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?

Bitching about Timeline, and bidding goodbye to May

Much to my own dismay, my Facebook was recently updated to the new 'Timeline' style. Ever since they introduced this I thought it looked confusing and pretentious - especially the 'cover photos' which tend to either show some holiday scene (look at me, I go on holiday), some modelling shots (look at me, I'm gorgeous) or a photo from a night out (I am soooo coooool and drunk). Well I chose the holiday scene, but enough on that.

Timeline got me thinking about the passing of time, especially as we reach the middle of 2012.

May saw the return of my more natural blonde barnet; the beginning of a heavy addiction to fake tan; my first driving lessons; some serious raiding of rubbish skips; visits to my boyfriend in Yorkshire; the loss of my grandmother; my last workshops at college before I go to University.

June is going to begin with my grandmother's funeral in Scotland; followed by a detour to Yorkshire; returning to tutoring; my nineteenth birthday; interviewing for an exciting summer job opportunity; finishing my Final Major Project, assembling the show and having it exhibited; and a second exhibition organized by Bear on a Bicycle Records, which will be at Truck store on Cowley Road; finishing up at college for good; and sorting a summer holiday out!

It's been a self indulgent blog post, but basically, I'm feeling pretty happy with progress.

And here's a shameless plug for the 28th June, be there:

An experience of "The Iron Lady"

Okay then folks: I'm not a political girl. I studied the 'Thatcher era' in very brief detail during GCSE Drama, but I took a lot more in about Yuppies than anything else. When it came to A-Levels I witnessed a lot of my peers studying Government & Politics and suddenly assuming they were future politicians with decades of 'well informed' political knowledge stored into their heads, learnt, of course, within 2 years. I've never claimed any political knowledge further than anything I have learnt from hearsay, infrequent news absorption and 'Mock The Week' reruns from the last 6 years - and as Frankie Boyle would later say, the show reports very little to do with politics, or even the news. In short, I am not a politician, a politics student, or a politics enthusiast.

All I can claim is that tonight I went to see 'The Iron Lady' in the cinema.

It was only about ten days ago that I saw 'Girl With The Dragon Tattoo' and saw the advertisement for The Iron Lady and said to my friends "Oh what, have they made a film about Iron Man's wife?" (I'm really hilarious, you see?)
And so I held no knowledge of the making of this film, or of Margaret Thatcher - the life of whom the film is primarily about.

I have been to see the film, walked out of the cinema, put my iPod in, been driven home, got into my house, checked my e-mails (nothing exciting), and sat down to write this. I have a Wikipedia tab open on Margaret Thatcher - which I will justify in just a moment - and a Google search on "peers" to check that I'd used the word correctly at the beginning of this entry. (Forgive me, I am tired.)

So about the film.
It runs almost like two threads - if you can imagine - running both beside each other and yet miles apart from each other. The film begins about the later (present day) life of Thatcher, and begins to include scenes of her upbringing and political rise, weaving and referring back to a portrayal of present day Thatcher, played beautifully by Meryl Streep.

Like I said before, I have nothing to do with politics and so that aspect of the film was informative and yet relatively unimportant to me. On the walk between the cinema and the car I overheard a girl say "I would have enjoyed that film more if I wasn't a historian." Well, I'm not a historian. If you're looking for an opinion of the film from a historian or a politician then you're reading the wrong thing (my apologies to inform you so late on, you've read a far way down now, you might as well continue mightn't you?)

I am, however, for whatever I lack in other areas, a human and a woman. (Tah-daaaah!)
The reason I have a tab open about Margaret Thatcher is in a bid to understand not her political career, but her present life. I have learned that:

"Thatcher suffered several small strokes in 2002 and was advised by her doctors not to engage in any more public speaking. After collapsing at a House of Lords dinner, she was admitted to St Thomas' Hospital in central London on 7 March 2008 for tests. Her daughter Carol has recounted ongoing memory loss."

There are also three accounts of Thatcher declining invitations to prestigious events due to 'frail' or 'ill' health. As a woman in her nineties, this is only to be expected.

The biopic portrays the present-day Thatcher as a woman suffering from ill mental health (or perhaps dementia) who is experiencing hallucinations of her husband, who would be at least six years dead by this point. The audience see the pity and sorrow her daughter and staff display toward her in this mental state.

It is in this thread of the film that there are no history lessons. In this thread it does not matter whether the film is about Margaret Thatcher or the history of the British political system. This part of the film could be about any woman, or any person, who is getting a bit old and doesn't necessarily know it; or any person who is experiencing grief; or any person with mental health problems; or any person who drinks a little more than the NHS would recommend.
Towards the end of the film an emotional climax within this thread is reached, and I am not afraid to admit that I cried - I didn't just well up, I had tears streaming down my face and I had to cover my mouth with my jumper in case I disturbed anyone else in the packed cinema. That woman could be my mother in a few years, and then she could be me.

Whilst I know nothing about the British political system I do know that, should no unnatural circumstances take place, I will get old, and the people I love will die, and I will then die.

I could get really preachy about how this film is going to "make me live life to the full" but that would go in the face of what I believe about 'resolutions' and promising to be a person I'd never quite become.
All that I know is that whilst watching that film I thought that everything in my life is okay. It is okay if I keep on getting my heart broken and abusing my health, because if I can shorten that horrendous ageing process just a little bit, I'd be lucky. Of course you don't all agree with that, and to a giant extent I don't either. But what I mean is that ageing looks cruel, and not necessarily on the ageing person, but on the people who love that person...


Whatever. Go and watch the film. I promise you that regardless of whether you love Thatcher, whether you hate Thatcher, or whether, like me, you know very little about Thatcher, that film will probably have some impact on you. Let me know if it does, and let me know if you want your money back - although here's a heads up: you'd not get a single penny out of me.