Unit 2 Assessment

Learning Outcome 1:

Develop and realise a self-directed programme of learning which draws from wide-ranging subject knowledge. (AC Knowledge, AC Process)

Overall, I would say that my practice has matured in two key ways over Unit 2. Firstly it has become more fluid, approaching each piece as a living part of a journey, rather than a project with a brief. Secondly I have become better at noticing, appreciating, and acting-on what I am experiencing as I make art.

Meaning (and thus, I guess, artistic purpose) has continued to be very important to me, but I have matured in my attitude towards it:

• Shifting from meaning-up-front to meaning as a dialogue with the piece (and here)

• Embracing meaning as something that is co-authored with the viewer and left for them to complete (and more prototypically)

• Moving from meaning as a message towards meaning as a process of searching (culminating in the squeezing of the nut!)

• The shift to embracing ‘irrational’ urges and finding meaning and ideas from them

Moving from thinking of a series of artwork ‘projects’ towards thinking of the work as a more fluid interrelated continuous thing (and here):

• Developing an appreciation for curation

• Developing a deepening appreciation for the importance of presentation in my own art, and in the gallery setting (and more aggressively!)

Becoming more independent in:

• Exploring and sampling different forms of art (book art from participatory art, performance, video art, digital art, sculpture, etc etc) but also taking control of learning (the power of light, working with resin)

• Embracing more experimentation and prototyping in my physical art

• Exploring different ways to explore ideas in art - tools for thinking about ideas e.g. thinking hats, projecting art through a persona, even different ways to document my experience

• Becoming my own critic (also here)

Moving from direct angry expression towards seeking more universal

• The slow process of moving from making art that metaphorically shares my personal experiences (“look-at-this art”) to art that uses personal experiences to explore more general themes (“consider-this art”) - culminating in passion vs detachment post

• Moving from quite an ‘angry’ aesthetic to something more coolly detached

Learning Outcome 2:

Articulate a thorough understanding of your research and establish an informed critical position. (AC Communication)

• I wrote a research paper on the relationship between fine art and play, which is something that interests me as it connects to my interest in play as art, and to my wider interest in the value and purpose of art. I also wrote a piece for the postgraduate community around my research paper.

• I have also been considering and exploring through research, what makes good art engaging, my emotional response to galleries, and the impact of AI on fine art

Learning Outcome 3:

Analyse and critically reflect on your practice and its context. (AC Enquiry)

I have enjoyed strengthening my powers of critical reflection in Unit 2, especially around a number of key topics below, culminating in writing a first attempt at a personal art manifesto to set-out the artist I want to be.

I have been reflecting on the how my work could relate to the world

• A new social role for the artist

• Whether art can influence society

• How CSM might view my work

I have been reflecting on the value of my work to me, personally

• Can a quick assembly of clothes really be art?! If not, why not?

• Is art a physical thing, or is the physical thing just a proxy for the intangible art?

• Art as part of a life well-lived

• Art as a life, not a career

I have become much more aware of my evolving aesthetics

• Recognising the desire to shock

• Recognising the desire to shock as coming from anger

• Starting to want to move beyond anger

• Recognising the desire to present my pain directly, and the potential to use it as a catalyst instead

• Understanding what I do want, by reacting to what I don’t

• Breakthrough in thinking about passion/anger vs detachment/reflection as a balance in my art

• Art as a way to explore the world, not present opinions culminating in art as the byproduct of a deliberately impossible task

I have been building the habit of reflecting on completing individual pieces of work art

• International Manly Crying Championships

• Rivers of Silver: Guilt

• The interim show

• A Month in my Head

• Pain and Acceptance

• Book of Wish You Were Hear

• My Hole (working title!)

• Reaching Through

RA Podcast - Tracey Emin and David Dawson in Conversation - Meaning as a process of discovery

 I listened to another podcast! Go me! I am a big Tracey Emin fan so I went for this episode where she is in conversation with David Dawson:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/0DHCRQnQvseUkwQV72mzqj?si=6SVIsL9cT1y6ebEFfmKgjg

It was generally very interesting with Dawson talking about Lucien Freud's work (he was his studio assistant) and Emin comparing and contrasting with her own work. 

However, I was particularly taken by this quote from Emin about meaning (at around time make 30:32):

...you would never go to a fortune teller and be happy if the fortune teller told you what you already know. And it's exactly the same with being an artist or a painter. You don't want to paint the painting you know, you want to paint the painting you didn't know ever existed

The transcript is a bit mangled, and I don't want to listen because it freaks the daughter out, but I think that's pretty close!

I think this aligned with my own approach of allowing my subconscious (Tathos) to drive a lot of process, while reflecting in the process as to what might be going on (Tomgos). It is a great made-to-stick way of expressing it. 

I guess Tomgos would say "well, maybe the process reveals things you didn't know that you knew" and Tathos would say "that's what she said!".

