Monday 9 November 2015




Level  5  Module:     Developing Practice    September 2015

List of Exhibitions I have been to see during the course of this module

Arnolfini, Bristol:  Richard Long.  Time and Space
Tate Modern, London: Agnes Martin Exhibition
Chatsworth House: Beyond Limits
The Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. Fiona Banner Exhibition
Eastside Projects, Birmingham
The Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre: Making It: Sculpture in Britain 1977-1986
Leamington Art Gallery and Museum: Medicate
The National Stone Centre, Derbyshire: The Milennium Wall
Tate Britain, London: Barbara Hepworth Exhibition
Royal Academy, London: Ai Wei Wei Exhibition
The Open Eye Gallery, Edinburgh: Jonathan Gibbs. Life is but a Dream
The Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh. Resistance and Persistence
The Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh.
The Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh. BP Portrait Prize
The Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, Exhibitions


While in Ireland during last summer I stayed in our holiday cottage which is situated on the south side of Galway Bay and very close to The Burren , a magical place which consists of 250 square kiometres of mostly bare exposed limestone rock.This whole area has a multitude of  dry stone walls which divide the fields and form enclosures.  These dry stone walls  were built by the local inhabitants hundreds of years ago.  Over the summer I spent a lot of time exploring the  Burren and  took numerous photographs of the walls, many of which have a  "lace-like" pattern, with gaps between the stones. The logic of the walls is simple: a wall with holes is less vulnerable in strong winds than a solid one and therefore in theory more stable. Finding that the spaces between the stones made some very intriguing shapes I took hundreds of close up photographs of the view through these spaces. The randomly built stones in the wall create a multitude of different shaped frames for the landscape and put it in a different perspective.

I have selected  a number of these images and glued them to a canvas which I painted black to make a collage:



I am intrigued by the notion of abstraction in painting and I have started to make a series of paintings which are semi-abstract. The inspiration for this work is "wall flora" or lichen as it is more commonly known. While in Ireland I was seeking out stones that I might be suitable for carving and I became fascinated  by the variation of colour and pattern made by the lichen on some of these stones. Some of the colours are so vivid that it looks as if they have been painted on!
I have made two paintings so far that have been inspired by these patterns:






I have also commenced doing a series of paintings using some of the images  from the collage of "spaces
between the stones:" 




As a further experiment in looking at the landscape from a different perspective I have again used one of the   images from my collage of "spaces between the stones". I drew this image in pencil on a piece of board measuring 26ins x 14ins and using a jigsaw I cut around the pencil line. I then cut another piece of board to exactly the same size and fixed both pieces together. I  used acrylic paints on the board to paint this image:


Using another image from my "spaces between the stones" I cut out an aperture in another piece of board the same size as the above. I painted the cut out piece in acrylic paints as below:


I then painted the land ,sea and sky image on the second piece of board as below:


And placed it behind the cutout to make this image:


Having discovered that using two pieces of board as above created a sense of depth in the image I went to try out this method using a piece of limestone. The stone I chose is a piece measuring approximately 26, ins x 14 ins and varies in thickness between 4 ins and 3 ins.  Using the cut out board as a template I marked the image on the stone in pencil as below and started to chisel into the surface:





I carried on cutting deeper and deeper into the stone, stopping very often to resharpen the chisels. I finally cut through, then turned the stone over and finished the cutting from the reverse side.



The two photos below show the finished piece of stone set on a plinth in my studio at college




After  attending printing workshops with our college technician James, I experimented with doing some dry point etching and screen printing. 
I found the process of screen printing particularly interesting and I made prints on both paper and canvas.
The image I made is based on a photograph of the artist Sean Scully. To create a different effect I printed one copy slightly offset on top of another as seen below:





I used a photo of a landscape with a dry stone wall, etched it on to an A4 size piece of acetate and printed this image:


I found both the etching and screen printing very intriguing and I will definitely want to do some more in the future.

My next paintings are two small landscapes on canvas measuring 18 ins x 12 ins. They are inspired by a photographic  image I saw on the cover of a book called The Green Road, written by Anne Enfield. I have used acrylic paints on both of these pictures
One is semi-abstract, consisting of  three horizontal bands of colour, and the other is a more traditional landscape:

My next painting is another small canvas measuring 16 ins x 12 ins. This painting was inspired by photographs I took during the past summer of the area in the West of Ireland called The Burren. The Burren means "Stony Place" and I was particularly fascinated by some of the areas which are very desolate, are covered in limestone paving and divided by dry stone walls that seem to zig-zag upwards  in random fashion or as the artist Sean Scully described it they "lurch in song with the lay of the land". 


