It's Blogolicious

Out There: A long and rambling final rationale.

2010-05-09T14:17:00.000-07:00

When I chose to be in the marketing aspect of this exhibition I had no idea about the extent to the hard work that would be involved. We started off well with lots of good ideas but were left waiting to get the ball rolling for quite sometime until the name had been decided, the theme was chosen and the overall look had been designed which were all jobs done by different teams.

Once we got going we were lucky that Beth managed to blag us some free posters, which when they finally arrived looked amazing and we had been given A3 posters instead of the A4 that they offered which was even better. We struggled with getting any free drinks, so that was a job that had to be left to fundraising to try and gain some cash to pay for it. The posters have been put in various places from student areas, general public places and some even in the art gallery to encourage people from the art world to attend which should hopefully make for a full and fun opening night.

It was decided to have luggage tags as something to hand out as a marketing device, effectively as a flyer. It was my job to source all the luggage tags and I found a really useful website which delivered them quickly and efficiently which was great. I ordered 250 to be used as flyers and a further 1000 which will be used as a window display at the exhibition.

Screen printing the flyers was quite difficult. A group of us helped out creating almost a production line so that we could get all 250 printed quickly. I think that the red ink on the brown luggage tags work really well. The main issue was getting the consistency of the ink right so that you could read the information properly. These flyers are unique and can be tied to trees and left in places which makes them really useful. We cannot just hand the flyers out because I looked into getting a flyer licence and it was going to cost £75 for one person to have a pass!

My job was also to contact the main players of the art world and try to get them to the exhibition. I spent a lot of time on the internet searching for contact details of artists, tutors, curators, arts groups, gallery people and many more and then sending them the details and an invite to our show.

It was useful that we were able to have a website to direct people to and on that website you can view everyone’s work. Ruth did a really good job with that and Emily’s piece of writing on there is great too.

Now the exhibition is on the horizon and its all now up to logistics to get everything to the site safely and curators to get it all looking fantastic. All that’s left for marketing is to push our online presence on facebook and get the invite sent out on LVAF again the day before the exhibition. Booze has been purchased and bubble wrap is on hand, so fingers crossed it’ll all go well.

In conclusion, putting on this exhibition has not been without its problems. Our main issue has been communication, making sure everyone is on the same page. The most annoying thing has been when people have not attended a meeting and then have a lot of things to moan about afterwards when things have already been decided. Actually getting people to help has been another main concern, the same few people have actually had an input in this show and that’s not because they wanted to but due to necessity because a lot of people had no interest or care in the whole thing. It makes me feel angry that they are actually allowed to exhibit anything in this show when they contributed literally nothing to the making of it (the actual hard work). We have learnt a lot from this exhibition which will help us next year when it comes to putting on our end of year show. We know who will and won’t help and we know when things need to be done for so that we aren’t left waiting to get other parts started. So because of these lessons that have been learnt… the whole Lost Property exhibition has been useful overall.

As for blogging, it has been quite a good experience because I tend to go to these exhibitions without paying too much attention but I have learnt how to look properly now and think about how the whole thing has been put on. By writing about what I’ve seen it gives me somewhere to collect my thoughts and images for future reference so I might consider blogging again.

I have created a gallery blog for my work which is here: http://lauracarterart.blogspot.com/

Logistical issues!

2010-05-09T13:04:00.000-07:00

The logistics of getting our sculptures to our exhibition space has not been an easy task. We have found that just in transporting our sculptures to and from the lighting studio they have started to die a little, especially the two cats. This is because we did not build a wooden support structure internally with them as they were the first sculptures we built. We have had to have a last minute re-build of the cats backs.

Luckily we have been using our girlie charm with the blokes in woodwork and have got them to build us some stretchers for transporting the sculptures, one for each. They have hand holes and holes for a rope to thread through holding the pieces in place. Each sculpture will be bubble wrapped and wrapped with cardboard too. Hopefully this should get each piece to the shop unit in a good state.

This is our spot at the exhibition site. we have a plug and we have a dark room with no working lights which is perfect for what we need. I quite hoped that the floor would be a darker colour but I still think our white sculptures will look good in there. We want to light our sculptures partially so that they look as if they're emerging out of the dark subconcious into reality.

