Words with Found Letters - Part Four

 

Unfamiliars: Tales for the Fireside 2

Putting together my contribution for the Unfamiliars: Tales for the Fireside 2 zine started by considering the title, the first thing that came to mind for me was the first line of many fairy tales, 'once upon a time'. The use of these phases would draw upon shared public language and resonate with others familiar with fairy tales. 

Once upon a time...

From taking this initial start point I then explored how to expand this. I often work with automatic writing due to its nonsensical outcomes. I employed my smartphone here, to create digital automatic texts which followed on from the phases, 'once upon a time'. 

To create these outcomes I entered the phase and then selected the predicted text, this adds a personal element to the outcome as the phone draws on my most used language. I wanted to move away from these outcomes - mostly as it turns out I am not that exciting and the outcome was not as playful as I had hoped!

Digital Automatic Writing

The second exploration on the start phrase was to look at synonyms for the words, finding words that mean the same thing as each word component. This exploration is the one I decided to develop, it allowed me to start breaking the language and moving it away from the shared public language of the initial phase and move towards something more Dada. The change is slight but enough to distort the reading a little. 

Synonyms

Once each of the words in the phrase had been replaced I start to put them together using my ACcomplte4 plaster letters. The maternity of the final outcome is not particularly important, it is just the medium I am currently interested in working in.

Final Outcome

See the final copy in print, available to buy at Tales for the fireside // Hand Embellished Limited Magazine | Etsy 

Words with Found Letters - Part Three

 

Throwback: The Waiting Room - RUPTURE

 

A Four Lettered Word - Part Four

This project has ind of fallen away a little. This is as I always have more than one project on at any one time. However, I have played with digitally altering the image. This was an attempt to blur the text.

While this did work, I worry that it makes the text too unreadable - the central letters feel OK to me, but the outer letters are becoming lost.

I am note sure where I will go with this idea, or if it will just fade away into the night. 

I think that i is good to remember that not all projects and ideas will work out, that is just part of the creative journey. 

CAS Christmas Online Exhibition

Head over to the Colchester Art Societies website to check out our Christmas Online Exhibition. All works are for sale, so you might just find the perfect gift there too (for yourself, or for someone else!).

Find us here: https://www.colchesterartsociety.co.uk/

My offering this year, is 'END'.

END makes use of two of my The Road Sign Collection lino cuttings. Designed to be a wall hanging, bring the outside in with this wooden sign.

The Ten Minute Session: Blind Line Drawing

Description

Look at the object, not looking at the paper

Draw with the eyes, allow the pencil to trace what you see

 

Instructions

1.     Pick an object that you have to hand; a cup, your phone

2.     Set yourself up with some paper and a pen or pencil

3.     Look at your object carefully, decide where you are going to start your drawing from

4.     Put your pen on the paper – do not look at the paper – and follow the shape of your chosen object with your eye and more your pencil to follow your eye movements

 

Task One

Complete a 30 second blind line drawing

 

 

Task Two

Complete a 2-minute blind line drawing

The Ten Minute Session: Draw This

 

Description

Follow these instructions to create your own work of art.

 

Task one

Instructions

1.     On a piece of paper draw a large circle

2.     Inside the circle draw, towards the bottom of the circle draw a semi-circle

3.     In the top left quarter of the circle draw a smaller circle

4.     In the top right quarter of the circle draw an identical circle to the one you just draw

5.     Outside od the circle draw a straight line going from the edge of the circle to the edge of you page, every 1cm

 

Task Two

Write your own set of instructions for others to follow, post them below. 

Developing a Peer Support Programme: Part Three: Online Creative Practitioner Support Programme

 I've not talked about the Creative Practitioner Support Programme on here in while so catch up with part one and part two first if you like!

Like with everything in 2020 the Creative Practitioner Support programme had to move online due to COVID. For the programme this transition was not too painful and in the end quite rewarding.

The main reason we were able to make this transition quickly was that we already had an online home, our Facebook Page, which allowed us to easily make contact with our attendee. We did not miss a session and went straight online the week of lockdown, letting our attendees know we would be there for their creative outlet needs!