Doing this small landscape painting spurred me on to doing something on the same theme but on a much grander scale. Using a painting that had been discarded by a previous student I stripped off the canvas and removed all the staples from the wood frame. Our brilliant technicians at college, James and Tanya, cut a new piece of canvas, and as a lesson for me on how to stretch a canvas, they very expertly fixed the new canvas on to the old frame. They then assisted with fixing the new blank canvas to the wall in my studio space ready for me to paint. I primed the canvas using white emulsion paint mixed with a bit of crimson acrylic to make it a pale pink colour. 
This new painting measures 83 ins x 72 ins and was much bigger than anything I had worked on previously. I found this a bit challenging to start with, as using acrylics the paint dries very quickly which makes mistakes more difficult to correct and also the quantity of paint that needs to be mixed is so much greater. Having got past these initial problems I found that the size of the canvas enabled me to work more freely and made the whole experience very enjoyable.
Although quite clearly a landscape the painting is semi-abstract and refers to what Sean Scully described as  
"the eternal horizon." Personally I prefer to call it "the unobtainable horizon" because we are never quite sure where these elements of land and sky or sea and sky actually meet. The Oxford dictionary gives two different meanings for horizon: 1. The furthest that you can see, and 2. The limit of your desires, knowledge, or interests. Perhaps they both mean the same thing.

Below is a photo of the painting in my studio at college: 











Art in Theory and Writing


Thoughts,    Ideas:     Abstraction------------------------------The Universal Language?
                                 Sean Scully------------------------------Bricklayer of the Soul
                                 Land, Sea and Sky--------------------"It's our World"
                                 Limestone-------------------------------Formed of trillions of tiny marine lifeforms over millions of years 

"We are all victims or products of our birth and upbringing" Sean Scully 

                               
Abstraction:   
I am intrigued by the subject of abstraction in both painting and sculpture and the movement between abstract and figurative modes of representation which started to happen at the beginning of the last century.

Abstraction became an international and identifiable style of painting in about the year 1910.

The french artist Maurice Denis predicted this in his essay in 1890 titled: A definition of  Neo-Traditionalism: "Remember that a painting, before being a battle horse, a naked woman or some anecdote or another is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain way."

Referring to abstraction Paul Klee stated: "Art does not try to reproduce the visible, it makes visible."

Gerhard Richter seemed to have a somewhat different view when he said: "It makes no sense to expect or claim to make the invisible visible, or the unknown known, or the unthinkable thinkable".
"The only true reality is always the reality that we see and experience directly".

Patrick Heron has written: "A purely abstract shape is easy to invent, what is difficult, so difficult that only genius can fully accomplish it, is the forging of a new and formal image out of familiar, well known forms.
What we look for in a painting is a recreation of the natural order, a significant transformation of everything we experience through the eye."

Abstract art can still manage to rile or provoke the general public.

When an artist makes an abstract image with one thought in mind, viewers can bring to it any number of other interpretations of what it looks like or means to them.

The view that representation can be emptied out of a painting, so that it is pure abstraction remains a controversial one.

In 1939, The German Baroness Hilla Rebay, referring to non-figurative painting, which she felt very passionately in favor of, wrote: "Like music, these paintings are harmonious, beautiful and restful. They elevate into the cosmic beyond where there is no meaning, no intellect, no explanation, but something infinitely greater--the wealth of spiritual intelligence and beauty. They help one to forget earth as most people do when they are looking up into the vastness of the starlight sky. One does not ask there, either, for meanings, symbols, titles, sense or intellectual explanation. One looks up and sees a vast beauty, and when the eye turns to the ground, its troubles seem to be so much smaller."

I have set out recently to try to discover what it is about abstract art that has compelled so many painters since the beginning of the last century to move from figurative to non-figurative work.

Due to the enormity of the subject, it seemed better to look at a particular artist who I consider to be the one of the leading proponents of abstraction. One such artist is Sean Scully.

Sean Scully:
 Like many artists Scully spent his early years in education exploring the possibilities of figurative painting. It was in 1968 when he began his studies for a BA at Newcastle University that he began to look at the potentialities of abstraction. He was at that time particularly attracted to the work of Mark Rotko. As well as painting Scully has produced a number of works on paper that explain the ideas behind his artwork and from reading many of these and seeing more and more of his canvases, I have become a great admirer of his very extensive oeuvre.