We are going to use these spot lights (£1.99 in home bargains) which have a nice soft white light and just have it sat on the floor, wires exposed but taped down so that they are safe.

Marketing Updates

2010-05-07T14:40:00.000-07:00

Well things are coming together now. The posters have arrived so we're gonna get them out and about. Luckily Beth has managed to get them in the art gallery which is great and we'll get them up in various shops etc. The posters look great, its really nice to see them around college and stuff, it finally feels a bit like it will actually happen!

I e-mailed a big list of important folk yesterday with an invite to the show. I researched for hours for e-mail addresses. People on the list include: lots of art related staff from leeds met and leeds uni, PSL people, ESA, the arts council people, artists I've met at a few exhibitions, the people from the art walk, some of the art magazine people and even Steve Manthorpe who taught us for that other module and many more.

Yesterday we had a meeting with Yvonne at the space. It was quite embarrasing at how little people turned up and Yvonne wanted to know what was going where but we couldn't really tell her beacause we actually didn't know since we haven't seen some people since christmas.

She asked us for names of people who she can give to the security guards for keys. The names we gave her are me, Michael and Emily, so if anyone collects the key on a day that one of us are not there, then they need to say it is on our behalf as a security reference.

We asked Yvonne about putting the tags that I sourced in the windows as a display. She told us that we cannot stick anything on the inside of the window because of the sprinklers for health and safety reasons. We can stick them on the outside or hang them slightly back from the windows. We can decide where abouts they go once we get there. We have over 1000 tags to use so there should be pleanty.

Finally the tags and flyers are screen printed. It was very difficult to get the consistancy right but they say what they need to say and have been given out to people who we hope will help us with distribution. We can't just hand the flyers out because I looked into a flyer liscence and that was £75 for one person! so we'll do it a legal and cunning way instead. So now the job for us marketing people really is to just keep pushing the LVAF thing, the fliers and getting the posters everywhere we can.

Sending an invite to YOUR contacts

2010-05-07T03:04:00.001-07:00

Anyone wanting to send an invite to one of your contacts, here is how to get the code.

Follow this link --> http://s12.photobucket.com/albums/a208/Koolkitten2/?action=view&current=Lostproperty.jpg

Copy the HTML code that is to the left of the image. Paste that HTML code into your e-mail.

Thankies.

Tramway

2010-05-04T10:01:00.000-07:00

This piece at the Tramway by Christoph Buchel was something that left me feeling horrified and amazed and still thinking about it for days afterwards. I don't really think I've ever been particually moved by a piece of art before, not like that anyway. Its hard to describe this piece except that you find yourself going from a pub...to a prison and then to a plane crash that is being pieced back together but you are totally unsure why.

A review by the skinny said: "Exploring Büchel’s work is a strange and affecting experience, provoking many contradictory reactions from moment to moment, excitement-dread-pleasure oddly coexisting and leaving us confused, drained yet oddly fulfilled when we are eventually spat out back at the entrance. Go."

In this review by the guardian it says "Büchel makes other installation artists look like wimps"

Turn It On Again - Glasgow Visit

2010-05-04T09:59:00.000-07:00

We were introduced to Connor Kelly by Niall Macdonald and shown around his studio, it was in a arch under a railway bridge which had be converted into a studio space that he shared with 3 other people. I saw this piece while I was there and was pretty amazed at how they had got the plaster to hold its shape, no doubt it must be fairly fragile.

We then went to visit an exhibiton containing Connor Kelly and Niall Macdonald's work called Turn it on again. The work by Niall was something that interested me, I thought he'd been using plaster, but he told be that it is jesmonite which is a much tougher material than plaster and is easier to dye with pigments.

This piece was also in this exhibition. The ball shapes are austrich eggs with text on them, it looked like a poem. The one on the floor was not intended to be smashed, although it looks like it was intentional. I do hope our sculptures don't smash during the exhibition.