There where changes to our online delivery

• We went from hosting 2 sessions a month, to a session every week
• We explored Zoom before Facebook introduced Rooms
• We were able to extend our offer to those outside of Colchester/the surrounding area

The main difficulties came from the tech (as always!), getting people onto Zoom, Zoom cutting out after 40 minutes and then once we moved to Facebook Rooms the issues of attendees not having Facebook accounts!

As we get use to the 'new normal' (sorry), the Creative Practitioner Support Programme sessions have gone back to twice a month, giving attendees time between session for their practice to grow.

One of the benefits that has comes from online offer has been the ability to grow our community, but also for our community to take more ownership of the Facebook Page. The page, unlike our in-person offer, is active 24/7 and attendees can - and do - post outside of our scheduled sessions. This is great as it allows for creatives to access advice and support whenever they need it and it also allows conversations to carry on over a longer period of time.

It will be exciting to see what happens with the Online Creative Practitioner Support Programme going forward!

If you would like to join us, give the Facebook Page a 'like'.

Collaborating with a bird.

My art practice often explores breaking language and I found a new way to do this, this summer. Creating letters from bread and placing them in the garden for nature to break.

I usually create work that other humans will interact with, however with lockdown a collaboration with a bird was the only option.

The inital idea was to spell out something on the grass with the bread letters, however the bird was too eager to take part and swooped in before I could do this.

They do say never work which children or animals after all.

Developing a Peer Support Programme: Part Two: Creative Practitioner Support Programme

Need to catch-up? Read part one here.

Expansion came in the form of moving to work with SPACE to develop the idea of a peer support programme.

Many of the same principles stood from Colchester Crit Collective, including the importance of it being something that happens outside of traditional arts education, with a much simpler structure (Vidokle and Rosler, 2008). We wanted to create a respectful environment in which peer feedback could be shared to help develop the practices of our attendees (Hattie and Timperley, 2007). Having SPACE as a permanent location for the sessions allowed us to develop this environment, as attendees start to become comfortable and accustomed to the room that sessions are held in (Davila and Waterston, 2009).

The Graduate and Creative Practitioner Support Programme was officially launched in October 2018 and offered two free sessions a month to creatives and continues to this day as the Creative Practitioner Support Programme. Sessions now run every third Thursday and fourth Saturday at 12-2pm. This along with the regular rooming makes the sessions more welcoming and predictable. 

The notion of building a supportive community (Day, 2012) is at the heart of what we do. Since we moved to the regular time slot, the session attendance has grown and we have started to create this community of creatives who are from in and around Colchester, each with their own practices.

The sessions allow for facilitated dialogues to take place (Lermans, 2018), rather than the sessions being a free-for-all, there is an element of structure. As the session facilitator I will manage attendees expectation and keep an eye on timing. Each attendee is asked if they wish to show work or are just there to observe. Those showing, will be asked to outline what it is they want from the session; do they have a specific set of questions they want answering, do they want their peers initial reactions to work. or something else. This allows for attendees to access the kind of support they require. This is also beneficial to attendees in terms of being able to bring more perspectives to the development and aid problem solving (Latham, 2018). Peers are able to offer critical analysis, allowing attendees to expand their practices and to sharing knowledge (Davis and Tilley, 2016).  Receiving peer feedback also highlights the opportunity for the attendees to become more self-reflective and critical about their own practices (Percy, 2004). 

Our Facebook group has also grown, bringing together our attendees on a digital site. This has allowed us to implement the use of technology into our offer (Wojak and Miller, 2015), allowing all of the elements listed above to continue outside of the meeting room. We currently have around 70 members within our Facebook group. This group is actively used by attendees, to continue conversations and for networking.

The Creative Practitioner Support Programme is currently in its second year. We will be running sessions every third Thursday and fourth Saturday until July 2020, when we stop for the summer break. 

References

Davila, J. and Waterston, E. (2009) Art Quilts at Play: Ignite Your Inner Artist-Experiment with Surface Design Techniques. C&T Publishing.

Davis, R. and Tilley, A. (2016) What they didn’t teach you in art school: What you need to know to survive as an artist. Ilex.

Day. P. (2012) The Are Group Crit: How do you make a firing squad less scary? [online] Available at: arts.brighton.ac.uk/projects/networks/issue-18-july-2012/the-art-group-crit-how-do-you-make-a-firing-squad-less-scary. [accessed 30/01/20].