I have also found many different publications about his work and and his life and I have been looking in particular at his connection with the country of his origin, Ireland. In doing so I have developed a great sense of admiration for his honesty about his unhappy early life and upbringing and his unbiased views on how his life and his art was influenced by this. His own exact words in his philosophical are : "We are all victims or products of our birth and upbringing"
(In doing my research I also discovered that I have a few things in common with Scully:  One;  Irish born. Two; Catholic upbringing. Three; early education in a Convent. Four; his reference to being poor and working class. Five; he calls his bands of colour bricks and his process like building a wall.)

"From the traditions of abstraction, geometric and expressive, Sean Scully's work emerged confidently in the 1960s."

"People tend to think of abstraction as abstract. But nothing is abstract: It's a self-portrait. A portrait of one's condition." Sean Scully, Zurich, March 2006

Scully has inferred that the long standing quarrel between representation and abstraction is of no interest to him.

Scully has likened his process to the building of a wall, and indeed his paintings suggest walls, as well as windows and doors, the scaffold for his lavishly layered pigments and rhythmic, textured brushstrokes.

"It is not uncommon to find people previously bewildered by abstract painting who, after attending one of his lectures , happily recognize what a coherent form of communication it can be when presented with such intelligence and eloquence."

"My paintings search for meaning", Scully has said. He has no colour theory, preferring a painterly "conversation" where colour and form convey emotion and feeling. His paintings are about relationships; As he puts it: "My work is about the difficulty and the possibility of coming together."

Scully believes in an abstract art that can be a UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE for people of all religions and none. Regardless of his Irish Catholic influence Scully has said: "I wouldn't make a set of paintings that were overtly representative of a religious dogma of any kind, be it Zen, Jewish, Muslim or whatever. I simply would not do that, and I wouldn't be the right man for the job, because I want to make art that everybody can love and everybody can feel equally invited to."

A painting by Matisse in 1909 titled The Conversation depicts the artist in a dialogue with his wife Amelie. This painting, although it is not abstract, influenced many artists including Sean Scully. In the scene the artist looks as if he is standing to attention wearing striped pyjamas while his wife is seated wearing a very deep black and green bathrobe. Matisse's use of stripes becomes a key element in his paintings and is seen as heralding abstract paintings later development into work that is more linear and geometric, but also colourful and expressive.

"Not many artists since Matisse have developed the emotional vocabulary of colour like Scully has"

I was more than pleased to learn that Sean Scully and the late Seamus Heaney were good friends in their youth, as my favorite poet after Yeats is Heaney. Some of the lines in this poem called Postscript have a sense of spiritual kinship and might have been written in response to the emotions evoked by Scully's paintings:

At some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightening of flock of swans,
Their feathers ruffed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park or capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.


Land, Sea and Sky 
In an interview with Brian Kennedy  in 2007, with reference to the stripe, which is the basic motif  in his paintings,  Sean Scully said: "Land, Sea, Sky. It's what we have. I try to show it in a way that's very simple, giving equal importance to each of those elements. So, of course it relates to the paintings, just like three bands in the painting, three stripes in a painting."











Leamington Spa Art Gallery and Museum

I visited Leamington Spa Art and Museum on 8th November to see the exhibition 

Medicate 2015


The works of art in this exhibition examine the physical, societal and psychological effects of disease and also the value and practice of medical science.
 Among the artists are Damien Hirst, Christine Borland, Keith Coventry, Jason Oddy, Laura Glassar, Tanya Kovats, Alexa Wright, Marc Quinn and Lyndall Whelps.

 Keith Coventry's work makes us question what effect prescribed and recreational drugs  affect us physically. His work is titled  Inhaler and is the cast of a genuine inhaler. However, when we examine it more closely we find that it has been adapted for use as an inhaler of crack cocaine!

Alexa Wright uses digitally manipulated photography to show us how our physical appearance can be altered  by illness and disease and how we are affected by this. 

Mark Quinn's work examines the relationship between physical appearance and mental state. The image is made by overlaying a photgraph of himself with pictures of various other peoples body parts, including the hand of his then girlfriend which is shown lying over his heart!



