Hand bound book of collages

Susan Hiller EXhibition at the Tate

The Susan Hiller exhibition was really refreshing to see after the British Art Show at the Hayward. It felt like really honest work. She collected what she liked the look of, understood from her postcard collection. This felt like she’d been really passionate about the archiving of something she was interested in or appealed to her, perhaps even for just aesthetic reasons and didn’t have any concerns holding her back with presenting to the subjective eye of the public some sort of political remark.

Preparation for World Book Day Exhibition

Making experiments with latex, I feel frustrated with not really knowing where I’m going with this, mostly because I’m completely unsure of how it’s going to work, will the seeds actually even sprout properly in the string, will it all just fall out when I go to hang it. I wished I had considered my time management earlier on. Though there is a part of me that thinks this could be a positive thing as not knowing how its going to work entirely will mean I’ll have to make sure I engage with the space more specifically on the day.

Eva Hesse

I’ve been looking at Eva Hesses work recently, through doing this I’ve been inspired to work with latex, a material that she uses often within her practice. I’m aware that I really need to engage with artists who use materials I want to experiment with to be most successful with them. Having this contact or knowledge of Eva Hesses work I will be more confident to go ahead and experiment with this new material, latex.

Copy stand workshop

Cognitive eye movement

I think it is so interesting how our eyes engage with the world around us, how everyone is having a completely different experience with their personal sight. One person’s journey through their system of viewing would be very different to the next. During the multidisciplinary week I attended a seminar where an artist and an experimental psychologist paired up on a research project about cognitive eye movement. I will have to keep this in mind when considering my own gaze in terms of my research and the cognitive process my own eyes are engaging in. Acknowledging this in relation to others gazes would be of great interest too.

Exhibtion Theory and Practice

Overall the exhibition did come together and everyone felt like they had been ambitions with the work they installed. There was a definite sense of interaction between all of our work as well. I think the exhibition felt very vivid as well as ambitious. Our title ‘Translation. Transition’ helped to contextualise our exhibit because of the way all our work engaged with one another’s (for example Matt and my overlapping sound pieces), as well as how the viewer would interact and feel more involved with the exhibition due to the array of media and context (film, performance, photography, sculpture, etc.) and of course exhibiting work that was produced overseas. Having the opportunity to get together with artists from other pathways and gain an understanding of the way they work and how they construct and consider space was all very interesting to observe too, this was as interesting itself as the exhibition for me. It was so valuable to watch how people would engage with materials and space, I think this is what makes being part of an institution and having a studio space surrounded by other creative minds such a golden experience!

Thinking about the opening of the exhibition now I wish I had considered putting a camera towards the audience to get an idea of how they were reacting to something I had viewed so much as exotic. I wonder how it being projected in this space also alters how it is viewed; is it now ‘art’ only because it is viewed in the context of an exhibition space on white walls? People at art school would be so familiar with projections, so would the technology the film is passed through narrowing the viewers gaze and diluting the possibility of it being viewed as exotic? I tried placing material objects in the eye of the viewer also to extend the gaze further as they are now able to engage with something more material and perhaps ‘exotic’ to them.

What is exotic to me, then captured through my eyes, through my camera lens then played back through (familiar to many) projection technology, in surrounding familiar (yet completely disjointed to the video) surroundings and then understood through someone else’s gaze who has had a whole different set of experiences, has different cultural values and I’m sure a completely different idea f what is exotic.

some pointers to consider...

• Datelessness
• Glamorisation of the rustic
• Cutting off, contextualisation and the exotic, orientalism.
• Our own changing cultural climate
• Tracing of the Gaze
• Eva Hesse and Adrian Piper

Assessment set up, and struggling with focus after a long break...

Aesthetic value of forms really started the balls rolling this year in my studio practice. The very fortunate for me, yet random series of events that lead for this organic form to be in my own hands highlights the importance of trusting in the unconscious. Before assessments I had been in my element; exploring, documenting and interacting with material and object. However, having this period of time where I have been out of the studio and have been less play-full and subjected myself less to these forms I feel a slight paranoia that these objects could become redundant likewise with the research and documentation I collected in Kenya. Reflecting on this now I think it could have something to do with the dialectic between my collection of documentation, very obviously intriguing objects and material forms (for example the collected and decorated gourds), in contrast to the flatter more institutionalised videos and photograph documentation. This could have something to do with the eclectic mixes of cultural values and where one culture finishes and the next one starts… how many cultures does one actually belong to? This is problematic for the contextualisation of my work. I have taken this imagery out of the context and put it into a completely polar one. The objects are now surrounded by a whole new set of cultural values, whether this be of certain individuals, or how about the idea of the institution of WSA having its own cultural identity and set of values?