Hattie, J. and Timperley, H. (2007) The Power of Feedback. Review of Educational Research. 77 (1).

Lermans, L. (2018) Critical Response Process. [online] brooklynartscouncil.org. [accessed 04/02/20].

Percy, C. (2004) Critical absence versus critical engagement: Problematics of the crit in design and communication in Higher Education. 2 (3),

Vidokle, A. and Rosler, M. (2008) Exhibition as School as Work of Art. [online] www.art-lies.org/article.php?Id=1661&issue=59&5=1. [accessed 05/02/20].

Wojak, A. and Miller, S. (2015) Starting Your Career as an Artist: A Guide to Launching a Creative Life. Allworth Press; Second Edition.

My Current Artist Statement

My artistic practice explores the use of text and site, examining how the context of a site can change the reading of any given text and provides the cultural frame work for the art work to exist within. The work produced is usually temporary, drawing on notions of time and place, duration and mutability. This is echoed in the use of language, as that too is affected by these factors. Language changes depending on when and where it is exists, and the meaning of words is edited and changed as time passes. Nothing is fixed and my practice focuses very much on nowness.

One of the main processes which takes place within my practice is the playing with language, I will often use synonyms and antonyms. I enjoy breaking language and pushing it to its limits; whether this means the use of repetition or removal of text until the language no longer makes sense. The text used within my work varies: some works use found text, others are created by automatic means – the silliness of Dadaism draws me in. However, in both instances they depend on our shared public language and social facts. The everyday nature of language and its accessibility to audiences appeals to me.

The notion of audience/audiencing and community/communication are important to my practice, as the work exists outside of an art gallery context. Therefore, the viewers of the work may not necessarily be looking at it intentionally. To engage this everyman audience, I strive to make text choices which comment on life, rather than art. One of the main reasons I use text within my practice is because we have temporal relations with it and thus, even if the viewer does not reach the same interpretation as my intention, they are still engaging with it on some level. Time and place come into play here too, as the same text will be read differently by the same person if the text is placed in a new site. The text used within my practice is often vague and embraced the audience’s interpretations of the text and the loss of control over it, echoing Barthes feelings on the Death of the Author.

My practice lends itself to installation work, the usual criteria for sites used within my practice are the Duchampian unchoice. These territories appeal to me due to their usually overlooked presence.

My process swings between two opposing pillars; choosing text specifically fitting to sites and putting text into sites and allowing it to resonate. These are varying processes, however I find the process of both compelling, as either way a dialogical relationship will take place between the art and the site [and the audience]. Working within different sites appeals to me as each has their own specific limitation and these limits help to establish and frame the text.

My practice takes a DIY approach, again infused with Dadaism, as such I use materials which are often inexpensive and processes that are easily accessible. Simplisticity can rule and as such the text is curated into the site carefully.

Continued...The Road Sign Collection - Series One Development (Firstsite Collectors Group Bursary)

The Road Sign Collection drawings are now complete. 

Next Steps

- To print and review The Road Sign Collection
- To cut down The Road Sign Collection from 71 to 50
- To seek peer advice on The Road Sign Collection; How to group the work, How to cut down the collection to 50 signs
- Look into types of book; shape and size, visual/colouring 

The Firstsite Collectors Group Annual Party

Friday night (7^th February 2020), I attended the Firstsite Collectors Group Annual Party, hosted at Firstsite to celebrate the 2019 bursary winners. The event was attended by members of the Firstsite Collectors Group, bursary winners and members of the Firstsite team, including director Sally Shaw.

The evening was a great networking opportunity and to meet others involved. There was chance for the bursary winner to display something of their art practices. For this I decided to show my three artist books and my current sketchbook. I presented the artist books as they fully document the last two years of my art practice, with images and short art essays. While my sketchbook documents my current ideas and the start point for what it is that I will be using my bursary for.

Each bursary winner had the opportunity to speak about their art practice and what it is they are planning on doing with their bursary. It was really insightful to listen to the other creatives talk about their artistic processes and ideas; from artists drawing and painting from across rivers, on trains and from Instagram to artists print making and attending research trips.