I found the whole of this exhibition very interesting and thought provoking but my favourite piece of work 
is The Last Supper by Damien Hirst. I think this is an ingenious piece of work, and  like Keith Coventry's  Inhaler, looks at the effect on our bodies of taking not just  prescribed and recreational drugs but also foods that have a detrimental effect on our health like processed food. Hirst has made a set of thirteen large  screenprints, (although only eight are on display). Each screenprint depicts the graphics for a pharmaceutical drug but he has substituted the manufacturers name with his own and the product name is replaced with the name of a traditional  supper dish like beans and chips, meat pie and chips etc. The name he has titled it The Last Supper seems to refer to the drug in question probably being the the last thing we will consume or our last meal before entering the next world!  











Monday 2 November 2015

Ai Weiwei Exhibition



Ai Weiwei Exhibition at the Royal Academy


I visited The Royal Academy on 30th October to see the Ai Weiwei Exhibition

Ai Weiwei is one of China's most recognisable and contentious artists, as famous for his outspoken criticism of the government of his native country as he is for his art.
The works in this exhibition represent a powerful and coherent exploration of Chinese culture, history and material and although he has exhibited widely across the world it is the first major survey of his work to be shown in the UK.

In his blog posted on 13th January 2006 Ai Weiwei stated: "An artwork unable to make people feel uncomfortable or to feel different is not one worth creating. This is the difference between the artist and the fool."

Table and Pillar 2002
Weiwei's artwork uses materials that probe the interrelationship between power, human rights, freedom of expression and cultural history in China.

I was completely overwhelmed by the scale and potency of the whole exhibition. I was also pleasantly surprised to be allowed to take pictures and these are a selection of images taken with my i-phone:

  This image is a scratched wooden table into which a 4.6 metre cylindrical wooden pillar, partially painted red is embedded. It alludes to recent government drives towards a highly industrialised and modern China




Straight
This work relates to the devastating Sichuan earthquake in 2008 which measured 8.0 on the Richter scale and left over 90,000 people dead or missing and 11 million people homeless.
When Weiwei discovered that the collapse of twenty shoddily constructed schools caused the deaths of many schoolchildren he clamoured for the government to admit that corruption had enabled builders to ignore safety codes when erecting the schools and to publish the names and the tally of the children who died. When his pleas were ignored he diligently collected the steel bars from the collapsed walls, employed craftsmen to heat and straighten each bar manually which were then  used to to make this 200 tonne installation that implicitly memorialises the students lost in the earthquake.

Ton of Tea



Ton of Tea which highlights the universal architectural measurement of one metre is one ton of compressed pu'er
tea from China's Yunnan prefecture, which has been aged using traditional methods.

The exaggerated scale and scent makes the viewer aware of the work's surface and of their own body in relation to the object.

Ton of Tea also invokes tea's material status as a luxury item in the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries, when drinking tea was the fashion of the upper classes in Europe.





Bicycle Chandelier 2015
This work which was originally a floor installation made up of bicycles calls attention to the bicycle's one-time status as China's chief form of travel, owned by Chinese citizens across the land.
Today, however, as a result of rapid modernisation, the bicycle has gone down in popularity so owning a bike has become a luxury. Weiwei has responded to this by converting the installation into another symbol of extravagance, the chandelier.
The artist, who grew up in exile without lights or even candles, further accentuates the status of this work by suspending and illuminating white crystals that cascade down from the rims of the bicycle wheels. He has taken Duchamp's concept of the readymade and in his usual style has enlarged it to a grand scale and also transfigured it.
The bicycles are no longer utilitarian items promising their owners a means of transportation and thus freedom, they now hang eternally motionless.








Friday 30 October 2015


Eastside Projects, Birmingham

I visited the Eastside Projects  exhibition on 14th October 2015 with tutors and fellow students from  years one and  two    BA/Diploma of HE Fine Art. 

This is a very interesting exhibition of contemporary painting and sculpture by artists including Gavin Wade, Yelena Popova, Haim Steinbach, Charlotte Cullinan and Jeanine Richards, Amalia Pica, Nathalie Du Pasquier and many others.

I found the whole exhibition very inspiring,  but my favourite piece of work is Cornelius: The Collectors Case by Yelena Popova.  This is made up of seven aluminium frames, ten paintings, and mixed media on linen in a very ingenious design that holds many treasures but can be folded up compactly for ease of transport.




Thursday 29 October 2015


Fiona Banner:  Exhibition in The Ikon Gallery, Birmingham

I visited this exhibition in The Ikon Gallery on 14th October 2015 with fellow students from years 1 and  2 
BA/Diploma of HE Fine Art. 

Banner's work in the exhibition includes a life-size tower scaffold in glass, (see image 1), a four metre high stack of encyclopedias,(see image 2), a 1920 baptismal font, a film of a Chinook helicopter and two mechanically operated wind socks in a kind of dialogue with each other.

