I looked back over all of my recent photographs this afternoon. Sod's law that as my degree is finishing, I am really losing sight of the point again. All I see on tumblrs and image boards is a constant stream of pretty pictures, the same throwaway things over and over, and I wonder if this is all I'm doing now? Funny how it all seems so clear and worthwhile when I'm unwell. I think the well and contented me doesn't understand the sick and miserable me. I wonder what I'd be making art for if I had never had this disease to give my art its only function.

Some home and some studio photography, and a mixture of Nikon FM2 and the Halinar again. Shot with normal Ilford 400 but all of these were developed on some verrrry expired paper I got from freecycle! The blue tones are just a lighting trick.




( Boys )

I've gone a long time without posting! It's a busy time in the fine art department right now, because we're less than a month away from the opening of our degree show and the end of our BA.

I've been focusing on photography since around easter, but it's been rather stop-start because I've been constantly unwell since the beginning of term. I might suggest that this splurge of photography is connected to that, as it is something I can experiment with and practice whether I'm able to go into the studio or not (I had a similar splurge the last time I was in hospital). Developing in the darkroom isn't too strenuous either.

Here is the first set I did with my mother a while back, using my wonderfully naff and dodgy HALINAR camera and some expired colour film:





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More to come.

A bit overdue; a blog post with the artwork that I exhibited at 'Lolita in Wonderland'. This was an exhibition was an emphasis on Lolita fashion and japanese street fashion; a scene I have been interested in from my early teens.

I wasn't entirely happy with most of this work. It's been a long time since I did prints or leaf paintings (which I last did in foundation year). There are one or two pieces that I think are successful but overall I think they show a lot of evidence of that long gap since I last worked with these materials.

Unfortunately no titles for you! They are all on the back of the pieces and I have no other copy, oops!

Regardless, they are all on sale with a few exceptions. Please comment if you happen to like anything! I am also open for commissions, on leaves or anything else, if you'd like!




( Prints )



( Drawings )



( Leaves )

Here are some photos from the exhibition, as taken by lovely assistant inkeyes because I couldn't be there in person.

( Exhibition Photos )


Well, I'm a woman of few words at the moment, so I'll leave it there for now.

A hypnotic and affecting film by Daniel Askill:


WE HAVE DECIDED NOT TO DIE

Daniel Askill - WE HAVE DECIDED NOT TO DIE from Cgunit on Vimeo.

From the 3-day sketchbook.

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And a bit of Saint Sebastian for you (there is a portrait of him by Guido Reni at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, that I always draw as a sort of 'marker' for my drawing):

Two new books:







I don't know, I'm getting sort of stuck and bored with these. It's kind of hard to develop book works sometimes. I mean, there was the thing with the pill (concealed indented in the book) in the first batch, but whether I should do more of that, I don't know...

“I came upon twin fawns in the display case of a mom and pop toy and science store in Kansas City, Missouri. It took me two years to win the trust of the shop owner and save the money to buy them. A taxidermist spotted a dead deer by the side of the road. He stopped to properly dispose of the body and realized she was pregnant. He opened her and found near full-term twin fawns, he removed and preserved them.
Deer rarely have twins and the taxidermist retained the uterine gesture of their bodies. I built them a vitrine with a light blue base. Their prematurity exaggerates the delicacy of an incredibly sweet thing. The points of their hooves, the length of their lashes, the spots of their hides, nose to small nose in an ur-cartoonish realism … Viewers’ eyes trick them into believing the fawns are breathing. The tragedy of beauty is its transience.
The twins live forever in their own demise. They are sleeping beauties.They have been muses since I first saw them … We dress death in lilies and bronze the names of our dead sons on walls. We erect altars of toys and hold candlelight vigils to express hope. My twin fawns sleep endlessly on their baby blue block in my studio. The twins never opened their eyes yet their wondrous fatality evokes an acceptable alternative to death.”
— Peregrine Honig

I'm going to see if I can start and finish a sketchbook of line drawings between now and the New Year. sketchy sketchy

An attempt to diverge from the pattern my books have been following.





I am really not keen. I just think it's dull. But not dull in the clinical, blank, medical way of the others. Maybe I have started something that has no development in it.

The collaborative book work at http://www.lookatbook.com/ holds more than a passing similarity to the Travelling Book project I started last year, but also more than a little difference. The content of a book passed between a small number of artists is starkly different from the Travelling book, which is passed to whoever wants it, and whoever wants it from them. Their book is lush and very well done (particularly Oliver Jeffers' work, which has a nice sketchbookish simplicity to it), but I wonder how limited the intrigue is for those who aren't involved in the art world. This sort of limited appeal is something I wanted to avoid with my book. The exhibition included pages from the book encased within glass presentation cases, an odd choice I feel because their work seems to be quite tactile.
Still, it holds the same core feeling - something similar to a group 'diary'; an appropriately non-verbal feelings and ideas something shared between people.

This piece by Jonathan Callan makes me want to continue with the cutouts in my books, but I'd like to find a neater way of doing it. The last one was so messy.
It might be cool to stick all the cutouts together on the page, maybe you could make it so that it's a little cutout-page landscape when you open the book. Hmm.

(You can see more of his work on artnet.)

Further practice.

Lots of photographs of my beautiful boyfriend.



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Last three are probably my favourites, 'cause I'm a sucka for chiaroscuro.

