Bear On A Bicycle - Truck Store, 28th June 2012

"Bear on a Bicycle are a new Oxford collective of bands, artists, and film-makers. Come join us on our first showcase at the renowned record store 'TRUCK'"

Having blogged about this event a couple of times, it's only right to show a few photos and say a bit about the whole shabang...

I'll admit, I was terrified - for various personal and ridiculous reasons. One reason is that my college asked to hang on to the sculptures I made for my Final Major Project so I was thinking for about two days "I'm an artist who has nothing to show" which is incredibly scary..
In the end I spent about £50 recreating the sculptures as photographs, by rushing into college one morning and photographing them against a black sheet in some natural light and cranking the levels up until you couldn't see any folds.

Then I printed these images to about A1 size and mounted them on foam board.
My other irrational fears ended up completely disappearing once the art was sorted.

Enough about me.

So the whole thing was basically, I'd call it, a celebration of the arts. That sounds incredibly pretentious, but it was a feast for the ears and eyes. Oh god that sounds worse.

Musically it kicked off with Rob Burr and Adam Watson, who's set gave me goosebumps. I don't know how readily I want to compare it to Mumford & Sons since I don't actually like those guys, but Rob and Adam were wonderful. Not sure if there's any music online but there definitely should be.

Ashamedly, I'll admit I'd never listened to Camena until the Wednesday night. I watched the video below and was so impressed by both the really interesting sound and beautiful accompanying video.



The last live music I saw before this has to have been in 2011. Hang on, I'm thinking... Was it seriously 2011? Fucking hell, I think it was. I forgot how good it is to hear stuff in the flesh, so if you like the sound or look of this video you should definitely come to the next Bear on a Bicycle event (which is rumoured to be near the end of July) as the recorded version can never do the whole experience justice.

Samantha Jayne did some lovely acoustic tunes, and I was astounded to discover that Danica Hunter was only 18 years old. Her stage presence was astonishing.

I am incredibly honoured to have been involved in anything to do with these musicians, as if I had anything to do with the kind of talent that people hear about it would be these guys over every single other act you get on TV and radio.

Besides the pretension about great art and great music and great blah blah blah, what was really great was to have a fun evening with fun people.

Make sure you retards get your sorry arses to the next one. You will hear about it.

Part 4

Instalment 4 of a series, you can find the previous entry here.

Human civilization is built on records. Most of the world’s most important records have been lost, due to the fragility and intense corruptibility of paper. Nowadays important records have backups, but over the course of the day we collect so much paper waste – receipts, bus tickets, to-do lists, notes, packaging. I began thinking about how wasted paper could become a sculptural work, through the folding or crumpling the material allows. When my friends got receipts I would ask for it, scrunch and roll it into a little ball, and hold it up in front of them – telling them I was going to do that a thousand times, pin them from floor to ceiling and exhibit it. They in return would laugh and tell me I wasn’t a ‘real artist’. I collected hundreds of pieces of paper and made some tests too, but the work didn’t receive much enthusiasm from anybody. A friend posted a photo online of a visit to Tate Modern, where Cruzvillegas had some works on show, and a modern-art-hating friend remarked – “I hate it, it’s not what I would call art, just a very bored person”. I believe that had I exhibited these scrunched papers that a lot of people would have said the same of my work.


Going back to Blue Curry’s works, for a while I would try to do something similar. I imagined that I could make towers from found objects and exhibit these. I collected larger and less dirty objects such as vases, crockery, glassware, pots, trophies from inside skips and made towers from them. My neighbours all got a note through the door asking for medium scale waste (like bottles and jars) that week - and this got me a few good objects.



Curry’s works always look sleek due to colour, shape and surface, and I was trying to make something similar, but they never looked quite right. I became frustrated by how makeshift mine looked, less polished than his. Despite receiving positive feedback from some peers when I asked them to write opinions next to images, one very honest friend told me that the whole idea seemed a bit lazy since there is no real craftsmanship besides finding the objects. In a discussion with a tutor it was suggested that I transform the objects by wrapping or casting them. Whilst I was dismissive at first, I realized that I would otherwise be making a second-rate version of Curry’s works, and I have always hated artists who completely recycle other artists’ ideas. At first I considered just painting the towers white, but I decided to cast them in plaster “to look like I’d done a bit more” (Luke remarked that this self-deprecating comment sounded rather Warhol.) Initially I planned to spray them bronze afterwards as a salute to old casting techniques, since mine would be a modern and cheap casting method.