Much of Banner's work references a play between language and object, the limitations of language and the struggle to communicate.
The font has a double meaning as a baptismal "font" and the "font" referred to in text!
The artist tells us that the  glass scaffold  is important because a tower scaffold is often used as a tool to erect works of art and is normally then taken away. Banner in this way makes it part of the work.

I enjoyed seeing this exhibition but my favourite piece of work was the wind socks in conversation because in one of my modules last year I made something with a very similar meaning. I got two people to choose a topic and have a conversation for about 3 minutes while making the sort of expressive hand gestures that people make when they are trying to convey something that they feel passionate about. I made a film showing just the two pairs of hands and without the sound the gestures looked very earnest and realistic. I think this was partly due to the fact that the two participants after the first few seconds genuinely completely forgot that they were being filmed!

Image 1                                                                                          Image 2

                                                               




Agnes Martin:  Exhibition in Tate Modern

I visited Tate Modern to see the Agnes Martin exhibition on 4th October 2015

The artist Anne Wilson has described  Martin's work as follows:  "The colour in Agnes Martin's work can be like the colour of rock at dawn, at midday and at sunset, depending on where your perceptions are when you see it."

This is a major exhibition of Martin's work and has to be seen to be experienced. Some of the paintings are in oil and some in acrylic but they all seem to have the ability to evoke a meditative response. I particularly liked some of the larger 6ft x 6ft paintings especially "White Stone" and "Grey Stone"which are made up of graph-like squares. A lot of the work is in soft pastel colours, mostly white and  light shades of blue and red and I think this contributes to the feeling  of quiet serenity in the paintings.

The exhibition examines the two distinct periods that define her career, her early work up to 1967 using biomorphic form  and her later work which began in the 1970s, when she adopted a template of vertical or horizontal stripes and this remained her style for the next three decades.   Her work has been described by the critic Marion Ackermann as "modest in form and subtle in colour though with an immense presence and powerful energy that almost takes physical hold of the viewer."

I came away from seeing this exhibition feeling that with Martin's "quiet and serene" work I had experienced something different from the strong gestures and bold colours of many abstract works of art that I had seen in the past.

Monday 26 October 2015


The National Stone Centre, Derbyshire 

I visited the National Stone Centre  on 26th September 2015. The main attraction for me was the Millenium Wall which was built to commemorate the millenium and demonstrates the traditional craft of dry-stone walling with examples of walls from all over the United Kingdom.

The centre offers courses in Stone Carving,  Dry Stone Walling and lime rendering. 

Barbara Hepworth

 Visited Tate Britain on 21st September 2015 to see Sculpture for a Modern World,  a major exhibition of Barbara Hepworth's work which traces her growing international success.

Hepworth was a leading figure of the international art movement in the 1930s and one of the most successful sculptors in the 1950s and 1960s. 

After doing a course in stone carving about four years ago I found I had  a passion for working with sculpture in stone. I had  wanted to see  at  Hepworth's work for quite some time and it was a great pleasure for me to be able to see so many of her sculptures in one place. I was particularly intrigued by her very figurative sculpture of Madonna and Child 1954. She has said: "Working  realistically seems to release one's love for life, humanity and the earth. Working abstractly seems to release one's personality and sharpen the perceptions, so that in the observation of life it is the wholeness or inner intention which moves one so profoundly,"

  



Richard Long: Time and Space


Friday 18th September 2015:    Went to The Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol to see the Richard Long 
Exhibition called Time and Space.

Long emphasizes simplicity in his work, which relies on nothing more than the artist's own body and          
the natural environment--a coming together of a place and a moment in time.                                              

This major exhibition focuses specifically on Richard Long's work from recent years, offering an opportunity 
to consider how his work is situated today. It marks an important moment to celebrate a career spanning six decades. He is recognized as one of the most important artists working today.                                              

He makes a work of art in the place he chooses, with the materials that are there, on the slope of a              mountain, high under the sky--a line of stones if there are stones lying lying about, or if the place wants a      circle he makes a circle. Where there are no stones , he can walk up and down the path as often as             possible to make a line visible.                                                                                                                   
                                                                                                                  
One of his major works in the Arnolfini is Muddy Water Falls.This is a design which covers the whole of one wall in the gallery and was created by the  artist himself using mud from the river Avon.                                                                                 
I have been fascinated by Long's work for quite some time, but particularly when I found an image of 


