Crude powerpoint presentations are what I live for.

My assessment was with Miguel and Peter, I was a little apprehensive to say the least as Peter knows little of my practice but regardless I plowed through my poorly constructed PowerPoint and said what I needed to say.

Something that was brought to my attention was that I need to remove myself from my work to be able to reflect on its perceived reception. I get so caught up in my own relationship with it's concept that I forget to recognise it's potential as something purely aesthetic and a piece of visual information. 

Taking myself out of the context, and what it means to me, I can see that a lot of my work is Representative of 'the line' which in itself is a symbol of control. The wool, the drawings and the writing all form linear patterns, moving from one polar to the other. They are restricted shapes and channel in such a way that allows for a beginning and an end.

Returning to the idea of concept, my whole train of my activity circles the theme of control. All of which are my own personal battles with forces within the world that I perceive as threatening, such as sex, relationships, personality and emotions. Trying to claw back stability by dealing with these forces in a creative way and theraputic way. I could almost likend my practise to autism, using different ways to try and cope with aspects of my life out of my control and trying to understand why I may be feeling certain things. By writing down my repetitive thoughts It is my ultimate aim to try and expell them from my mind, the action of writing, using my hand and an instrument to physically exert words from my conscious is an incredible emotional release. I am trying to rationalise my inner conflicts and break them down into something understandable so I can start to come to terms with them and their presence within my life.

The morning after.

After opening night and a deep drunken sleep, it was time to scuttle back to the Union to check on everything, make sure that my work hadn't been moved and generally clean up. I arrived to a beautifully clean room, Beech was also pootling around the place making sure everything was in order. The space in which my piece was once held was empty, and on the table to the left of my pre-existing piece was a till roll. An empty till roll. Neatly placed upright in the sunlight.

That's weird.

It would appear that my thoughts have left the building. Commence sinking feeling in my stomach. I frantically faffed around the place trying to find the remainder of my work, all kinds of crazy thoughts are running through my mind, has someone stolen it? Stolen it out of malice? Taken it to bumper for a little dance? SET FIRE TO IT? As my over thinking gradually sends me into a frenzy I decided to pick up what was left of my work and flee to University to get advice from my tutors as to how to deal with this new found predicament. Miguel advised me to use this experience and respond to it for the remainder of the exhibition, and I did. I escorted my bleak looking till roll back to my space and unrolled it completely. I wrote at the end of the roll, where it had been ripped, 'Some funny fat twat has thieved my work, this is what is left of it'. I don't believe the 'fat' adjective was necessary but I was highly pissed off.

So how do I go about trying to deal and break this occurrence down? It's irony more then anything else, the drive behind my work is based around my concept of control, my own struggles with power and lack there of. So the idea that someone has interrupted my creative channelling for this particular issue completely ruffles my feathers. It was extremely unnerving to try and cope with this, it's completely out of my control and power. Whether someone had chosen to party with it or try and decode it smashes my trust with the paper. That paper knew things about my own thought process that nobody else living knew, so to think that it was gone and out of my hands is a real bummer.

To put this into another context, maybe I could look upon this act as something positive, a way of grappling with my own moral code. Someone has forcibly (whether intentional or not) made me reflect on my process by removing it from me. 

A day or two later it came to light that a cleaner had accidentally binned it thinking it was rubbish, a little careless but nonetheless, I can't cry over lost thoughts, but I can moan about it in Blog form. Nutty cow.

Booze, art and old friends

Opening night of exhibition, faffing entails.



The day began with stomach churning nerves, As I only had one day to set up and that was on the same day as opening night the pressure was immense. I set off for the union with my roll stuffed away into my bag. I arrived and frantically tried to source a section of someone elses room to deploy my work. I chose the largest room leading off from the stairs, I was sharing it with Rhia and Hannah, After much faffing and pootling around with how I wanted it arranged I left it and went home to prepare for the night.