The actual casting was made less daunting due to a lot of help from a sculpture tutor, since I ended up making my sculptures in the last week of workshops being available to students. I don’t know how readily I would tell anyone that, though, because the whole reason I cast the towers was to look like I has done more as an artist… if everyone knew I’d actually just had loads of help there might be more debate about who’s work it really is. Artists do receive a lot of technical help though – Damien Hirst didn’t cut those cows open with his bare hands and measure out how much formaldehyde he would need by hand, and more shockingly he doesn’t even paint most of his spot paintings but has a large team of assistants instead. So not only is the art that gets exhibited changing, but so is the way it’s made. In the future of art I don’t imagine technical skill will be as important as having original ideas, which may be executed by a skilled team.



Even with skilled help I encountered some problems. The first mod-roc cast became weakened by the plaster and warped; it needed to be broken to fit together. The second sculpture had a lot of air holes and snapped near the top whilst being transported, so I fixed it with PVA and painted some plaster over it. It is the weakest of the 3, and I exhibit it in the middle for balance. The third was made near the end of a bag of plaster, and stayed really soft.



Bear On A Bicycle: Thursday 28th June; Truck Store, Cowley Road, Oxford
It is free, and set to be amazing, so why would you miss out?

Primadonna Bitch Pt2

I promise I will write a blog soon which isn't a follow-on from another blog!

My boyfriend just reminded me of something I wrote in Exhibiting And Being A Primadonna Bitch last Thursday, "Hopefully we might get the first ever decent photo of us together - but it is more probable that pigs will grow wings this weekend. Oh well."

Well, I was wrong!



It is my new favourite photo ever.

I was also feeling stressed about my exhibition, but it all went up pretty safely, even though I wasn't able to party on the night of the opening (I still had work to do. Bad Kat.)



Managed to have a really lovely dinner with my dad at Giraffe though, which is one of my favourite chain restaurants because I feel like everything on the menu is flavoursome and healthy. I had the tequila grilled chicken, and I could even have a pudding! They do a sorbet and fruit sundae which was so lovely. But only one cocktail, because we missed happy hour and I had work to do - in the form of that evaluation I keep posting bits of. Hopefully anybody who is reading those instalments is enjoying it.



Cheesy grins all round!
Life is good.

Mad love, xo

Part three

In news besides art - back to 15km/h sprints! Very happy.
This is part three of an evaluation. Parts one and two are my last two posts, though I always want to write a blog about running every time I finish a run... then I just sort of die and forget.
So here it is:

At the same time I also made a video of myself collecting every single bit of litter in a room-sized space in college grounds, in an attempt to make the finding of the objects more of a performance. This was just before the Easter holidays, and I had gone completely ‘off the boil’ with my whole project. It was one of those “what has art ever done for me” periods of hating art and hating me and trying to find any working method that required no effort, in a sort of backlash protest to art. I considered exhibiting the video, or a series of stills, above a case of the litter I had collected, or several cases and sets of stills.



My excavations had already been compared to Marc Dion’s ‘Tate Thames Dig’ (1999) and ‘Tate Thames Locker’ (2000). This piece had seen Dion and a large team collecting waste from the Thames at low shore for fragments of history. Like archaeological findings, the objects were cleaned and displayed in cases, alongside photographs of the beach and tidal flow charts. Themes of geography and natural processes, as well as those of childlike curiosity and rescue missions, are within the work. Having never seen the work in person, I imagine it to be similar to Susan Hiller’s ‘From the Freud Museum’ (1991-96), which I saw during her retrospective at Tate Britain in 2011. Hiller displayed various small, solid objects within wooden cases, then behind glass, rather like an anthropological collection – something that can only be truly appreciated up close.