         A Line in Ireland



He has made work at various times  in several different parts of Ireland but this particular piece appeals to me because it was       created in 1974 and sited in an area that I am very familiar with called The Burren in County Clare.                                                                                                 

                                      
                                  
                                  
                                                                                                                                                                                    
                                                                                                                                                                                                                       















Sunday 25 October 2015


Saturday 17th October 2015         Visited The Mead Gallery at Warwick Arts Centre to see an exhibition called :

Making It: Sculpture in Britain 1977-1986


Making It is a substantial exhibition and represents the work of over 40 artists. It is the first exhibition
to bring together the work made by the 1970s and 1980s artists working in the UK who began to receive international recognition for practices which shared a revived interest in the sculpted object, in materials and in new ideas around making.

The works exhibited were incredibly diverse and all very interesting but my attention was particularly drawn to the following:

Gastropod's Dream (1985) by Peter Randall-Page reflects the artist's interest in the study of natural forms and organic matter and the emotive effect of nature on the individual. His work investigates the relationship between outer appearance and internal structure, between surface and volume. Randall-Page is famous for his large scale stone sculptures many of which can be seen in public places. His work appeals to me because of my own interest in stone as a material my ambition to create some more sculptural work in stone.

Gateway of Hands (1984/1991) by Glynn Williams. This piece of work was originally two hands carved in Lancaster stone which in 1990 were sliced into sections, reassembled and cast in bronze. The work is concerned with messages evoked by the gestures of hands. The work appeals to me because of my love of stone as a material for sculpture and I have in the past carved a pair of hands in Cotswold stone.

Making It (1983)  by Julian Opie. Opie used flat pieces of painted steel to created some everyday objects, mostly carpentry tools, at an oversized scale. I liked this work because it is an interesting way of showing the relationship between two and three dimensional work and between painting and sculpture.

Postcard Flag (Union Jack) (1981) by Tony Cragg is an image created from an assemblage of brightly coloured, found plastic objects made into a huge Union Jack. The work was made in the same year that Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer, a year when the air was full of Royalist passion national pride.
I like the work because because of its simplicity in the making but also because of its relevance for debates on the subject of national identity
George and the Dragon (1984) also by Tony Cragg appeals to me because it  is an amusing way of using what to me is a very familiar material; that is,  pipe fittings which are used in underground drainage systems!
The other objects he has used are domestic items and the combination of these different objects depict  an opposition between the contemporary and the traditional.

Saturday 17 October 2015



Friday 16th October 2015:                Visited  Chatsworth   to see the exhibition      Beyond Limits

This is an exhibition of post-war and contemporary British sculpture and included three works by one of my favorite sculptors:   Barbara Hepworth

Also in the exhibition were works by Kenneth Armitage, Sandy Brown, Reg Butler, Anthony Caro, Lynn Chadwick, Geoffrey Clarke, Stephen Cox, Tony Cragg, Angus Fairhurst, Barry Flanagan, Anya Gallaccio, Antony Gormley,  Damien Hirst, Thomas Houseago, Allan Jones, Phillip king, Bryan Kneale, Richard Long, Sarah Lucas, Bernard Meadows, Henry Moore, Eduardo Paolozzi, Simon Periton, Marc Quinn, Conrad Shawcross, Gavin Turk, William Turnbull, Mark Wallinger, and Bill Woodrow.

Apart from the Hepworths my favorite piece of work in the exhibition was: Pair of walking figures-Jubilee by  Lynn Chadwick. (See image 1).This is cast in bronze and depicts two figures, one male and one female as they stride forward. Chadwick has always been intrigued by movement and in many of his works has explored figures in motion.. He has also conceived a simple but ingenious distinction between his male and female figures. Men are depicted with rectangular heads and the females with triangular ones! 

My second favorite piece of work was a stunning  sculpture by Sandy Brown called: Temple.(See image 2).
Brown is a ceramicist and this particular piece of work was created as a temporary installation especially for the gardens at Chatsworth. Involving arches, columns and more than 5000 handmade tiles this work is a celebration of colour and creativity.

Although I am not a big fan of Antony Gormley I was impressed by this sculpture called: Big Gauge 11.(See image 3). This work is made in cast iron and consists of 16 blocks similar in size to those used in building houses. This is an abstract piece of work and differs from the  previous sculptures  I have seen which are made from casts of his own body.

In a very prominent setting  was one of Henry Moore's monumental sculptures: Three Piece Reclining Figure: Draped.(See image 4)). I have admired Moore's work for a long time and seeing this stunning piece in "the real" and was a real treat.