Vestiges Park - Glasgow Visit

2010-05-04T09:58:00.000-07:00

One of my favourite things from the trip to Glasgow was the visit to this temporary park, Vestiges Park. A group of artists took over a piece of wasteland next to the sculpture studios for the time of the glasgow international art fair and turned it into a sculpture park.

We were introduced to Kirsty Shindler from Low Salt and some of her collegues who help to look after and build the park.

One of the freakiest things in the park was this shed, it was filled with hands. The hand on the door was disgusting, so realistic and squashy, bleugh!

One cool interactive part of the park was making plastercine models and postioning them in this rockery. I made a whalephone. There were some really intersting little models in there.

I loved how these artists had turned what was a dump into something with beauty and mystery. As you walked through this park you wondered what was coming next and the witty nature of the art works here was intreguing.

Glasgow Sculpture Studios

2010-05-04T09:57:00.002-07:00

We were shown around the sculpture studios by Naill Mcdonald. We saw the exhibition of Jimmy Durham who had been doing a residency there. He had focussed on scottish history and created witty work on that theme with golf references reaccuring in most pieces. Duram regually collects things on the streers and likes to use things that are rugged and cheap in his work, which gives the objetcs more interest.

We were also shown around the actual studios and all the facilities there. Naill showed us his studio, it was a fair size but the whole building was really cold, I don't think I could have worked there all that happily. We really do take our college facilities for granted.

David Noonan Speil - Glasgow Visit

2010-05-04T09:57:00.001-07:00

We were introduced to Kendall Koppe from the Washington Garcia gallery by Naill MacDonald whilst at the Mitchell Library. There was an exhibition by David Noonan Speil there and we were given a talk by Kendall. David Noonan Speil collects imagery from mysterious sources, often with quite a sinister dialogue. He likes ambiguity and is influenced by stage props and theatre. The pieces in this exhibition are silk screens on fabrics.

GLASGOW!!!!!!!

2010-05-04T09:41:00.000-07:00

I went on the trip to Glasgow with college recently. It was really useful and I learnt quite a bit about the types of studio artists outside of college use and the kinds of materials they use.

This plaster piece with lights in was quite interesting because it reminded me of mine and Ruth's sculputres.

Recent Exhibition in College Cafe.

2010-05-04T09:39:00.000-07:00

I recently took a look at the exhibition that was taking place in the mosaic cafe in college. There was a group show on of artists who had been working around the college for several months and we had gotten to know a couple of them through working in the plaster workshop on a daily basis.

I was intregued by the way that this piece had been displayed, just simply by balancing them on a metal rod just crudely screwed to the wall. Somehow it seemed to suit this way of being displayed however odd it appeared. I was trying to think of how else these pieces could have been displayed and thought about perhaphs stacking them like a brick wall.

The spaceship piece had clearly had a lot of time and effort put into building and painting the spaceship and the level of detail on the spaceman inside was quite impessive. The projection piece inside was very difficlut to make out though, I couldn't decide whether this was because of the shape of the screen or because the room behind wasn't dark enough. Perhaphs the artist intended the video to be hard to see.

I had seen this piece in its upright form, as a teepee not too long before the exhibition. However the whole thing seemed to have died a little. I wasn't sure if this was intentional or not, but from the drawings along side the piece it showed it in an upright form so I guessed it hadn't meant to be this way. There was something strangely intreguing about the thing as it was though, I wanted to peer to see if anyone was trapped underneath. I hope me and Ruth are not faced with this kind of situation at our exhibition, packing will be essential.

The fish tank was my favourite piece at this exhibition. I was viewing this piece on a really sunny day and this helped to enhance the light and dark of the gravel giving off an amazing pink glow. Larna had chosen the perfect spot for this type of piece, it really was site specific due to the whole glass box thing like that of the fish tank.

Not Quite

2010-05-04T09:26:00.000-07:00

During our sessions in the lighting workshop we have tried lots of different layouts for displaying our sculptures. Ruth and I have decided to ignore the beatle sculpture because he is too delicate and heavy to move to the exhibition site, but keep the 4 other sculptures.

The best layout that we have found is to have all 4 sculptures in a circle facing each other, leaving the viewer feeling as if they are left out as they appear to be plotting against us. This sinister feel fits nicely into the overall theme of the piece. We want the whole thing to be ambiguous as to whether they lay in the realms of reality or still in a dream-like state.