Within my speech I spoke of my general art practice being based around text and site and how historically I have utilised very DIY, hands on methods and materials, such as; wood, plaster, string and paper. I went onto to discuss how with the bursary I would explore digital outputs to develop The Road Sign Collection. The end goal being to create an artist book, or artist colouring book, wanting to have an outcome which could be interacted with by an audience.

Within this time, I also explored some of the aspects of The Road Sign Collection that compel me to continue with this project. Touching on their everyday nature and our individual experiences with them and how they exist both as mass produced objects, as well as originals, with each having their own history which is documented in their visage.

The opportunity to talk about my art practice in an environment such as Firstsite, is unique and a valuable learning experience. There are few other situations in which to flex and develop this skill set.

Attending the Firstsite Collectors Group Annual Party prompted me to reflect on my experience of the process of applying for and receiving the bursary.

I found the process of applying for the Firstsite Collectors Group bursary useful in that it made me articulate myself and my ideas in a more coherent way – having to write within word counts also helped. I was conscious that those reading the application may not have encountered my practice before and wanted to ensure that I did not overlook any aspect of my practice.

Receiving the bursary is a great vote of confidence and goes someway to externally validating what it is you are doing. From a practical point of view, it offers much needed funding to allow artists to continue to develop – from a personal viewpoint I would not be able to justify investing in software such as Photoshop without the bursary. However, it also comes with some pressure as there is a slight feeling of being accountable to others with reference to what it is you are creating. Something that I have mot felt since leaving university. This is an exciting position to be in and I look forward to seeing what it is i create and develop by December 2020.

You can read more about the Firstsite Collectors Group and the 2019 bursary winners here.

2019 Recap

As 2019 comes to an end I look back on the exhibitions, events and publications which I have featured in. This year was a bit different from the others as it was the first year that I have been out of education. The year has been spent working out how to juggle being a practising artist, with real life commitments. 

Scroll down to see what I have been up to!

58^th Essex Open Exhibition

‘This Way’

Beecroft Gallery, Southend

29/11/12 - 16/12/19

Poetry Sound Collection

‘Page Forty Three’

Poetry Sound Library Online: https://poetrysoundlibrary.weebly.com/

19/01/19 – Present

WOTISART?

‘done’

Art Magazine

February Edition

Unfamiliars: On Wonder

‘WONDER’

The Minories, Colchester

22/03/19

Secret Art Sale

‘you are here’, ‘you are here’

The Minories, Colchester

29/03/19 – 30/03/19

Harwich Shorts

‘Word-by-Word’

Harwich Festival

20/06/19 – 30/06/19

Colchester Art Society Summer Exhibition

‘Playing Cube’, ‘String Words’

The Minories

21/06/19 – 26/07/19

Unfamiliars: On Friends and Family

‘Communication Cards’

Odd One Out

28/06/19

The Travelling Sketchbook

‘turn over’

SPACE Colchester

18/07/19

Communication Cards

‘Communication Cards’

Edinburgh

10/08/19

Lowland

‘Its’, ‘Layers’

Ateliers Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Reuchlinstr. 4b

06/ 09/19

Polemical Zine

‘PLAY’, ‘FUN’

Online

01/10/19

Coastal Open

‘x’, ‘to the sea’

Jaywick Martello Tower

12/09/19 – 27/10/19

Colchester Art Society

‘Playing Cubes’

Beecroft Gallery

07/09/19 – 02/11/19

Falling Walls

‘Road Sign Postcards’

SVA Gallery / Nau Gallery

01/11/19 – 16/11/19 / 04/12/19 – 10/12/19

Museum of Human Kindness

‘Wallet’

Online

13/11/19

Folds

‘Paku-Paku’

Lewisham Project Space

20/11/19 – 01/12/19

Colchester Art Society Winter Exhibition

‘Page Forty Three’, ‘PLAY’

The Minories

07/12/19 – 31/12/19

New Emergence Art

‘Playing Cubes’

newemergenceart

16/12/19

2019 was also an exciting year for the Creative Practitioner Support Programme (Previously known as the Graduate and Creative Practitioner Support Programme).

We completed out first year of peer-to-peer feedback sessions, hosted a Collaborative Installation Residency and started our second year of peer-to-peer feedback sessions.

To find out more about the Creative Practitioner Support Programme visit our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/269213273718843/

Thank-you for your support in 2019, here is to an exciting 2020!