Tutorial 4 with Jonathan - 15 Nov 2024

Very interesting and enjoyable conversation with JK. I focused mostly on my approach to the end of the course, and the implications for my art. Essentially, I am trying to focus on the end of the course NOW so that I can have my crisis early while there's still time to actually do something about it... 

JK asked why I was thinking of it as 'the end' and I discussed that it is the end, in some ways... After the course, I'll probably have to go back to work. I gave up work when Carolyn died, so it's not the end, but it's definitely the end of the beginning - the end of a strange but potent time in my life - I feel I've lived more in the last 2 years than in the preceding 20. 

I said I would like to stay in academia, but I needed enough money to support the two kids and I, and JK explained that wasn't likely to be a viable option financially. I said that I have actually begun to consider what I might do next, and that actually I would give myself up to a year to sort myself out with either 1) writing a book that might lead to consulting work or 2) getting a qualification as a counsellor that might lead to flexible work.

JK asked around what I thought would be different when the course was over. I said I felt (having curated my blog) that the course had already delivered on the promise to help build the 'muscle' to develop my practice independently - I feel like I have the tools to keep building new tools. However, I said I thought I would miss 1) the structure that the course gives me and 2) the people to talk to and the feedback that gives me. 

We therefore explored ways I could get this:

• Dead Critics: I mentioned how helpful the DCS has been to me, and admitted that I probably would have quit the course if it wasn't for them. We discussed how hard it is to keep these things going, but agreed that smaller groups have a better chance of staying together. He suggested committing to a smaller target like meeting-up regularly for a year can make it easier for people to bow out gracefully rather than keep flogging a dead horse if it's not working (my words, not his!)
• Local art groups: I mentioned that I had made a great connection to the Chair of the Ashford Visual Artists, and that I had joined the Sevenoaks Visual Artists Forum - while they will be different from what I get at CSM, they are still a chance to talk art with people who practice it at all levels, including those that are significantly more experienced than me
• Professional Groups: Artists Network and ArtQuest have great resources
• Open Calls: Can be a good way to get your work out there, but only if you enter on your own terms (we discussed my 'rules' for open calls) and if you are prepared to fail (a lot!). He suggested that I think of the benefits broadly - not just reputation, but connections, experiences, and also deadlines to help to force work to happen - it's true that most of my finished pieces were for open calls
• Artist Collectives and your own shows: Something like the DCS can be a great way of creating your own exhibitions (we talked about the proposal Roz and I did). JK talked about his experience in an artists collective that ran extremely short exhibitions in unusual spaces like bars and discos - they eventually gained their own space and became a gallery in their own right that ran for seven years! 

We talked a bit about my recent blog post on "Useful Art" and JK mentioned that  also mentioned that Alistair Hudson (who JK knows!) was also involved in the "Grizedale Arts" project, and he suggested I check out their work, which is driven by the same 'useful art' agenda.

We finished by talking a bit about the end of year show itself, and JK explained the curation process. There is a dedicated space for the course, so there is definitely scope for groups of students (e.g. the DCS) to get together to lobby to have their pieces displayed together, and in a particular way. Obviously JK gets the final say, but he seemed positive about the idea.

All-in-all, I feel more positive about the end of the course. I need to get out and walk, and think about which of my current pieces I would want to show, why, and how I would want it to look. I should perhaps make a decision about what I will do next, and put out some feelers. I also need to visualise how my practice might look continuing after the end of the course.

Useful Art - RA Podcast "What is sculpture good for?"

Catherine recommended this podcast to the Dead Critics group. I have been meaning to "get better" at listening to podcasts, so I decided to listen to this one in the car when I had a long journey alone (L would simply DIE if she had to listen to Daddy's aaarrrrt stuff!). 

https://open.spotify.com/episode/3jJWa9CsOe5RqMFRFkBRmI?si=OcNkJqy4Sge2P_4uMYJmOw

I'm so glad I did! I've only listened to half but it's been really interesting so far. I've particularly enjoyed Alistair Hudson's comments. I've attempted to use Otter.ai to transcribe them (it seems to have a 30 min limit on the free version so I might need to try something else!).

Hudson was the director of the Whitworth and Manchester Art Gallery, which has the strap-line "Making art useful since 1889". I was amused but cynical... Can art really be useful? Is 'useful art' even fine art? But then Hudson went on, at time mark 14.57, emphasis mine:

...the short version is, of course, is that our last 200 years of history is one that's defined by this idea of autonomous art. We could touch here, perhaps upon sculpture and how that, you know, how we how we conceive of and think about sculpture, but it's really one that's defined in Western Europe, or centered around Western European thinking, the philosophies of Immanuel Kant, for example, about sort of isolating art out of the system and thinking about it on its own terms. This is really it kind of created the conditions that were very supportive of an art market. It was very support, supportive of the conditions that created kind of hierarchy, hierarchies within society, but it's one model of art. And what that model of art did, basically was push out the idea of use value within art itself, which for a long 40,000 years of human history, people have been using art in their daily lives in all kinds of ways for a very long time. So it was really about not necessarily doing away with art in its current form, but reintroducing this idea of use as a way to actually understand what's going on when we do art, or we look at art, or we employ art that process, and think about art as a process which is then employed in life practices. So that's sort of the underlying philosophy of it. But what it means, in practical terms is that I've become particularly interested in forms of art in which they are their very definition is defined about their use. So rather than prescribing meaning from the outset, which is dictated primarily by you know, an author or so on, the meaning itself is derived over time, through through processes. 

