The main things I have done this week:
- glazed my first batch of ceramics and fired these, along with my second batch (unglazed) – I will hopefully pick these up early next week
- I finished my bronze cast seaweed – cut them apart in the fine metal workshop, filed them, polished them and gave them a subtle patina
- cast another rock-type object in plaster (reflection on both casts below)
- I had my tutorial – thinking about many of the things I wrote about in last week’s reflection – I’ve started another few drawings as a result of this
- I watched (and help lead a workshop about) Elizabeth Price’s User group disco – this spoke a lot to me about the idea of an unknowable/unreadable ‘thingness’, but I will most likely do another post looking into this further
After my post last week where I was unsure whether to start making bigger pieces in preparation for the degree show or whether to lean into my natural inclination to make more smaller, potentially more detailed pieces, I spent a lot of this week mulling it over. Talking about it in my tutorial was particularly useful in reassuring me that it’s not necessary to make bigger pieces for the degree show as such, although we did explore the prospect of making bigger paper pieces to offset the collection of smaller, gathered pieces on e.g. a table/cabinet. I have now got much larger paper so this is something I may try and start this week.
One thing we discussed in my tutorial was whether the soaked paper drawings almost have too many layers of agency happening to them/being channeled through them: the artist’s hand, the bubbling of the paper, seeing through the paper to the outside, the sun/shadows etc on the paper, looking at the window pane etc. We started considering whether even just the soaked paper on its own, without the drawing, might be enough to capture the idea of material agency that I’m after. As such, this is something else that would be good to work on this week, as well as potentially considering if there’s anything I could draw that would enhance the material agency, rather than competing with it; perhaps writing on a quote, or even just uniformly colouring the whole sheet, on one or both sides?
Something else that was good to see from my tutorial was how successful the bronze seaweed was – it elicited a curious, confused response, drawing in close attention and inquisition as to what exactly this thing was. I think this is down to the fine detail the bronze was able to capture, creating a like-for-like copy of the (now non-existent) originals, and then the dark patina almost hiding the fact it is bronze. I seem to have polished it just enough that there is a slight shine – a slight hint that something is not quite as it seems, that this seaweed is not quite behaving as we expect it to. I also cast another object this week – a strange tar-like by-product which has an odd, lumpy, oozy form. I cast it in plaster, partly as a response to my consideration last week of going back to making exact replicas, and partly as an investigation into the form of the object. I’m not sure this cast was quite as successful as the seaweed; as the initial item itself wasn’t recognisable as an object anyway, the thingness wasn’t particularly enhanced through the process of abstraction – it is already abstract in and of itself, and more successfully so. In terms of replicating objects, it seems to me that the main reason to do that would be to incite a questioning of the objects that I hadn’t made through suggesting that they could have been hand-made by me. However, the other pieces I am making – the bronze seaweed, small bits of water-soaked paper, clay, string etc – I think do enough to incite this questioning (as the open studios showed). Essentially my current tactic moving forwards is to continue these material experiments, over time amassing a collection of these strange pieces, both made by me and gathered, and then come the degree show I can spend some time carefully curating these, seeing what connections are sparked by various arrangements.
I’d also, this next week, like to sit down with Izzy (we will be exhibiting alongside one another) and have a proper chat about possibilities for the degree show. I know we’re both interested in potentially using cabinets as a mode of display, so it would be good to at least start sending some emails out and seeing if we can locate some. In terms of display for the degree show, too, I am also considering creating some kind of text to run alongside the work. At the moment I feel quite inspired by, for example, Rosanna Martin’s exhibition catalogue for Other Interesting Stones; she displays images of the work in the format of a geological catalogue, interspersed with writing about the rock formations of Cornwall. Similarly, in Elizabeth Price’s User Group Disco, she has taxonomy-related writing alongside images of spinning crockery and pottery, starkly lit to make them into strange, alien forms. I’d like to do something potentially similar wherein I create a text that perhaps speaks of process (like I did for my last artist statement? (see below)), not directly of the work, but then interweaves with the pieces to create another layer of complexity, again nodding to thingness and material agency. Could I get inventive with this? Leave a text to be weathered and simply use the words that remain?
A previous artist statement:
A rock draws a path across a beach. A shard of ceramic pipe nestles into the neck of a once-was bottle. Tangled tentacles cascade down an eroded brick that was once clay, that was
once sand, was deep underground, hauled out, compacted, mixed, fired, stacked, lived on,
lived in, discarded, disregarded, forgotten.
Inert, invisible.
Water buffets round it, ripples rippling, tumbling sediment onto slick glass, tumbling, dulling,
smoothing, tumbling. Iron oxide leaches out, seeping, seeping, eddying down river, into the
reservoir, into still-shiny pipes, into your glass of water.
So, in summary, a rough to-do list for the next week would be:
- continue with paper drawings/sculptures – try watering paper without a drawing, with a coloured uniform sheet, with a quote perhaps. see which of these is most successful and do it larger scale?
- talk to izzy about display and degree show – what do we want to get out of exhibiting together? who can we start asking for cabinets etc?
- start thinking about writing/start some potential, speculative writing for the degree show
- pick up ceramics from Poly – pick the most successful ones and start making small, detailed versions with the degree show display in mind
- maybe gather some more pieces from the beach? and make some more small material experiments (although it is possible that the ceramics will cover this basis – I’ll see how much time everything takes)
- research-wise it might be good to look more formally at taxonomy and its associations if this is something I might be evoking through my mode of display
- any articles/shorter readings on thingness/things I can do?
Anna Harris 