work as an orchestra. When showing it to my parents (musicians), they came to the conclusion which I completely agree with, that, although they work quite well on their own, they emit so much noise, almost like they're tuning up, and don't have a coherence that is generally the essense of an orchestra. Instead of them working together, they make many separate sounds, they almost form pieces of music in their own right, which then becomes the opposite of the function of an orchestra. In this way it correlates to my practice, as it's kind of a warm up, a tuning up for future painting. Anyway, I've taken photos and put them up on the same page because there's a lot of them, but you can click to enlarge to see each one.

Bach Suites I and II

Sorry for not having posted anything on here in aages, issues with internet. BUT I've been busy in the studio and here's the second of my performance paintings that I made in response to listening to Bach Suites I and II (two of my favourite pieces of cello music). I chose a completely different colour scheme for this one according to the colours I thought would suit these pieces. It's interesting how the style is very similar to The Protecting Veil, I'm not entirely sure whether this is down to the fact that they're both pieces of cello music, done with the same tools or perhaps that's just how I deal with paint on that size of canvas. Regardless though, given the similarities, I'm showing them as a series in my upcoming show (end of year show at Kingston University). Having said that though, I'm happier with this painting than with the other one, I think it possibly shows a bit more confidence with the paint, and I just need to build up that confidence. The next plan is to get some instruments and fill them with paint then play them on to canvas/board to see what effect that has. Really wanting to go more nuts with the paint now! I actually submitted this piece for an open exhibition in Cork Street so fingers crossed! (click to enlarge)

Jam session #2 at the Toilet Gallery

..and so there was a second one, and hopefully more to come after because once again this was really good fun. Though, this time perhaps not as focused on the music as last time, there were more breaks, but it was really up to you how much you wanted to play etc etc, so even if no one else was playing at the time there was nothing to stop you just playing for a bit on your own even which was kl. The exhibition in the gallery was taking place, open to the public whilst this was going on too, so the public were free to listen. Even though it wasn't particularly a performance it worked well with the artwork which was all about music and art.

So this time we had my brother on the mandalin (much appreciated), a violin player, myself on the cello, Spike on a didgeridoo, a singer or two, someone playing a saucepan and someplaying a makeshift drum using a pedal from a drum and a bin - genius.

Another event that the Toilet Gallery is holding is a painting jam on monday between 6 and 8pm (I think!), which I and most definitely going to have to make an appearance for, so exciting!!! I love this gallery!!

First performance painting attempt - "Shine on You Crazy Diamond" - Pink Floyd

This is my first attempt at a real performance painting, whilst listening to music, in this case, "Shine on You Crazy Diamond" by Pink Floyd. Awesome song! It was really odd, before trying this I tried just doing a performance to the music with my body, without involving any paper or pens etc. I found that ok, not too difficult, it's strange doing performance again, I'd forgotten how free it was. But then trying to add a concious act to an essentially unconcious process made it very hard. I found myself confused, trying to simply be in the now, but I couldn't help but be drawn to the music, getting lost in that, more than getting lost in my own actions. The result being that although I was somewhat acting in the moment, it felt slightly hindered by the fact that my body naturally kept wanting to get lost in the music. Eventually I found that shutting my eyes and simply letting my body flow, giving in to the music with one pen in my hand felt like the most appropriate way to perform in this instance. The moment I decided to switch pens I lost it again though...more practices of these may be needed me thinks, but this is the first go anyway. In order to ease myself into performing again I decided not to film this time, so below is just the result, but as I get more used to it I'll start filming them and posting them on here.

Reallllly loving the work of Fiona Rae right now. Someone suggested I look at her work and it's freakin awesome, I love how vibrant it is. I know it's quite graphic, almost cartoony, but in the mix there's more obviously painted bits which really make it I think. Quirky and bright..legend.

"Hidden Dragon" Fiona Rae (2008)

more instruments...

So I'm going mega over the easter hols with painting, the studio is lovely and empty letting me nuckle down n get the work done! Only just caught up with me that friday til monday I can't be in there :S I'm quite happy with the pace at the moment though, so just thought I'd post up a couple of photos of the paintings I've done in the past few days, some of them need some tweaking, but it's a start..



Excuse the messy space, I'm actually building a mess moutain. But the paintings are taking shape in the chaos hopefully!