 Seeing this major exhibition of "best of Britain"  in the very impressive grounds of Chatsworth which has been described itself as "a vast sculptural intervention"was a great experience and source of inspiration. 

                                                                      
Image 2
Image 1
Image 4

Image 3





Wednesday 23 September 2015



   "Something different usually happens during the summertime"

2015 -  What I did this summer

Introduction
 Having just completed my first year on the Diploma of HE  Fine Art in June, I  travelled to Ireland  on July 3rd and stayed in our holiday cottage in Galway for ten weeks. 
 My time there was spent going  for drives and walks to explore the countryside, going to private views and exhibitions, reading,  conversing with  friends and neighbors and meeting local artists.

Our cottage is situated  on the south side of Galway bay and about 3 miles from the nearest village which is called Kinvara. The front elevation is facing west and has stunning views of a tidal lake and Abbey Hill which is part of the famous and magical Burren landscape. I spent several days exploring the Burren  and its exquisite features including the many dry stone walls which I find of particular interest.

Holiday Reading 

Some of the books I read during the summer: 

The Daily Practice of Painting by Gerhard Richter. I found Richter's writings very interesting and in particular his views on how photography and painting relate to each other..  

Nothing if not Critical, by Robert Hughes. I really enjoyed reading  Hughes' essays as it has helped  me in my research into  the work of various artists  including some of my favorites:  Matisse, Picasso, Hockney and  Hodgkin.

Painter as Critic, Patrick Heron: Selected Writings. In his lecture at Leeds University in 1949 on the subject of The Necessity of Distortion in Painting, Heron said: "I believe the function of painting at its highest level is the perpetual creation of a new fusion, a new marriage between the purely formal abstract entities on one side and the everyday world of commonplace but nevertheless magical realities on the other. A purely abstract shape is easy to invent. What is difficult, so difficult that only genius can fully accomplish it, is the forging of a new formal image out of familiar, well-known forms". Reading Herons' writings has given me a better understanding of  why so many artists (including Heron himself) have progressed from figurative work into non-figurative or purely abstract work.   


Exhibitions

Galway Arts Festival 
The annual Galway International Arts Festival took place in the city from the 13th to the 16th of July this year and is a major event featuring Theatre and Dance, Music, Comedy and the Visual Arts. As the city is only about half an hours drive from our cottage, a day spent at the festival was a must. I have always found Galway city an exciting place to wander around  and with the festival in full swing my visit on 24th July was a day filled with new and extraordinary experiences.

The exhibitions were shown in various locations around the city and I stopped first at the University Gallery to see the work of Sioban Piercy. Sioban Piercy's work combines drawing, printmaking, photography and text in a three-dimensional form.  In the festival catalogue the work is described as follows: "These are books in the broadest sense. Instead of pages of words, the artist has cut, folded and bound her drawings and photographs to create three-dimensional forms and fragile, ink-covered paper structures. While pushing the notion of a book to its limits, these works still reference all that books might connote - tools for comprehension, carriers of knowledge, maps to guide or offer explanations."The objects that Piercy has created are fragile, unstable and delicately balanced and have the effect of making us question our own self-understanding and self-perception."

My next stop was Galway City Museum to see an exhibition of Louise Bourgeois' drawings and prints. As I understand it,  Bourgeois' work has always maintained strongly autobiographical themes, expressing her own range of emotions. The well known critic Robert Hughes in his essay published in Time magazine in 1982  said: "The field to which Bourgeois's work constantly returns is female experience, located in the body, sensed from within."
It was really interesting to see some of her work in its original form as opposed to reproductions. In the collection was one of my favorites: (see image below).



My next and final visit that day was to The Festival Gallery to see the work of Patricia Piccinini. Piccinini is one of Australia's most acclaimed artists and she is recognized worldwide for her startling sculptures and digital environments. Her work examines the connections between science, nature, art and the environment. She creates an imaginative world peopled with families of charming but somewhat unsettling creatures, mutants who are half-human and half-beast, baby trucks and humanised scooters who fall in love with one another! Many of the sculptures in the exhibition were made from silicone, human hair and clothing. This this gives some of the figures the appearance of being living, breathing creatures which some people find quite disturbing. Piccinini herself has said: "The creatures literally appeal to the audiences empathy, they entreat the viewer to look beyond their strangeness and see the connections. Modern understanding of genetics and biology has shown us how deeply interconnected all life on earth is. There is more similarity between creatures than there is difference.

