Charity Auction: A Private Show

It's seven on the dot, and Artsite has opened its doors, 

champagne and smiles at the ready!

Straight away I'm off, nosing around for work I haven't seen yet. 

There is a diverse range of brilliant local artists showing their work, a handful of Swindon, Oxford Brooke's students including:

Minh Chau, Lee Carter,
Jemma Gunning, Kareen Jackson,

and of course, myself.

The proceeds from the auction will all go to the Swindon Carer's Fund, it's a great feeling that our artwork can take part in raising money for a good cause, as well as get a taste for curation and event planning in the future.

I liked this particular handling of the larger canvas's and frames: using easels well worn in paint and splatters tied in nicely to the finished works and white cube environment of the show.

It's also handy for framing the titles and business cards underneath their respective works;

as well as making the placement of works easier to re-arrange at any moment.

The presence of the standing easels adds to the work itself having a presence in the room, but not so much that it detracts from the image itself.

I always look out for this:

how does the artist sign their work?

Tonight, I found an ornately painted ceramic stamp by 

Tim Caroll:

bold, detailed, yet it tied in with this particular subject very well. 

It's a great cause with some wonderful artworks;

please join us on the 12th November and 

take part in a wonderful evening of Italien food, 

brilliant local art all towards a worthy cause!

Painting Boxes for the Big Draw

There is something unusually satisfying about this.

Stripping cardboard boxes 

from their original context,

into a body of blank faces
and forms.

As well as embellishing

the floor with messy 

outlines :)

Introducing a splash of colour in The Big Draw 

at Swindon College with some block primaries.

It's also been ages since picking up poster paint! 

That powdery smell of junior school art class, yum!

Excited to get started!

Play

Eggs, blobs, dough, orbs, goblets, balloons...?

I'm not so sure. 

I created a miniature colony of these organisms, who balance, cluster, or sit alone. 

Hiding in the shade between two lockers, camouflaged against primer paint,

with a post it not instruction for passer's by: "play"

These little critters encourage a quiet doodling for anyone intrigued, an essential exercise for art students. Aimless playing with no rules or agendas for five minutes, one minute, thirty seconds.

It's really engaging to pass by and notice one or two have clustered together, rearranged or drifted across the surface.

Open to interaction.

play

why am I drawing like this

There is a lot of conversation in artwork.

A lot to say about the relationship of perspective, 

of the viewers perception, of flatness and objectivity:

For the last year, 

I spent my practice drawing out 

tactile work from an intangible, online realm; 

creating compositions 

from our perspective 

through its lens...

the framing device 

of the monitor screen, 

abstracting our own forms 

from our fleshy reality.

So re-create a tactile side - 

so make a reformation of the input.

I like doing it so much I might

want to change the subject.

offer a more direct exchange...

of material on material,

like gestures of charcoal or pen, 

of pencil or paint,

expressive, fragmented, sensitive marks.

the back and forth of marks on a page,

a growing form of the abstracted humanoid

I want to find niches in the real world again.
Its like swapping the glass screen for baking paper,
its like switching the Hi def. for analogue,
its like swapping the mac for an apple.

it just tastes better...

my charcoal is licking marks along

the rough handmade paper;

who rolls along, just casually,

puffing dark dust clouds with

a sharp rustic smell. 

the smell,

its pretty meets pressure, its figments in friction, 

pulling out these liquid hints

I just keep finding it exquisite

how the delicate seems to grow into 

such scrambling, gestral branches, 

thickening its roots until something starts to bloom,

starts to breathe.

Felix

My boyfriend found a long lost friend in my book today...

No! It wasn't a goddess or unfortunate protagonist from ancient times
(that'd be cool though)

but it was something unworldly and mythical all of his own:

My creature, Felix
.

this little beaut' was a part of my related drawing practice for university last year - and I was convinced I had left it on the bus after school was out for the summer, as I couldn't find it anywhere until today!

(Honestly think  I checked this book already...)

So, I guess my book has a new, modern moral in its pages:

If you're going to keep your work safe in your favourite book, 

make sure a sneaky piece of blu tack doesn't stick it face down to the inside of the cover - 

because if you're as  selectively unobservant as I seem to be,

 you will cause yourself a lot of grief and effort looking  for it everywhere else! 