Can't wait to see what they all look like together in the positions of an orchestra! As me and my friends were saying though...if there's nothing planned...you can't go wrong - good times :D

The Protecting Veil

This painting is based on a piece of music by John Tavener called "The Protecting Veil", performed by Yo-Yo Ma. It's a goooorgeous piece of cello music that is incredibly passionate and emotive, which is why I picked it for this. I wasn't particularly treating this like a proper art performance, but I wanted to create one in this way to experiment, see how it would come out, perhaps to look at whether I would want to change anything like background etc etc. I'm quite pleased with it, but I'm tempted to use acrylics as well as oils, because this used a fair bit of oil paint and it's expensive stuff!

This a link to a youtube video that has and extract from the piece playing in it (if you can, try to listen to the version by Yo-Yo Ma, it's waay better) : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkgN9OjMXgw




Below are some photographs of particular areas that happened to be quite interested. I really like playing around with the random results of the human psyche, whilst listening to music, through the medium of paint. I'm DEFINITLY going to have to try this as a performance piece, hooopefully distancing myself from it a bit, so that it's a far more genuine approach, rather than something that has been thought about too much, because it's all about emotion and passion, not thought.

Performance painting

Fraid I don't have any photos to put up yet, but just felt I needed a bit of a rant on this subject! I love painting, music and texture, so have been making these paintings trying to emulate feelings that are evoked from the piece of music. I've found this leads to some issues though, mainly that it then doesn't look great (when trying to be representational), also it seems to lack a certain depth and passion which is what I was originally going for. So today I tried doing one of these paintings, sure enough, this was the outcome...quite interesting, you could see the movement in the marks I think, but it was definitly missing SOMETHING. So after a considerable amount of procrastination, alongside a good few buckets of tea I came to the conclusion that maybe it would help to make it more like performance art. A while ago now I took part in a performance art workshop run by Dagmar Glausnitzer, fantastic woman, and found it really interesting and fun, if a little bit scary, really have to pull out the weirdo within for this, but it's worth it I think. But anyway, one of the key points to be picked up from the workshop is that whenever you are taking part in a piece of performance art you have to be "in the now", ie. blocking out the outside world completely, becoming aware only of yourself in a detatched way so that you don't think...you just do. Taking this point, I'd love to incorporate this into my painting, it's worth a shot at least, might help. I did attempt to do it once or twice today whilst painting, but I found I was very self concious, so I might need to go and find a space away from people, distractions and embarrassment. I'm annoyed at how self concious I felt, but then it's been a good few months since I tried this, got some good tips from a friend (fellow performance art lover) on how to start it, get into the right mind set for it. So yes, I'll post up the photos of today's painting asap. Might try to do some small performance paintings tomorrow to practice, experiment with having to deal with blocking out the outside world from the mind whilst still having to come back every so often to apply more paint to the brush/broom/mop or whatever, essentially this should be doable, just it's quite hard so we shall see :)

We jammin'

As a part of an exhibition called "Open Road" at the Toilet Gallery in Kingston, I, along with any other artist/musicians at the university was invited to take part in a jam session, told to simply bring our instruments and some form of documentation (to be shown in the exhibition)...and that's it. Given that I play the cello, not exactly the most common musical instrument used for jam session I was a bit terrified, expecting to have to bring music, but actually it was incredibly relaxed and incredibly awesome! It went on for 3 hours, which seems hefty when you say it, but drinks and food were provided and despite the cold temperatures the atmosphere was really good, had some candles around the place and between the 3 guitars, a synthesiser, bongos, a ukulele, a violin, a cello and some singers we all had a lot of fun creating random bursts of music. The plan now is that we're all going to meet up again, and hopefully do a live performance at some point, I'll keep you posted on when that will be. So a big thanks to Kate Renwick for sorting it all out :) This video below is a taster from the session, sorry it's a bit dark - Enjoy!

More experimentation between music and painting

Here are some more paintings where I've tried to merge music and painting, however in the top three paintings here I was listening to some violin music by Purcell in an attempt to get lost in the painting by getting lost in the music, hopefully resulting in a painting that the viewer can get lost in like they can with music. After seeking some advice about this, I've been advised to go big with it all now, get away from these small boards. So I've got myself two large square boards and one large long thin board, I'm thinking of creating a score of painting so to speak on this one, inspired by the work of artists from the De Stijl movement. There is a really awesome exhibition on in Tate Modern at the moment all about the De Stijl art scene, I was originally a bit sceptical because I don't usually like strongly geometric images, but the ideas behind them are so abstract that the paintings then became fascinating. In particular a room in the exhibition dealt with this cross over between different media really interested me. The result being an exciting mix of sound, film, sculpture, painting and performance.
This orange painting was really rather rushed, having spent most of a day trying to create the piece below, I got irritated with it so put some paint on my finger tips, whacked on the music and "played" the board, the result being every single note being depicted in paint on the board. When I'd finished this though aesthetically it wasn't very interested so I experimented with scraping the paint along a bit, which looked slightly better but it still wasn't working so I then put the piece of music on again and scraped into the paint a flowing line where I barely took the end of the paint brush off the board. I'm still not entirely happy with it, but I felt it was a more accurate connection between the music and the paint. Maybe being accurate is the mistake, could concentrate more on the general feelings I get when listening to the music and then try to get those same feelings across in the paint. We shall see!