              The Observer
Yet much of how we understand the world and its creatures is based on the idea of a fundamental difference between us and them. Every new thing we learn - whether it is about language, behaviour or biology - points to the basic wrongness of this presumption. The other creatures in this world are more related to us than not".
 
 Although I don't agree with Piccininis' theory I found her work interesting and thought provoking. My favorite piece of work in the show was called The Observer.

At first glance the boy in this sculpture looks very real! (See image on the left)





 I had mixed feelings about one or two other  pieces of sculpture including one  called The Welcome Guest and another called The Strength of One Arm as I think a lot of people might find these images  disturbing. (See images below)

The Welcome Guest                                                               The Strength of One Arm































 

Wednesday 22 April 2015


Art and Exhibition          Group Project Work



03/02/15  Introduction to Art and Exhibition Module: Presentation by Tutor and Introduction to curatorial concepts.

 Virtual Exhibition
Theme:  Imaginary Exhibition. First year student Darren Logan, and myself selected two artists: Robert Long and Andy Warhol for the imaginary exhibition.
Robert Longo's powerful drawing of police holding back protesters in Ferguson was based on photographs taken after 18year old Michael Brown was shot by a police officer.
Andy Warhol's silk-screened photograph of police in Birmingham, Alabama attacking a civil rights protester.
Title for imaginary exhibition:  Capital Crime.
Location of Exhibition: This would be a travelling exhibition showing Robert Longo's and Andy Warhol's images projected on to buildings such as The BBC Headquarters, New Scotland Yard Headquarters and The Empire State Building etc. etc. 
The aim of the exhibition would be to make more people aware of the injustices of the law and the liberties taken by people who hold positions of authority.
Darren presented the exhibition to our group leader Jo Capper and the group of first first and second year students.

Group Curatorial Activity
Theme:  Narrative of Object
Our group was made up of six students:  Ella, Sharleen, Alanna, Darren, Sam and myself.
First we held a meeting to discuss ideas for the subject. We discussed the possibility of making a large charcoal drawing divided into six sections and each student would sketch an image of their choosing. Not all members of the group were present at this meeting so the idea was put on hold. We managed to get all members together for another meeting and agreed the following: Each member of the group would bring in an object that held memories from their past, something that was precious to them but not necessarily of any value to other people. We discussed how these objects might be used and decided that they should be brought into college and  photographed and the photos cut into pieces as a way of saying that the objects  had served their purpose and were part of the past.We then discussed how the objects could be presented to an audience. We decided on making a room inside a room and how this could be done to allow the audience to view without having  physical access to the space.
The chosen items were brought in and photographed expertly by Sam. Ella designed and created the beautiful artwork for the show and Darren, Sharleen, Alanna and myself built the museum for the objects. This was a room 8ft x 8ft with the walls made from sheets of rigid board insulation. The inside of the walls was papered with 1980s floral wallpaper (which my sister Anne very kindly provided)
and the outside was painted white. The floor was covered with a green carpet provided by Darren and a shelf was fixed round all the walls. The furniture consisted of a very old armchair (provided by Darren) and a coffee table (provided by Sharleen).The objects were arranged on the shelf and the coffee table. To enable the audience to view the objects Darren cut small apertures in all four walls of the space. One of the items was a very old transistor radio which we placed on the table and this was left switched on to a station to provide rather muffled sound.
The video of the installation was created and presented by Sam to our tutors and fellow students.















       

Saturday 14 February 2015

Laura Oldfield Ford

Just discovered the work of Laura Oldfield Ford.   This is my favourite piece because it reminds me of the outbuildings at the farm where I grew up..
Her scenes of dereliction compare with George Shaws images from his series The Passion


http://lauraoldfieldford.blogspot.co.uk/















This is my new blog

Discovering George Shaw

Coventry artist George Shaw paints the landscapes that he grew up with in Tile Hill, Coventry.

This is one of my favourite images.The now dilapidated look of the garages built not that long ago (I would guess about mid fifties) is a reminder of how everything is affected by the passing of time

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/culture/thresholds/421210.article
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMHYHwN_LgE#t=137

Scenes from the Passion


http://search.tb.ask.com/search/video.jhtml?searchfor=george+shaw+artist&p2=^UX^xdm005^LAENUK^gb&n=781ac896&ss=sub&st=tab&ptb=4A83CD8C-A732-4AAD-9DAF-BD584B6866F3&si=CPfd5YfmsboCFfMQtAodBhEANQ&tpr=sbt