Month: November 2021

The members show at Two Queens was a very valuable experience, seeing different layouts for such a variety of work within a space was really interesting. It was also good to be able to experience a more intermingled curation and way of displaying work, this is not like the clearly divided by artist nature I am used to from college and university; it is similar to things like the LOVE Art open call I was part of as well as an upcoming group exhibition in February.

It was also a valuable experience in terms of meeting others who are
artists, involved in or interested in the arts. I made a couple of new
acquaintances and was able to interact with people since the environment was
very welcoming and open, not like the large galleries I have been inside
before. I did also trade information and social media details with a few local
artists and people I met at the show.

I I was also able to speak to many lecturers and technicians from DMU outside the course, this was invaluable as I felt much more able to make a human connection and relate to them as peers rather than staff etc. In this way I feel the experience was very valuable as a networking opportunity and as a way for me to re-evaluate how I see art outside education, it was also good to talk to other people in and around the arts scene about opportunities or advice. This has inspired me to seek some sort of voluntary or residency opportunity, in order to run a community project maybe and interface with the public more through my work.

The construction of the show was also a good demonstration of curation and the use of space, the square room was transformed by constructing a wall to divide the space into 3 or 4 distinct areas. This allows the viewer to travel around the space moving from one interesting piece to another in their own way if desired, instead of being read as a circular or linear display it is an amalgam.

I also found it interesting to see how people negotiated this space themselves, often investigating alone and then returning to find friends and show them the point of interest they had found. Observing this in a members show with the public was a useful experience and this aspect of investigation of the space could easily become part of my work, which itself is about distorted space and visitor experience.

Frank Stella was suggested to me as a resource when I started to explore painting in the expanded field and incorporating objects and materials within painting. Stella is an American painter mainly working in painting, sculpture and printmaking, working with ideas around minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.

I started by simply looking visually and I was struck by the freedom and lack of refinement, I don’t mean this as an insult, I prefer some amount of exposed construction as it allows the mind to focus on the core elements and materiality. I also clearly saw the similarities others noticed between my work and his, particularly the later objects like the one below.

Stella has a clear interest in materiality and from watching interviews he is more material than contextual in some ways. He states that his industrial interest and use of manufacturer’s paint was a cost consideration, and that working in series was a similar choice, approaching things many times to get as much as you can out of an idea or a mood.

Stella also talks about how for him the reality of the work comes from the effort of the expression, which is the way he approaches his work, constantly changing the ways of expressing to push ideas forward. This allows him to create wild paintings and sculptures that are sort of both and neither at once, like many of the references I have looked at this year freedom of expression is the thing that attracts me to his work and his practice.

I also relate strongly to Stella’s notion of changing his practice and approach regularly, this is something I have wrestled with across my whole degree; in three years during a pandemic I have gone from small-scale drawing and painting, to large-scale sculpture and installation, and now to sound/video/performance and interactive installation.
The sporadic nature of my practice has been commented on as ‘lost’ which is an accurate statement; I have barely started my career and artistic journey, it is not surprising I seem lost or overwhelmed. This lack of knowledge can be an advantage, as it allows me to explore the world without many preconceived notions, aiding me to think in different ways.

One way of expressing this is that if I knew everything about process, colour, art history etc. now then I might write off certain approaches or ideas because of this knowledge. Whereas in my novice state I can freely explore anything, as long as I can overcome the fear of leaving familiar territory, this is something I will approach through play like Stella and others.

Looking more deeply into Stella’s artwork and process revealed not just the material and physical aspects I can learn from to develop my artwork, but also the behavioral and conceptual aspects of Stella himself. In short I have been inspired by his work (in terms of form and blurring lines between media) and him as a practitioner (a driven artist with varied interests and changing motivations) separate from his work. This is similar to other artists I have researched in the past like Phyllida Barlow, David Medalla, Anne Hardy and Richard Wentworth.

Reflecting on this research I am considering ways of making canvas’ more like objects, hardening them with varnish or mod-roc perhaps. I also want to try and explore bringing paintings off the wall perhaps connecting them across the space or even ‘spreading’ them (by separating them) around the space.
This research has also inspired me to experiment with series when it comes to ideas, which I normally do not do. Stella states in interview that he uses series as a way to almost stop an idea and explore it laterally, then collapse all of this learning into the next idea.

In this way he developed an evolving practice that is unified by his approach to making the work conceptually, which expresses itself in a wide range of forms and media, he describes this as taking conceptual control over the freedom found within experimentation and expression. This is something he says he learned from observing the fate of some abstract expressionists, who became lost in their mark making experiments and did not bring formality back to maintain the balance required in painting.

Frank Stella 3-D Paper Collage – NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale

Frank Stella: A Retrospective – YouTube

Studio Visit with Artist Frank Stella | Christie’s – YouTube

Olafur Eliasson is an artist with a wide range of interests like vision, colour, light, but mainly reality and how it is formed. He works with many complex materials and designs experiences that are intended to challenge the audience to make their own deductions and craft their own reality.

Your Blind Passenger is a tunnel filled with fog and light designed to disorient the viewer from normal ways of perceiving reality. In this way the audience is invited to alter their perception, using sound and other senses to navigate independently. Some areas are dark or light, some warm or cool; this is to further the disconnection from constructed reality as we normally perceive it.

His other works are varied but most focus on audience experience within the work not only visual aesthetic or beauty, even though this is a clear consideration. Works like Riverbed in particular play with the notion of the individual’s place on the planet and in the universe. These are very complex topics that are tackled using universal materials, bringing a riverbed into a gallery again subverts the norm and blurs the boundaries between things.

In this way we are called to reassess how we think about nature, galleries, ourselves and the environment; all by navigating the indoor space filled with outdoor materials and themes. The juxtaposition can be understood across languages and is accessible to all (wheelchair access does not look possible however) since the experience is communicated through the body and through movement not through a prior knowledge of contemporary art or scientific theory.

There have been some critiques of his work, namely the Ice Watch piece, in the sense that raising awareness often doesn’t lead to lasting change. The argument is that the energy and fuel wasted transporting the ice from Greenland, the counter argument is that Greenland loses 10,000 of these every second so taking 30 is relatively benign.

Honestly I am not sure how I feel about this piece specifically, but in terms of his wider work I feel Eliasson has good intentions and brings a lot of interesting questions and insights to the fore. His understanding of space colour light and how this relates to the human experience is astounding, he like many others seems to be able to speak to a universality inside each of us.

Some Quotes from his interviews that stuck with me were:
‘combine singularity and collectivity’
‘an artwork hosts whatever subjective material you bring to it’
‘you don’t have to be a professional to have an opinion about a rainbow’

Was Olafur Eliasson Bringing 30 Icebergs to London a Sustainability Own Goal? | Frieze

Olafur Eliasson – ‘Collective Experience’ | TateShots

Olafur Eliasson: Become Your Own Navigator | Art21 “Extended Play”

3 Writers on a Riverbed by Olafur Eliasson