(Image belongs to MOMA)

After the Easter holiday I continued to go on walks finding objects, cleaning them up in an attempt to make them better. In one heated argument that month I was told that I “wasn’t good enough” and continued to contemplate how and why objects could be good enough not to be discarded. Around this time I tired of collecting dirty and boring objects. At best I found lots of plastic bottles, crisp packets, rarely anything particularly inspiring. A big problem was that these mass-produced objects often had logos or colours on them already, so if I tried to make new objects from them it was hard to tell whether my transformation was interesting, or whether it was the existing design.



Studying sculptures by Blue Curry reinvigorated me – as he often worked with found objects too, but a slightly larger scale than the ones I had found. Also, rather than having any dirt on them, his were always immaculately polished. It was as if it all made sense – I wanted objects which were unwanted to be desirable again, but how could they when they were still covered in dirt? Nobody would put that in a home, least of all for sanitation reasons, but it just isn’t attractive. Curry had tapped onto what a modern day market want from decoration. There are generally two categories of people nowadays: people who want antiques items for their historical value, whimsy or aesthetic; and people who opt for clean and sleek finishes such as metal and glass. By recycling objects such as bottles, shells, plates and vases, Curry’s sculptures instantly look domestic, yet they are not quite antique or new. They meet in the middle – they are ‘one-offs’, but they look very shiny and new. An environmentally conscious viewer would be impressed by the use of found materials. Curry exhibits work with the aim of selling to private buyers, unlike Hiller, whose cabinet would be better enjoyed by a room full of people in a gallery than in a home.


(Shockingly, again, not my photo. I didn't manage to see Curry's works in the flesh.)

Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray were also rather essential to look at when I started thinking about larger ready-mades. Duchamp’s ‘The Fountain’ was incredibly controversial in 1917 (he infamously signed ‘R. Mutt’ onto a urinal) and would nowadays still be dismissed by many as ‘not real art’.

The whole idea of ‘real art’ started to bother me a lot over the following weeks. I was aware that whilst my tutors and peers may be able to understand and appreciate rather untraditional (and by untraditional I mean ‘fast’) working methods or final pieces. However, the exhibition of FMP material would be open to the family and friends of students, who will often go along to support an individual, not because they have a big passion for art. For my FMP in first year I exhibited seven photographic prints with one sketchbook (with several blank pages) and I never forgot the brother of a fellow student looking at my work and remarking to her “Is that all?” I eventually realized that I did not want this audience to view my work and think I was completely taking the piss.

But just before that realization I came up with another idea, inspired by Abraham Cruzvillegas ‘Blind Self Portrait as a Post-Thatcherite Deaf Lemon Head. For ‘K.M’’(2011) which sees hundreds of magazine pages in various sizes painted white on one side and pinned to the gallery wall. I saw this work at Modern Art Oxford in late 2011 and thought it was a load of rubbish at first. On my second visit I was seduced by the part-painting-part-installation quality of the whole thing. Viewing it straight on it looked like a flaking white wall, and from the side colour and text became visible. It was like torture to a curious person such as myself – I had to force myself not to lift the pages to reveal their identity. Cruzvillegas introduced me to the idea of paint as a transformation for objects, but more importantly he made me think about discarded paper.



I almost kept going there! Hope someone, somewhere, is enjoying reading this... Or reading it and hating it anyway.

So what the hell have I been doing the last few months? (2/6)

The questions I was asking myself were along the lines of – do we need objects, and to discard objects? Why were the objects I found so disposable to the owners? Would the ground I removed them from feel the loss? What purpose did, or do, they serve to be any use?
Encouraged by my tutor, I took out a Jean Paul Sartre text on Existentialism. My boyfriend, an ex-philosophy student, was dismayed – “you’re going to become one of those people who read one Jean Paul Sartre and think they’re a bloody philosopher.” I underlined parts of the text which felt relevant to the work I was making: “Nothing is absurd if it is part of a rational plan. The ordinary objects of everyday life will no longer seem pointless or dispensable, if one can think of them as necessary means for some genuinely important or necessary end.”