We have decided that to have the wires and bulbs showing seems to add something to the piece, it adds to the rawness and ambiguous nature of the piece. Now our issue is to find out once we get to the site whether we need just one central bulb, or to have 4 bulbs for each sculpture, we will asses this when we see how the lighting is in the space.

The title has been something that we have been thinking about for some time, but everytime we try to tell anybody about our piece we always say the phrase "Not Quite", for example: "well they're not quite smooth because we want them to seem raw and like they're not quite real" so we have pretty much come to the decision that "Not Quite" is the title.

Currently we are building wooden stretchers for transporting each creature to and from the exhibition space and working on how to wrap them in the most secure way.

Parcel Tags

2010-05-04T09:07:00.000-07:00

It has been decided that for our exhibition we are going to create fliers from already exsisting fliers, painting them white and then screen printing ontop with our details. Recycling, cheap but probably slightly illegal, but we can probably get past that.

We also want to hand out parcel tags with details of our show being screen printed onto them. These tags can be left is strategic places and adds to the theme of lost property.

It has been my mission to buy the tags, 250 for handing out for marketing purposes but also another 1000 tags to use as a window display. By hanging the tags in the windows at the space it will mean that people are not only drawn to them (kind of as an art piece) but also means they can't see inside the shop very well, which will hopefully drag them inside.

I eventually settled on the site http://www.theessentialscompany.co.uk/ to buy the tags from. They are cheap and have a huge range of different sizes and colours, not to mention lots of other useful things from string to different papers. The parcel arrived within about 2 days of ordering them which I thought was good.

The only other main issue we currently have for getting these fliers and tags out there is getting enough support to get them printed. WE NEED YOUR HELP! Some of the marketing people have contributed literally nothing so I hope they at least show their faces this week.

The Hilarious Creation of the Wooden Armature.

2010-04-13T10:23:00.000-07:00

Me and Ruth have been having a few logistical issues recently, we didn't really foreplan about how we're gonna get our pieces to the site. At first when we made the two cats they kept caving in because we hadn't made any support structure for underneath and so we used a LOT of plaster which made it heavy. We are lucky that plaster gets a lot lighter once it is totally dry, so much so that two people can lift it quite easily.

For the other pieces we made sure to build wooden armatures to go underneath the chickenwire and modroc. As much as we're both shockingly bad at DIY (infact we should have sent a film of it off to you've been framed) we managed to make them sturdy which meant we used a lot less modroc, making it lighter and cheaper.

We have also been considering how these pieces are going to be displayed at the exhibition. We know that they do not need a plinth. By sitting something on a plinth you situate it in reality for all to see, but that isn't the point of these pieces. They are items from a dream which are partially still in a dream like form and partially trying to reach reality. We want to work on lighting them from underneath and making them look as if they're creeping out of the darkness into reality, probably sat on the floor, therefore a plinth is completely unneccesary.

Interim Exhibition

2010-04-13T10:06:00.000-07:00

I recently visited the exhibition called "Interim" at Vernon Street. We had been given the brochure for the event beforehand and it was very professional. I think that it could be expensive to print that many professional brochures for our event which is why I think it is a cheaper and more efficient to have a website which links to our own pages.

Unfortunatly I didn't particually enjoy the Interim exhibition. I did like a video which was showing in the lecture theatre of a guy painting the lecture theatre black and then white again, it was pretty mind numbing but kept you hooked. The invoice for the work he had done which he had sent to the college was displayed also. I actually took down the artist's e-mail address off the invoice and thought I could add him to the list of people to send the invite to. The more the merrier afterall.

The large amount of steps and echoey rooms seemed to ruin the exhibiton a little bit. I don't think it is a great space for sound pieces because there are too many distractions from it in a nosy, echoey stairway. It is a good spot for 2D pieces and the space is set up to accomodate for that kind of thing.