An hour before I was due to leave I cracked open the 'good' vodka and necked back three or four measures out of sheer anxiety. I felt like I was about to be judged, judged as a person. People whom I cared about dearly were coming to judge my creation, coming to view what I was working on to obtain my degree. If they rejected it, it would be like a personal rejection. Especially as my work was purely self indulgent and encompassed my own selfish attributes. Needless to say my premature alcohol intake significantly reduced my nerves, whilst also increasing my clumsy factor ten fold. 


The overall response to my work was positive, people were intrigued by my words and their meaning. I had people approaching me actually referring back to me what they thought my work was about and why I was doing it and they were completely right. It was a form of acceptance that I sorely needed, to know that people actually understood what I was striving for with this process felt fantastic. 


The free booze and numerous snacks helped the crowd along their way to happiness, as 11pm slowly crept up I was completely exhausted, mentally that is. I'd built up this event to such an extent that the relief of opening night being almost over felt amazing.

Louise posing in her installation space

Liquor stained playsuit.

 

 

 

 

 

My piece.

Close up.

Free booze, note that my drink has rapidly been consumed.

 

Gallery Crawl.

Today I decided to embark on a gallery crawl with Wez, this involved stops at the Victoria Gallery, the Bluecoat and finally The Tate. 

At the Victoria gallery we were greeted by a multitude of Lady's of leisure, just pottering about, drinking tea and eating lunch. A lifestyle I could happily adapt to. But less of that. We made our way upstairs to the Quay Brothers exhibit. This work involved dark puppetry. A room full of glass display cases containing scenes and characters to be used within the work. At either end of the room were two television on which to view the puppet show. 

In the glass cases were sinister puppets, hand crafted using a variety of textures and materials. They were extremely strange and evil looking, positioned within the scene to depict a certain aspect of the show. The room itself that the exhibit was in was dimly lit, the majority of the light was exuding from each television and from one slightly lit glass case. Peering into each case made me feel a tad on edge, I think this had something to do with the scale of the puppets, they were small and threatening, almost rodent like.

I scuttled towards one of the televisions to watch the show, obviously all filmed using the stop motion technique. The jittery nature of this always reminds me of 1970's B-rated horror movies, using animatronics to depict the villainous characters. That dated technology is laughable today considering the progress of CGI and computer animation, but I still find it quite unnerving. Seeing those techniques being used now always throws me straight back to being a nine year old child. It was when I was nine that I was allowed a television in my room, and when I'd managed to avert my parents attention and stay awake into the early hours I'd often stumble across low budget horror movies on Channel 5. The animatronics would always terrify me, the noises that fake blood makes when it ooze's from a chainsaw bound wound, the insane screams, all of this secure violence was horrifyingly hypnotic.

Puppetry is all about manipulation and control. The controlling of a situation and living stories through fictional characters, there is something humbling about puppetry. It's childlike connotations, it's used to entertain in a happy sense. But on reflection, punch and judy was terribly violent and promoted domestic abuse.

I managed to get a couple of photographs, due to the poor lighting I had to use flash which was a bit obnoxious.

 

Although the puppets obviously have no conscious and are not even remotely alive in any sense, I have this horrible irrational fear that somehow they might be aware that I'm staring at them. Again this is probably originating from my complete addiction to badly constructed horror movie characters. In particular the childsplay series, which involves a doll that contains the soul of serial killer charles lee ray. Whilst at this exhibit at the back of my mind is the niggling thought that maybe one of these dolls contains the soul of a murderer. I hope not.

 

Berlin Guggenheim.

A little later on in the trip we visited the Guggenheim, I was incredibly excited about this, the Guggenheim is associated with such prestige and it's really something great to be involved in. Their current exhibit dealt a lot with Detournement and globalisation. We had to wait a little while before being allowed in due to a group of school children occupying the space. Eventually we were allowed access, instantly we were faced with a long room filled to the brim with naive colours, childish structures and interactive art. I was in my element, 'silly art that I can touch and play with' flooded through my brain. 

It felt a bit strange being able to sit on the artwork, I mean, this is the Guggenheim! Security was alot less intrusive then the other gallery, which was bizaree, I mean. THIS IS THE GUGGENHEIM. I'm sitting on artwork, IN THE GUGGENHEIM. It was such a turn of events being able to move and climb on the artwork, the sense of freedom was almost too much for my little soul to take. 