Mind. Blown. WTF! I had no idea about any of this. I had no idea that what I think of as 'art' is 'autonomous art', let alone that it's only one form of art. Of course, now I see how that could be so but... Wow. Reading more about autonomous art. 

I really like the idea of making art that is defined by it's use... It feels adjacent to some of my earlier musing on art as the 'fire' (event/process/experience) not the ashes (object/record). I am a bit of a meaning freak, and the idea of meaning being created through processes - not 'process', but processes, I think meaning the processes of use - the use develops the meaning, especially (in the context of the podcast) meaning to the community of people who use the art. You could argue that something like The Angel of the North has developed meaning not through existing as an object, or even though its form, but through the meaning it has come to have in the hearts of the people who have interacted with it.

What does this mean for my own art? Dunno, certainly it has renewed my interest in participatory art, but also perhaps given me a new way of thinking about meaning and how it comes to reside in a work... I need to get a good walk in, and ponder this further.

Happy Sun-day - Grotto Print Done

 Got three copies of my Grotto print gilded and ready to go:

Overall I'm pleased with how it's turned out, and it makes me want to explore a series of very constrained variations, preserving many of the original features (e.g. the size and position of the circle, the use of perlin noise warping, the use of gold), but seeing how many different variants I can make before I get bored and/or boring.

Instagram loves a regular 'feature' so, given they remind me of the sun reflected on water or obscured by mist, I plan to post one every Sunday with the tag line 'Happy Sun-day'.

My Article on Art as Play published in the Postgraduate Community Newsletter

 The Postgraduate Community were kind enough to share my survey on their newsletter, so I thought it would be fun to write-up the results and share them as an article, which they were happy to also publish:

https://www.arts.ac.uk/study-at-ual/postgraduate-study/postgraduate-community/stories/subjective-experiences-of-art

It was fun to be a small part of the postgraduate community, and I figure it's good publicity for the course, and potentially for me also ;)

Exploring and arriving with the Grotto print

 I feel like I've been on quite the journey with this print! It's been frustrating at times, but it's actually been a great learning experience. Having freed myself from the pressure of having to 'perform' and produce a print that was beautiful, and sensitive, and funny, and epitomised my art practice, my instinct was to fall back on humour. Funny prints sell well, and there's a lot of my sort of pithy humour out there. 

However, remembering my manifesto, my focus shifted to something a bit more authentic. I thought I could draw on the space-filling pattern I did for the book illustration, plus the skull I was messing around with before. I wanted to share something around finding joy in life, before it's too late, so I conceived something a bit like a memento mori - sort of like a grave rubbing:

I quite liked the 'poster' style, and I quite liked the slight dark ambiguity in the proclamation - clearly it could be read as 'seize the joy in life, before it's too late' but it could also be interpreted in darker ways e.g. seize the joy of death. However, sharing it with a few friends, I got the vibe that they didn't like it. They didn't like the ambiguity and double meaning. I also began to worry I might have inadvertently tapped into a bit of 'nazi-aesthetic' with skull-on-a-poster vibe...

Having seen some blind-embossing on instagram, and having studies the prints on the walls of various institutions I happened to be in, I decided to go for something radically simpler, and lean-into the computer art connection, almost bringing me in a full circle. Keeping the set-up above, I moved eventually to:

Which I am really pleased with. I did experiment quite a lot with e.g. different sizes of circle, shading behind vs no shading, different arrangements of whether the lines cross the circle edge, etc etc One particularly tricky decision was whether to include a slight warp to the positions - this code was implemented originally but turned out to be switched off. I liked the more organic nature of the warped image (whereby the positions of the lines above are pushed around slightly using perlin noise), but I also liked the cool precision of the un-distorted image. Eventually I implemented a very slight distortion, which I think brings it to life.

The aim is for the centre circle to be gilded, but the prints only came back today, the day before the deadline for submitting the thumbnail for Not Just A Shop. However, I was able to reuse some code from a previous experiment, to create a mock-up of the gilded poster in Blender:

It's not great, but not awful either! Hopefully it will give people a decent taste of the real thing...

Having got the prints today, I now have to do the gilding for real... I hope I don't mess it up!

Funnily enough, having refreshed my interest in computer art, I read this very interesting article about computer art pioneer, Lillian Schwartz, in Art Forum.