I saw a performance piece of two twins attached to a rope and when one pulls...the other gets pushed backwards and they were trying to paint a piece of paper different colours. It was rather odd, but then, I never do understand these performance things. I was trying to decide if the actual performance or the piece of painted paper was the actual final piece. The space wasn't very good for a performance, it was so crowded not that many people could fit in that tiny spot, so I guess the painted piece of paper is all that most people would get to see of the whole thing, but does that make it the final piece?

SliceLand

2010-04-12T10:07:00.001-07:00

I recently visited another of the "art in unusual spaces" exhibitons in Leeds Shopping Plaza called Sliceland which was organised by students from LCAD, Met and the Uni.

I really enjoyed this exhibition and it made me wish that Stephen had chosen this huge shop as our exhibition venue, especially considering the large work that people are proposing to do.

They had really just worked with the space that was already there, not changing it or freshening it up, just decorating it with cardboard signs and newspaper decorations accross the room. They really had stook to a very low budget but it worked somehow.

They had bands playing, which was something that got me wondering about whether we should have music or some kind of entertainment happening at our private view.

They were very much trying to encourage students from each different art insitute in Leeds to mingle and share contacts etc. They had various comments books, lists for contact details and even badges.

They even had robots! Ones which you can get inside and move about! I liked.

Playground and On Your Wall

2010-04-12T09:40:00.001-07:00

Been meaning to post this for a while, but I visited the exhibitions that were on recently in the Leeds Shopping Plaza where we will be exhibiting. There were two different shows within the 4 shops that we will be using so it was a good opportunity to have a nosy and see how they've done it.

One of the shows was called "Playground". The title was vague enough to link each piece of work in together nicely without being too descriptive of the type of work. I liked the way they had kept with the fun theme for the window display which said the show's name, we need to make sure our window displays are inkeeping with our show name. I thought that it was interesting to have artists working throughout the private view. One man was drawing Xs accross a whole room, another was building a sand sculpture out of a tonne of sand and another artist was drawing from a photograph onto the window.

I found the general atmosphere a bit flat despite the whole "playground" name which suggests a little more excitement, however they had done well to use what was available to them and the use of clip on lights seemed to work well.

The other exhibition was "On Your Wall" which was aimed at people buying the works on display. They did very well to make the place look professional considering how it isn;t designed for this type of occasion. Even their posters and fliers were very professional and carefully considered. The atmosphere was good and there were plenty of drinks flowing.

The use of boards on a stand seemed to work well because it didn't block light and they would be easy to remove after the show, perhaphs this is something we could think about for our exhibition.

Umbrella Exhibition Opening

2010-03-03T07:51:00.000-08:00

I visited an exhibition at the Umbrella studios in Holbeck last week. Beth was exhibiting some work there so the troups came along for a nosy.

I found the use of these lights to be rather odd, they lit the work but perhaphs lighting the paintings from above would have worked better.

A lot of the work was really good, Beth's pieces looked great. I really liked the pieces of bodys stacked up, it made me wonder about stacking mine and Ruth's sculputes up into a tower instead of accross the floor.

Robyn helped herself to two massive bowls of olives while we sat around a table on some fake grass debating if Will would make it there alive or not.

Then will showed up fashionably late in the rain, amazingly not lost and we all drank the free booze and listened to the music coming from the white painted caravans within the exhibition space.

Yorkshire Sculpture Park - Peter Randall Page and Rob Ryan

2010-02-27T12:57:00.000-08:00

I recently had a trip to the Yorkshire Sculpture park and had a look at the Peter Randall-Page exhibition in the underground gallery. I was looking at his pieces with more depth and thought about the process more than I usually do at these sorts of places.

I thought it was interesting about how these pieces that are stuck on the wall are attached with velcro. At first this seemed like a perfectly good way of attaching it, its practical in terms of moving the exhibition about and it seemed to be holding up pretty well. Then I spoke to one of the gallery assistants who told me that they keep falling off and having to be re-installed which I can imagine becoming annoying considering how long that exhibition is due to stay there.

I was fascinated with the texture of these plaster sculptures, it inspired me to think bigger about the kind of thing that me and Ruth are working on and consider the texture of the piece more. I like how it is sat on the floor, no need for a plinth, almost like an obstacle or an intrusion in the space.