The walls were decorated in thousands of images, the crass nature in which they had been arranged was reminiscent of GCSE graphic design, awkwardly cropped and pixellated images splayed all over the place. There was something endearing about this, it made me feel at ease and less intimidated. Disguised in all the bright colours and naive immagery was a stern message of Globalisation being deployed, whether it reached any audience I don't know. 

I just keep thinking about the art's accessability, would this exhibition be successful if the work had been off limits and controlled? Would it still deliever it's message had I not been able to lay around on the pillar shaped cushions? I don't think it would, I believe it's acessability was a major factor in it's success. And for that reason alone I left the place feeling elated. For once.

Globalisation in Berlin.

Upon arriving in Berlin it became obvious fairly quickly the effects of Globalisation on this city. After just completing my essay on Globalisation, not really understanding what I was talking about but somehow mildly grasping the concept of it. We wandered down to our hostel via a couple of train rides and a 20 minute walk, one of the first things I picked up on was how much Berlin looked like Manchester city centre, the structure of buildings, the trams, the advertising. I walked past the clothes shop 'All saints' and in the window display was a multitude of old fashioned sewing machines, exactly the same display as the All Saints in Liverpool One AND the branch in Manchester. Considering that the archaic style sewing devices were a stab at kitsch and floating in the concept of 'overpriced charity shop trendy' it seemed strange that the considered choice of window display had spread across the continent.

In parts Mitte seemed run down and vandalised, I much preferred these aspects of the city to the ultra modern chrome style parts. Masses of grafitti and art festooned the streets walls and buildings. There is something much more interesting and consuming about street art produced by a stranger as apposed to something deployed in a white gallery space, blindly throwing darts of art at dartboard of pseudo reality. 

 

Berlin lad.

Gosh, I've got a lot of blog related catching up to do haven't I? I'll being the catch up process with an entry about my recent venture to Berlin as part of a University led 'educational trip' and by 'educational trip' I mean 'Get hammered and pretend we know what we're talking about'.

One of our first group led trips was to *insert gallery name here* to see the Richard Long exhibition, I was really looking forward to this, I've always loved his work. The building was overwhelming, it was grand and breath taking. After much pootling and faffing about entry, bags being too large and some language barriers we made our way in. The entirity of Long's exhibit was viewable from the front, his pieces formed a line of work leading to a huge piece fixed on the very back wall. Long had his token stone structures layed out on the floor in perfect alignment, with a little help from a circle drawn in chalk beforehand. I was thouroughly enjoying myself trying to get up close to the work, until I was stopped in my tracks by some shrill, obnoxious sounding German security personnel. Of which there were many, all keeping an eye on us English folk intently.

As I reached the back of the exhibit, there was a large circular piece on the wall, at first glance it looked like a huge smear of mud shaped into a circle, but upon closer inspection *but for a mere few seconds due to those lovely security persons* it was just a vinyl sticker type construction. I was kinda disapointed at this, not sure why, I'm not even sure how this piece would be made so perfect had it been real mud. But still, a bit deflating nonetheless.

Long's work uses universal symbols such as circles and rectangles, relatable shapes that are uncomplicated and easy to absorb. His materials are natural and organic, yet arranged in a technical manner against natures flow. Controlled nature as it were. Which kinda reminds me of a recent trip to a forest with a friend, I was talking about how much I do like being out in nature and what not, but how I don't like it when it touches my legs, I'm all for walks in the countryside but control the tree's and plants. This is kinda what Long has done for me, he's taken organic objects and controlled them for me. 

I'd seen a few of these pieces on a smaller scale in Tate Liverpool, somehow this setting, and their scale really heightened the experience. The gallery space was pretty spectactular and it housed Long's work perfectly, shame about the insanely strict security, I wasn't going to steal the work, honest.

 

There were many other works on display in this gallery, it was such a large space with lots of winding corridoors and rooms to explore, there was enough art for about a year's worth of prattling. As a person posessing a very short attention span, this held my attention for a fairly decent time, aesthetically it was beautiful and overwhelming.