Documentation
Contextualization
Tia Marie Mcdermid
Mcdermids artwork uses a lot of texture which relates to my work a lot and she also uses quite fluid lines in a lot of her work. Her abstract works tend to have themes such as “sea and sand” or “elements” with all her themes being nature based but rather than landscapes she focuses more on details of thinks such as ripples in the sand, water effects and other natural textures.
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Jackson Pollock
I found Influence from Pollocks piece “Full Fathom Five” as he has a kind of crust of texture built up which he did using a pallet knife and an assortment of objects hidden in there to create a texture which the paint is dripped on which reminds me of my way of working as I’ve been building up a texture before adding paint to create a crust which I do with modelling clay and wax layers. As well as this the use of neutral colours and blues look like the sea to me which is part of the landscapes I’m working on. This may be due to this piece in particular being about a quote from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” where a shipwreck is described.
Field
For the first part of field I was in the group making and modelling with ecological materials where we learnt about how to build with more ecological materials and art and building based around more community based projects, despite this my group looked at the brief in more of a aesthetic way. We used the technique of willow weaving in order to make a sculptural piece we based our work of not only the basis of my subject work which is storrs rock but also the art work of Spencer Jenkins who does both aesthetic and functional willow sculptures. This project I feel didn’t influence my work much apart from me experimenting with texture and sculpture a bit more, it could have possibly but I found that it wasn’t well organised and because of the materials we were using we had to work outside which wasn’t ideal with the time of year and weather, however I could have looked at using more ecological materials in my main practice
The second group I was part of was the Disobedient Objects project, I didn’t have as much time as I would of liked as I had to take time off for health reasons however it was my favorite of the two as there was more of an open brief so I took mine down the rout of failure art with the disobedient object part coming into it with me creating furniture that was designed to not work which i did in the form of making cardboard chairs in different sizes so they were too small or too weak to use, I then filmed someone attempting to sit on the chairs with my final outcome being the films. William Wegman was a main artist influence for this project as his collection of video works mostly include his interacting with objects and furniture or just filming himself while he acts strange, as well as this Tulio Pintos works including chairs influenced me although his work tends to be more about how he can use force and balance in his work. Also another main influence was Bruce Nauman who documents failure and turns it into art work in his photograph “failing to levitate in the studio” where he attempts to levitate between two chairs and ends up falling. most of the tutorials with this project were based around learning about circuit boards and robotics so that the option of making a working moving object was there which I enjoyed as that is something I didn’t think I’d be able to do but it wasn’t something I was really interested in after giving it a try.
Final
For my final pieces I decided to do a series of three paintings on wood which I based of collages I made, I made these using modelling clay, wax and melted plastic to create texture and a more sculptural look and decided to use more neutral colours to relate them back to the fact that they are based off a painting of a landscape.
With these pieces I do feel like if they were bigger perhaps they may have worked better because I do prefer the close up view of the textures and painting on them as you can see the wax resist effects and how I poured the paint to go around the modelling clay build up better and possibly as a whole the paintings might come across as quite busy but with what i wanted to do being to recreate work based on one subject and based of collages and capturing the textures at the same time they work.
With presenting these works I decided to have them all in a row on a large white wall which I think was the best way to present them. When deciding what order to put them in I thought best to have the one with the lightest tones in the middle as other wise they seemed to blend in to much colour wise.
Site venue exhibition
For the site venue exhibition my first choice of venue was welcome house as I thought it was an interesting idea of an exhibition space and would be different to what im used to however I did then decide that the West Warf Gallery would be better as my art work would stand out better against white walls and is better suited to that sort of area as they’re paintings on wood.
I chose to have it on a smaller bit of wall as my work wasn’t that big a piece, I though it was a good place to put it next to the window but I do think that it would of benefited from being somewhere more well lit and less in the corner but as it was a small piece and just one on its own I couldn’t really have a larger space as other people with larger work needed the space, overall i was happy with my decision to put my work up in west warf however because I feel that in welcome house it could might not of stood out. i also had the experience of providing drinks for an exhibition.
Field- Making and modelling with economic materials
In today’s tutorial we were shown willow weaving, I practiced doing this in a more spherical shape as it linked to how in my subject work the focus of my work is based around a rock and despite Storrs rock not being a sphere and having more of a natural form to it this was a more simplified view of it, there are links to my work also in the way that we are using natural materials to re-create an object that is also part of nature.
Ideas for my main work taken from this is that I could work in a more sculptural way either by leaving behind the idea of making more flat pieces of artwork in favour for making sculptures or by integrating the two so for example having a painting that has elements of sculpture in it.