Another tutor encouraged me to think about how an object can be translated to different media (an object to a photograph, or a drawing, or a sculpture) and whether that can transform the value of the object. I was also encouraged to consider scale – if these discarded objects were somehow made bigger than the viewer, would it make the object more important, or worthy of a place?


Only this far into the project did I begin my artist research. I believe that looking closely at another artists work whilst ones own ideas are still emerging can become a hindrance to creativity. Irving Penn’s beautiful photographs of cigarette packets and gum trodden into pavements entertained me – because the objects themselves, which as litter were therefore a cost to society, once photographed by somebody so famous become incredibly valuable. Michael Landy’s ‘Art Bin’ and ‘Scrapheap Services’ interested me too, the latter arguably more political, and the former a piece of modern art that even I cannot completely appreciate. ‘Art Bin’ is a ‘monument to creative failure’ – Landy asked artists to throw, from a large set of stairs, any art work in which they were dissatisfied into the clear bin. His explanation of value within this work interested me – “In the bin there is no hierarchy, so everything is treated the same.” Cornelia Parker’s ‘Thirty Pieces of Silver’ got me thinking about transforming objects through a physical change such as flattening or colouring them.

Having eventually obtained a medical note to account for the slow progress on my FMP, I decided to work the words and idea into my project, since I saw the objects as the physical and non-human equivalents of sick people who had become absent from a place due to some damage. I wondered how I could write letters in the style of the doctor’s note, as if I was a doctor writing to the ground to explain the absence of the object I had taken. The note could also have been from social services (neglect, or a dangerous situation), parents informing of a holiday to be taken, or as myself. If I wrote as myself, the artist, I could explain that the objects had been ‘specially selected’ for its interest to me, and that the selection would help the object rise in status and worth. I made some large monoprints of the letters, as the childlikeness of a monoprint (where the letters are sometimes the wrong way round) contrasted the formality of the original doctors’ letter.



Maybe I had gone a bit off task and forgotten what it was really all about, because I made a series of A4 sized monoprint drawings of the found objects, which isn’t usually what I’m in to. In a discussion with one tutor he asked me “Do you like monoprints?” I probably replied unsatisfactory like “Yeah well you know…” He told me that rather like Tracy Emin doing all her crazy work, then occasionally doing a drawing, it seemed like I had only made these prints in some Emin-like attempt to “prove” that I am a “real artist” because the world isn’t always so accepting of the conceptual kinds of ideas better suited to me. It was a very interesting piece of constructive criticism.

(Oops sorry they're a bit massive)

This is what I'm listening to tonight;

I feel like I'm sleeping - can you wake me? You seem to have a broader sensibility. I'm just living on nerves and feelings, with a weak and a lazy mind and coming to peoples parties fumbling deaf dumb and blind. I wish I had more sense of humor - keeping the sadness at bay, throwing the lightness on these things... laughing it all away - Joni Mitchell

So what the hell have I been doing the last few months? (1/6)

Last night I stayed awake until 2AM evaluating the last 14 weeks of my artistic practice. The result - six sides of A4 which my tutor seemed to enjoy reading this morning. My assessment is done, my show is up, and I find my grade out next Monday.
I will publish small parts of my evaluation (along with accompanying images) at a time, for those of you who might be interested.

It is an incredibly frank piece of writing, so I urge anybody who struggles with the truth to avoid it like the plague.

Part 1 of Godknowshowmany (just kidding, this makes it about 6 parts)
“My specialism is Fine Art, and I intend to make a Fine Art outcome (sculpture/drawing/painting/installation/film/audio/photography or any combination of the techniques) exhibited as professionally as if for a gallery, for the FMP show.”

Following the college trip to Barcelona, I felt inspired to go out and collect items and make sketches. Rather than a working title, this was my starting point – the feeling of not knowing everything about one area, and being so hungry to. During the first week of this brief I had begun to make sketches of the places I inhabited, and I took my first walk collecting small objects and photographing them in a field opposite my home. I immediately felt a kind of affinity to these objects – discarded, trodden into the earth, unidentifiable from neglect. I had been having a pretty strange time myself.