I like this set, especially as a second try with studio photography, but I'd like to do something more calculated in the studio, involving set-up. Completely at a loss for what that could be at the moment though, especially as it will be totally uncohesive with the rest of my work. At the moment I'm torn between working towards a grade and just using the year to do as many different things as I want before I won't have access to the facilities...

First attempt at studio photography using studio lighting and Nikon D90.




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I love expressions and I also love funny faces!



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Simon wants me to exhibit these in the school foyer at some point. They're a bit small for that space as they are, though, so I might have to mess about with them a bit.

Some weird miscellaneous things I've done recently to pass the time.





I tried making a mini Piss Christ, but it didn't really work out. The 'liquid' (as it is true to the original), uh, dissolved the PVA glue I used to stick it all together.
I had this idea to make loads of mini versions of famous artworks and display them in a tiny doll's house gallery, but I don't think I will now. Oliver really liked the idea and it's always tempting to do something that will make him smile or grab his interest. After a talk with Emma things are a bit clearer and I can see that, even working in series, it's a bit too impersonal for this stage in my work.
Perhaps as a side project, I still think it would be cute. I'd like to have a full-size 'Dolls House Gallery' for babyart, that would be neat.



Book, dipped in blackboard paint. I want very much to cover my whole body in blackboard paint, but I'm pretty sure it would poison me.

Some constructs on the blackboardpinboard. They make for some interesting, dark photos:



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I was recenty introduced to the concept of working in series, which is something I hadn't considered before. For many years I have struggled with the feeling that I should be specialising in something, 'sticking to something' and having a 'style', and that that was what having 'a practice' meant. By no means do I think that what I just described is a bad way to work, as there are some results that are only obtainable by visiting and revisiting the same object, concept, style or method many times over. But it's been useful to look into other ways of creating art that defer from this method, though I've not quite grasped it to a full understanding yet.

Here is a very good and simple investigation into working in series (though I don't particularly care for the focus on painting):
http://www.squidoo.com/art-series

Excluding business motives for now, I was interested in the other three common 'categories' given to emcompass reasons for working in series:
http://www.squidoo.com/art-series#module11528757
* investigate and explore - subject
* investigate and explore - technique
* emotional response

I would think that the way I work suggests a combination of these three.

'Developing a series based on a concept is akin to 'working through a problem'

I want to try many different ways of creating art (especially while at university with access to so many facilities), but I also want to have a well-explored product of each investigation. I still think my explorations/research/development leaves something to be desired. I need to be much more imaginitive and playful with whatever concepts or materials I'm focusing on.

I think it's worth looking into more, anyway. Books and exhibitions are likely to provide more productive research on this kind of working, I think, because the internet has noooothinnnng.

Light Night this year was so-so. It was very drizzly all night, but in general there didn't seem to be a lot around, and I think a lot of things shut down earlier because of the weather. I think the first year I went was a hard act to follow - that year they had a massive procession incorporating various performance art events around Leeds, having handed out hundreds of white umbrellas.

But anyway, some photos from the Night:



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I think the best thing about Light Night is the unifying vibe you get from it around & about Leeds. I'd like to see more events making use of that and doing BIG events getting lots of people involved at once. Maybe I should look into doing something for next year....

An update! I haven’t been sure what to do since ending the surrogates project, so I’ve just taken to what I do best... drawing and making books.
I’ve been saving my medicine packets for a long time in my vaguely obsessive-compulsive paranoia that they may come in useful, and hey, they did! I’ve been making books to go in them:













The covers are bound in the medicinal instruction leaflets.

This concept came from a small obsession with the tangible nature of books, and tangible, intimate objects in general. One of the problems I have with what you could say is the more ‘pretentious’ end of book arts is the book in a glass cabinet error. How ridiculous and pompous! Of course it’s natural to want to protect something you’ve worked so hard on, but in my opinion a book in a glass cabinet is no longer a book at all. Why would it be – it’s not like you can pick it up and hold it or look beyond the page presented. It has lost all the delicate and fragile intimacy that to me makes a book what it is, and makes it such a unique form to work with, within art.
So... We had book-in-a-cup. Paper off-cut book. Smaller and smaller books for smaller and smaller pockets. Eventually the books were small enough to fit in a matchbox. So, of course, I made a book in a matchbox; the matchbook.

A lot of people I’ve spoken to agree – there is something particular about a book in a box.
I haven’t begun to think about that too much just yet, let alone the connotations of using these medicinal dregs to bring the books together.

How is a book in a box once containing matches different to a book in a box once containing 10mg antibiotics?

Love. I suspect I will find it hard to function as a selling artist because of love. Things that I love are the things I’d think were good enough to sell, but things that I love I can never let go of...
Preservation
Deterioration
Surrogates
Intimacy
Entropy
Dependency
Not what is art, but...
What makes something beautiful?
What makes something ugly? (With some work, like book works, these terms would perhaps have to be repaced with more appropriate ones, eg. beautiful to become attractive/appealing/etc, ugly to become unappealing/empty/dull)

Why is art so valuable, that you spend your lifetime agonising over it?

This is the blog I intend to use as a space for documentation of my artistic inclinations, as well as for discourse upon such things.


I have moved into my studio for this year already, not sure if I was allowed to do that before term started. Early birds and all that. Thom and I are early birds and we have the best studio. Thom is very tall and I am very short. Does this sound like a perfect setup for comedy hi-jinks? I think it does. 8D