PDP
I was part of the constellation group looking at how to “puzzle out contemporary art” so we looked at subjects ranging from the YBA’S and new forms of art being installation art, art done through video and also socially charged art and art based around politics and post- feminism which are topics that i’m already interested in. . During classes I found that the way we would address and discuss topics during lectures would help a lot with critique as we would usually talk about our own opinions on the work or what we saw when we looked at the work and how it would relate to the main point of the particular lesson and in doing this we would get to gather different opinions and not be worried about being wrong or having a difference in opinion compared to others because it all contributed to picking apart the source of discussion and puzzling it out. We also went on a trip to London to view contemporary art which was nice as the few times I’ve been to London I hadn’t gone and seen specially contemporary art works and stuck to places more like the Tate, we went around as a group discussing the work we seen while also experiencing it and showed just how helpful it is to experience the art work you’re looking in person rather than just behind a computer screen.
An example of this could be the Magnus Plessen works I seen in the White cube as in photographs of them I find that my eye just tends to be drawn to the aesthetics of the work or the texture from the media he used where as in person seeing them at the size they were and how they were presented I could find meaning in them even if it wasn’t the meaning the artist intended for people to get from them. 83.So these works in particular had a lot of human form mostly that of women with large rounded stomachs and many of the works had smaller heads, so to me I found these works to be about pregnancy, and although there was quite a pastel and neutral colour scheme which through the form of photographs is seen just as a aesthetic thing when witnessing the work along with the collaged bits of painting and seeing the texture of the work I found the work to appear more violent and dark and when discussing it with other students on the trips my feeling is that it was about pregnancy and how in some ways it can take control away from your body and that your body isn’t seen as just your own I also found that it portrayed pregnancy to be a frightening thing, but then we also had to take into consideration the context around the painting so who painted it and how that affected our explanations of work.170.So for example Magnus Plessen is a father so may have painted his works in the white cube about pregnancy even though he could have had the same or similar explanation for his work as I did he has only ever witnessed pregnancy rather than experienced it and has never had to think about experiencing it so it might not be as likely that he shared the same opinion about the stomachs in his work that appeared pregnant compared to me and the mostly girl group of students on our trip, further research into him and his work you can see that most of his work is inspired by books with the ‘1914’ painting being based around “war against war” written by a German pacifist Ernst Fredrich which contains photographs of mutilated soldiers which could explain the abstract look of the bodies in Plessen’s work, but without that knowledge I seen a completely different thing and could use his work to back up a completely different point.
This way of working continued into class where in the lecture on post feminist contemporary art the main source that I contributed an opinion with was Lisa Yuskavages’ piece “Half Family” which without an explanation I found to be about women sexuality but also that its something which women art expected to be very open about and with a statement from an interview the artist did about it I found that it confirmed that and also made me think about how women are expected to be sexual but also women who do what they want sexually are discriminated against “the knowledge that you want to fall” this quote from the article next to the piece of work made me think this especially as she describes acting on her desires as falling as it can be seen as a fall from grace almost but also with her knowing she wants to do these things and could end up acting on her fantasies she fears repercussions possibly in the form of slut shaming. I also feel that I was drawn to this due to the this being very similar subject to previous works in my studio practice so when I do give opinions and explanations to art work I take it into consideration that my interest could give a bias on my opinion. Due to this when looking at sources I explore every single part of them so with video sources looking into not only what you see in the video but the title and what that implied and also music and looking at the context of the lives of the artist and authors compared to the language and imagery in their work and how and if it can contribute to the points i’m using them to back up and I take into consideration how my own personal bias can affect my written work when writing about things such as gender and sexuality and media that is about these sort of subjects.
Assesment
Documentation
After painting from collages on paper I found that as I was trying to add texture and emulate the collages using multiple layers that paper was to weak for what I wanted to do so I then went on to working on wood. The thing that worked best to create a textured base to paint on was using modelling clay and dragging it across the wood or building it up when needed or pressing shapes into it.
I used then would first of all add thick layers of paint occasionally adding watery layers and allowing them to form around the shapes in the clay and dry there to create a marbled effect and I’d do this multiple time with different colours. In some areas of the paintings I would ass small bits of detail or rub away paint that had already sunk into the clay giving a stained effect which showed different layers to the paintings. Occasionally I would also add bits of powered ink to the coloured water on the painting to create different patterns and colour layers
As well of this I also experimented with using wax and plastic as one of the artist who influences my work ( terry setch ) who’s work is also based around welsh beaches however his materials are mostly found. But i feel that both of these materials could create effects to recreate my collages in painting form and to give my work texture and a more sculptural effect.
I feel like the use of wax is quite useful not only for adding texture but when used with paint can create a wax resist effect how ever it would probably work better with more layers and the better board than what I used to practice on the plastic was a bit more difficult to work with I used a heat gun to melt it which changed the size and texture of it but it doesn’t take as well with paint as the wax does.
Sophie Churcher- fine art 