Having focussed solely on digital photography during ‘Flow Around Town’ I decided to step back and use film. There is a strange sense of soullessness I feel shooting digitally, as if I, the artist, am not involved enough in my own work, allowing a machine driven by science and maths to create the images. My friends were involved in hands on processes like painting, drawing, sculpting, and it made me feel like a bit of a con artist, rather than a visual artist, to be working in a media so uninvolved.
So I shot photos using disposable cameras as well as old film SLRs, and used the dark room to blow up negatives and develop my own roll of black and white film. Artists understand the mother-and-child sort of connection between themselves and their work, and working in a hands-on way enabled me to feel that connection again.



At first ideas behind the work were, as before, over-conceptual and difficult convey visually. I had feared and anticipated this writing my statement of intent - “This project should find a way to make a conceptual piece understandable to a wider audience – a strong concept shown through my exhibited work”
The concepts I was dealing with were those of value – what makes one item so easy to discard, and not another? I was also trying to imagine these objects as patients – how could I treat them, make them better, return them to the original location as something more valuable in any way? The yearning to do this was partly down to my own poor mental health. It is far too easy to over-conceptualise or over-analyse anything at all in this situation.



Ordinarily whilst working on projects I enjoy visiting galleries for inspiration, since as a 'fine artist', presentation of final works is something I like to focus on alongside every idea. University interviews in various parts of the country made attending exhibitions a little more difficult, but I did manage to see a lot of Fine Art Undergraduate works in progress. At an interview in Leeds I saw a work by a girl who had collected lost gloves over various parts of Yorkshire, photographing them as she collected them, with the intention of eventually returning the glove to that place. One of the other prospective students on the tour asked – “why is she doing that?” … This glove girl and I had something in common. Inspired, especially since our projects had started in the same way, I tried this idea of ‘returning’ my found objects. I printed the photographs that I had taken when I first took them, and stuck them on a wooden stick, going round the route I had found them on and sticking the corresponding image into the area in which it was found. I then photographed this again. It was like the idea of a ghost – only two weeks ago an old tennis ball lay on that earth, for two weeks it was empty, and then reunited with a fragment (photograph) of the tennis ball.



... So what do we think so far? Am I depressing you enough?

Exhibiting and being a Primadonna Bitch

It has been a stressful week preparing for my show, and I've ashamedly taken it out on other people... and if you're one of them then I apologize profusely.

The private show opens on Monday 18th at 6pm, at Oxford & Cherwell Valley College (Oxford Campus, opposite the ice rink) and here's a plug -


Would like to state that I had nothing to do with that exhibition title choice... Sounds naff, sorry whoever decided it. It's also the name of one of my less favourite early Laura Marling songs.

My work will be assessed on Tuesday. I still have some work to finish for the exhibition - I want audio playing of an essay or interview based around my works, having bought all the audio equipment for recording it, I now need to write the essay.
Tomorrow my day begins getting on a bus at 9:30, tutoring between 10:30 and 1:30, working in the shop between 2 and 6, and jumping on a train at 7pm to see my boyfriend by 10. Saturday is this wedding, and I finally have an outfit! Hopefully we might get the first ever decent photo of us together - but it is more probable that pigs will grow wings this weekend. Oh well.

Provided it all gets finished off, it's going to be a cracking show. Regardless of how mine turns out, I am so impressed by everybody else's hard work and stunning shows. I have to admit I had no idea it would look so good and my heart genuinely skipped a beat when I saw the studios yesterday... the whole thing is getting me very hyped for London and the chance to exhibit more work, hopefully I'll learn to be more organized!

This is my show anyway, as I know the vast majority of you won't get to it (cynical as ever? Or just realistic...)

This has been stuck in my head since my wonderful trip to MAC today (Laura will be so proud) so I'm using it to say sorry again to everyone who's experienced my Primadonna-but-not-as-hot-as-Marina ways this week.

Mad love,
x


PS. yesterday saw me enjoying my first 'mocktail'... it was tasty, but I hope to jump back on the alcohol wagon next week! The end is in sight! (Excuse the baggies, there's not much left in me)