In another room there were tables full of maquettes and sketchbooks with all the information that helped the artist to scale up his pieces. The gallery assistant told me that Peter Randall-Page puts pins into his maquettes and then measures between each pin and multiplys that amount by however much bigger he wants to make it. I thought this was really useful to know because it could help us.

I then took a look at the Rob Ryan exhibition that was on. He makes delicate cut-out pieces of cute little scenes often with text about romance or comments on life. His work did not seem like that of a male's, it has a feeling of femininity about it, in a sensitive and delicate sense.

Lanzarote and César Manrique

2010-02-26T12:04:00.000-08:00

During reading week I went to Lanzarote, mostly for a wedding but I also got chance to have a wander around. In one of my favourite parts of Lanzarote there is a new sculpture put up. These huge pieces of wood have been taken from a Greek Merchant Shipwreck nearby in the harbour of Arrecife which has been there ever since 1980. The paint on the pieces of wood highlight the main parts of damage from when it became wrecked.

I find it interesting how a lot of sculpture in Lanzarote is situated on roundabouts. It is ideal because it means that people cannot really get to touch the sculptures to damage them and it forces people to notice them.

A lot of the sculptures on the island are by César Manrique. He was born in Lanzarote and after receiving a large grant he set up a studio in New York and moved there to persue his career however he began to feel nostalgia for Lanzarote.

"(...) more than ever I feel true nostalgia for the real meaning of things. For the pureness of the people. For the bareness of my landscape, and for my friends (...) My last conclusion is that man in N.Y. is like a rat. Man was not created for this artificiality. There is an imperative need to go back to the soil. Feel it, smell it. That's what I feel."

" When I returned from New York, I came with the intention of turning my native island into one of the more beautiful places in the planet, due to the endless possibilities that Lanzarote had to offer. ".

Manrique had a major influence on the planning regulations in lanzarote, when he recognised its tourist potential and successfully encouraged sympathetic development of tourism. One part of this is the lack of high rise hotels on the island. The ones that are there are in keeping with the use of traditional colours in their exterior decoration.

Interestingly Manrique didn't drink, didn't smoke and didn't allow others to smoke next to him, he regularly went to bed very early and got up at dawn, and began work in his studio very early.
He died at the age of 73 in a tragic car accident, near a roundabout with his own sculpture on. Poor bugger.

Leeds Art Walk - February

2010-02-23T09:39:00.000-08:00

I've been meaning to post this for a few weeks about the Leeds art walk that I went on sometime back in February.

Stanley Burton Aubrey Gallery

We started the walk at the gallery in Leeds University; there was a short talk about some work that was on show by Wilhelmina Barns Graham. She does a lot of work on landscapes mostly set in St Ives.
I like that a lot of her work is colourless, it forces you to focus on the shapes and forms of the work. She studies the shapes of nature looking at lines and contours.

She also paints views of Lanzarote which is somewhere that is particularly familiar to me considering the many times I visit the place each year. It's not somewhere that I think is beautiful or picturesque but I can understand why Wilhelmina would paint this place due to the amazing shapes of the deserts and volcanic spaces that she seems to take interest in.

I quite enjoyed seeing her work but the talk was quite boring. It was set out well as an exhibition because the curator Dave Louis had put her work into sections depending on when they were done and the different styles as her work progresses.

Leeds Art Gallery

We also went to the art gallery to see the northern art prize. To be honest I wasn’t particularly blown away by any of it, the one thing that I did enjoy was ‘these are the days’ 2008-9 by Matt Stokes which was a film of a band playing and was shown in a large room projected onto one of the walls. It had a really good atmosphere but when you stand alone in the room, it really doesn’t work; you need to have a crowd stood there to get into the gig atmosphere.

There was also an animation that I enjoyed called ‘The Four Horsemen – War’ 2009 by Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson which was different flowers mutating into different shapes to form depictions of insects.

It was shown on four screens set within a white cube in the room containing lots of old paintings. The cube blocks the light to the paintings and looks an eye-sore in that room; it really doesn’t fit. The animation inside is great but the cube that it is set in needs to be moved to another room that is more appropriate.