But yes, this is just one more addition to my creatures collection. I feel extra motivated to start creating more.

...might invest in a secure portfolio for them first though.

Author's Note: an investigation with Katheryn Owens

For one year, Katheryn Owens and I shared the same art studio, before she moved 80 miles away to Wimbledon College of Arts to undertake an MA degree. 
Our tutor, Julie Smith, later drew a connection between our practices’, and suggested I participated in my former peer’s final show. 

The interesting part about this reunion, was that it was the first time we ever met.

"...Without any distractions or link to the world outside, 

do we stay contained and focused on the interaction, 

or do we find a way to mentally escape?"

- Katheryn's MA Year Development Page

Katheryns show is now available online for you to learn more here.

Over the course of eight days, 7 solitary participants arrived to be ushered into an isolated room. Personal items were immediately surrendered and each of us prescribed headphones to ensure washroom visits were undisturbed. The idea was to submerge the individual into an entirely controlled environment wherein Katheryn offered the sole object of  social focus. 

"Do any status relations play out?"

Ironically, a technical mishap on my half led to Katheryn rescuing me from outside Wimbledon Station, upsetting the arranged agenda of the experience. This exposure shaped the day, later subverting my initial role as the panicky participant into a calm and reflective listener for my host. This interested us both – the slippage of authority between two strangers moving from public space to an unnaturally closed off domain.

"... neither one of us feeling in control and both with an anxiety about responsibility..." 
After all - could we really designate Katheryn as the host? Or was I the one influencing our choices?

"...I want to make as clear a possible, that even through I have set up the experiment, that the participants have as much information as I do..."

Having already disturbed the ritualism, the day began to unravel on its own accord. Having similar threads running between our practices, discussion naturally fell onto the experiment itself.

"How do we fill the space available?" 

We concluded that the mood of the room acted as a personification of the new arrivals - after having exposed a less than composed side of my personality before starting Katheryn's performance piece, my usually calmer head space germinated the ambiance of the day - quiet and reflective.
Despite an unexpectedly large room to work with, we remained rooted to a central parameter, close to one another throughout the entire 9 1/2 hours. 

Was the mere potential to take on this territory enough to qualm a need to physically move through it?

Or was this an ample amount of 'space to breathe'? 

After all, almost all of the participants admitted to Katheryn that they had anticipated a small, claustrophobic space in their mind's eye; something the artist herself had overlooked since she was the only one with a prior knowledge of what to expect.

"...How is the days interaction authored?"
This experience adapted our perception of the room, whose mood seemed determined by our interaction.The traces of the participants varied depending on their personalities. The first visual artist, Julie Smith, was also  the first to leave physical marks of her presence in the room. These were still evident when I arrived: small tacks of paper tracking a project the host and tutor had devised throughout the day, a minute photograph of a rose hung in the centre of a large empty wall, opposite to which was the original flower itself - silently recording the passing of time as it drank from a small vase.
My own observations of our visual traces were more transitory - sketch booked reflections upon the movement of the rooms' basic furnishings around our own interactions. The role of using outside participants as direct resource material is something my own practise relates to. Despite a primary focus on drawing, by using a performance to  inform compositional decisions enables me to create more insightful works in relation to their subject matter. The theoretical intentions need raw material to develop and refine the physical outcome.

"...Together we document our experiences and display this for the viewer..."

Excited to find myself on the other side of this equation, I had expected to leave much more in my sketchbook detailing the experience, yet hadn't anticipated I would feel inhibited about drawing while having conversations with a stranger. Regardless, Katheryn didn't mind this doodling (she even affirmed it to be relaxing, reminding of her old habit of knitting whilst talking to others).

The parallels of these experiences and our chosen themes in practice are highly significant to me. 
We are both researching social interaction as shaped through, or starved by, modern technology's perception. Katheryn's experiment takes a step into the polar hemisphere of my own work, which attempts to define how modern devices act as frameworks; as people become instantaneously objectified yet intangible within a box, whose contents  is controlled from without. 

In here, Katheryn also observes how social interaction is subject to a physical container, one without controls or connection outside of itself.

And here we were again, sharing a single room in the name of art practice; first 9 months of education and now 9 1/2 hours of final performance work. Despite sharing physical space and interests for an entire year, it was an online resource which strung us into realising just how much we had in common.