This is a representation of a piano and piano music, and also my discovery of how useful a ruler can be to apply paint, really good fun! Would definitly like to explore more and more weird ways of applying paint. I think board is better for me to work on considering that I will probably be using more and more random objects to apply paint. This week we're having a lecture on "Body in Art", it might be interesting to explore this on the boards too.

Orchestra in the making..

I really need to get a move on with these, but I'm attempting to create an entire symphony orchestra of representational, abstract oil paintings. For each board, I'm trying to imagine the sounds of the instrument playing a piece of music in my head, then painting appropriate marks, so that hopefully a sense of rythm will find it's way into the brush strokes. The link between music and art really intrigues me, so I'm attempting to bridge the gap. Being a cellist, the first board I did was a representation of a cello. I might even try to find some recordings of solos of each instrument then try to paint from these. These are the first few that I've finished. I think by the end of it there should be about 20 different boards. Sorry the quality of the photos aren't amazing, really need to brave the photography department soon.

I love oils!

I've always thought of myself as a 3D kind of girl, but actually, after doing a workshop in oil painting I think I maay hav converted. I still enjoy making texture out of the paint, which I suppose I've brought over from my love of materiality from working in a three dimensional way, but I'm definitly enjoying working with these oils. I'm still exploring all the different ways to manipulate the paint to create images, to date, palette knife use is probably my favourite, though I've been advised to be even more abstract and start using random object around me to achieve different effects, so more of this to come! Here are some experimental pieces from the workshop, we had so many boards to work with - fantastic :D

canvases ready to go!

So we finally sorted out the canvases, all 16 of them and the photos, now the art begins, which is kinda nice, sort of get lost in the planning sometimes! I'm not sure how I want to do mine yet, I have to do 2 canvases, so 4 halves of faces. Many thanks of course to all the lovely fine art people we managed to rope into having their photos taken for this.

Group Project commences....

Currently in the works is a group project! I'm teaming up with about 7 other people to create a project which for now is called "Inverse". The intention is to create an inverse gallery, ie, a white cube, about 8 ft x 8 ft x 8ft, showing 16 canvases on the outside, which will have portraits painted on them, with two half faces at each edge of each canvas, in order that half the face on one canvas will flow on to the other half of that same face on the next canvas, but we all have naturally different styles of painting or making so hopefully it should look quite interesting! The plan is then to transport this inverse gallery out into the public domain, documenting this with film and photography, which will then be displayed in the final private view, along with the inverse gallery in the centre of the room. I'm very excited to try to incorporate my newfound love of abstract oil painting in this project! It's just all the planning that needs to happen now, but it's all under way so I shall keep you posted.

Catch up of some early works from first yr

So here are some of my pieces of art that I did in my first term of uni, they're a bit of a mix of styles and ideas whilst I gathered my bearings. Now I've moved on to some painting, heavily influenced by sound, which I'll post on here as soon as possible. This image above was an experimental piece where I was looking at language/music as a system. Having researched morse code, I found a beautiful quote, "Calling all. This is our last cry before our eternal silence." I then wanted to write this in morse code, but experiment with my interest in materiality and texture, so I allocated different materials to each letter and recreated the quote in morse code then used it to make collograph prints.

I tried further experimentation into music and art and ended up creating this piece above, which is a physical representation of the sounds and the movements associated with chakras. I performed the various yoga positions, having painted my hands and feet with the colours that were in correspondance with the yoga positions, creating an abstract piece, which I then worked into with charcoal, adding records to amphasise the link with music.
Having felt somewhat pressured to work with music and art, I thought about what else I wanted to look at, and felt that I wanted to look at escapism, which in hind sight seems very apt considering how I was feeling uncomfortable working with music and art and looing for a way out perhaps. I began to look at tunnels as a general symbol of escaping, and mixed this with my interest in domestic objects, which has been carried through from previous projects. I spent some time experimenting loosely with materials to depict this concept, really though I feel I was getting a bit bogged down with concepts and so more recently have tried to move away from that a little bit.


And that is a general catch up on the year so far! More stuff to come...