The Howard Assembly Room

We then moved onto the Howard Assembly room to the opening night of Janet Cardiff’s “The Forty Part Motet”. This was a fantastic opportunity to see the sorts of people who are part of the art world in Leeds.
The piece was of 40 loud speakers mounted on stands placed in an oval with each voice of a choir playing from each stand. If you stood in the middle you could hear the choir as a whole.

The room suited the work because it reminded me of a church, the roof was rounded which helped make the sound bounce around enhancing the piece. The lighting in the room helps to set a relaxed atmosphere. The ceiling was lit and there were soft lights around the room.

It was interesting to note how the piece had been put together with the wires on show but tidied away around the edges leading to a computer which controls each speaker. I was concerned about tripping over the stands but it would be difficult to change that without making it so that you can’t go near the speakers, which is the whole point.

It was very noisy the night while I was there due to the fact that it was an opening, so I would like to return when it is much quieter. I was imagining the piece if I was in the dark, I was thinking about how it would be nice for there to be spotlights above each speaker and when someone is singing on that speaker it lights up.

There was a nice image as a woman who was listening to the piece rested her head on one of the speakers, shut her eyes and smiled, it kind of summed up the atmosphere and was probably the sort of reaction that the artist had hoped for.

Conveyor belts and Snobbery

2010-01-28T12:19:00.000-08:00

So today has been very long and tiring having spent most of the day in the workshops with Ruth. Also we ran into Stephen who offered us a space in a bigger studio, at first we were nervous about accepting it because it seems like a big place to fill but after a chat we decided that it would be silly to decline it, plus it'll allow us to have bigger and more ambitious plans.

We would like to use some conveyor belts to create a "dream factory" but we are going to have to work out where we might be able get them from and whether it is going to be more expensive to buy one or make one. We also face the issue that we are useless at DIY so may have to ask for a few favours.

This evening I went to the Martin Parr talk in the lecture theatre. Honestly I didn't find it of much use and I found him to be incredibly snobby and obsessed with money making issues. It was so built up like some amazing person coming into the college with so many people clawing to be up his rear end, I was expecting them to ask us to stand as he entered the room. His money-mind was especially apparent when he said that he has started to make work on the subject of climate change because it is a way to get published due to the high interest in that subject. Also when he said that his photographic library goes to the state when he dies, that somehow seemed like he was really bigging up his work as if they would really want it all.

He began to talk about the realm of digital photography and about how it makes a lot of photographers work look similar and the only way to make your work individual and unique is to really show your personality and sensitivity with the subject matter. He also mentioned that it may seem easy to take a good photograph but the amount of time and effort is transparent within each photograph and thats what makes it good; the best photograph tackles a difficult subject matter and shows vulnerability.
He kept repeating how it takes an obsessive person to make it; being persistant, serious and working hard. In all honesty I just found him annoying and the hype about him was riddiculous.

Next week I'm going to go on the art walk in Leeds, hopefully that will be of use to me. In the meantime I'm going to attempt to track down a conveyor belt.

Dream Factories

2010-01-21T14:28:00.001-08:00

For this project I am collaborating with Ruth. We have been looking into the theme of dreams and nightmares and the feelings that surround them.

Today has been a busy day trying to grasp the vast subject of dreams. I spent most of the day in the clay workshop making a dinosaur and then creating a two-part mould for it. I plan on making a baby's mobile with 4 wax dinosaurs hanging from it which are mealted and distorted to try to represent how dreams are not always complete or rational.

I ran into Stephen this afternoon who gave me some really good ideas. He suggested that because we are working in a collaboration we should try to force ourselves to have the same dreams. He also suggested intead of creating an object as a representation of something from a dream we have already had, we should create an item (such as my wax dinosaur) and then try to dream about it. If the dream changes the appearance of the object then we should try to create that as well. Then hopefully we should end up with a table of before and after, effectively becoming dream factories.

I've been researching the most common dreams tonight. Apparently the most common are:
being chased, missing an important event because you are late, finding yourself naked at work or school, falling, flying, losing your teeth and snakes.
I've never had a dream about a snake though, unless you count a long necked dinosaur.