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?
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