Audiences Project Report

I have to admit that when I first heard we had to do a blog, I totally hated the idea. The idea of recording my thoughts in a diary form appealed to me, but it was the thought of sitting at a computer, on my own that really got to me. When I’m excited about something, I want to tell other people about it, and I hated the idea of meeting someone at college, and rather than having an interesting conversation with them, asking them to go and look at my blog.

 Once I got going however, I quite enjoyed it. It is somehow much easier to rant when you are typing, and it is much easier to copy and paste images virtually, rather than manually. Also,  I found I was more inclined to write a blog when I was already at the computer and found something interesting.

 I didn’t really manage to stay on subject while I was writing. I was interested in the beginning in the idea of differentiating between work you could touch, and work which was kept at arms length. However, I think a combination of my critical studies presentation being on this subject and there being a lack of suitable source material, I never really got going with the idea.

 I have learned quite a lot from this short module. One thing is that I should really stop being so stubborn and defensive all the time, and give things a chance to grown on me before I start slating them. I have also learned that it is ok to write in an informal way sometimes. I think this is another of my pre-conceptions which is not necessarily correct; I always imagine that people who do art courses are looked down on as being less academic than those who do traditional English/maths/science degrees, and I have always tried to fight this off; refusing to consider ever asking for essay writing help and writing in full structured sentences all the time. I have realised however that my remonstrances of ‘but I got 2 A’s in English at school, I’m not stupid’ are actually ridiculous, and I have enjoyed writing in this informal style as it is nice sometimes to be able to say ‘I like this because I just do!’ without having to justify yourself or reference anything.

 I have felt that the audiences module has been relevant to the course as a whole, but not necessarily relevant to myself. It has defiantly made me think about the importance of the audience, and the importance of setting also, but as I want to do Art Therapy, and have no intention of being a part of the exhibiting art world, I always find these short modules difficult. I decided at the beginning of term however that I was going to focus on myself as an artist and have tried to react to the module as such.

 I think I will keep the blog up after the module is over, because I have found it a good way to record thoughts and get feedback on them. I feel it has been a useful tool for this particular subject, though I think I will always prefer to have physical things, physical notes, experiences and conversations. 

The Big Art

Last night I watched the first in C4's series "The Big Art", in which a team of 'art specialists' chose from thousands of applicants who want a piece of public art in their community. I didn't really know what to expect, and to start with I was dreading an tacky reality tv show attempting to be cultural by dragging Anthony Gormley on board. It was ok though, nothing much was made of the selection process and the show quickly moved on to the types of art people wanted and what they were hoping they pieces would bring to their communities.

I t was nice to see untrained people really believing that art can change the public perception, and indeed the world. At one point a group of overweight, aging Irish men were discussing their plans for a large scale sculpture to bring the Catholic and Protestant communities together over a pint. In Burnley a group of school children wanted a piece that was colourful and bright, a stark contrast to their presently concrete town, and one boy in particular said "wouldn't it be great if you could google Burnley and not see the 2001 disturbance, but have this project come up instead". 

I think the programme will get better as the series continues, but already there has been a lot of disagreement. One of the artists says he is not interested in creating what the public want, and a member of the public said he likes art to be beautiful, not contemporary. I'm not sure the public are ready for this, it's all very well to put up a piece of public art and let people either love it or hate it, but I think there are going to be some major fallings out because neither the artist or the public whose proposal has been accepted are likely to back down on their idea. As Anthony Gormley said ""If you were to make work that was based entirely on popular opinion, you would end up like I did ... losing to a rotating cup of tea." 

The ideas behind the project, and the public opinion on it can be seen in this Guardian Article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/09/public-art-project

My piece has a name!

Introducing the latest work from Eleanor Rae Smith:

'Piggies' 2009

Plaster

Dimensions Variable

I think the name of a piece is incredibly important in the way it is seen by the viewer. I often look at a piece titled 'untitled' and feel a little let down because I want to draw more information from a name. Another of Toby Christians pieces can be used as an example here:

On first glance, it appears to be nothing more than a piece of bent steel, but on finding out it is called 'Superman', you begin to see it in a new light, and it starts to become a symbol of strength, trust and courage. 

I wanted to give my piece a name that was both personal to me, and that the audience could relate to, as this is also the attitude I have adopted when making the work itself. The only names I came up with to start with were horribly cliched and obvious; footprints, memory, nostalgia, home is where...etc etc. Then I looked at the poem, Footprints in the Sand by Mary Stevenson, which is about a girls looking back over her life, and seeing two sets of footprints in the sand, one being hers and the other those of "the lord". She reflects, that in times of sadness and despair, she could only see one set of footprints, and she asks "the lord", why he was not with her during the hardest times, and he replied that there was only one set of footprints during those times because he carried her. For a while, I thought my piece was going to be called "When I carried you", but it never felt right. I am not religious at all, and although I liked the title, it isn't really very relevant to my reasons for making this work. I was talking to Sarah about it, and explaining where my ideas had come from and I told her the story of me collecting stones with holes in on the beach and handing them to my mum, telling her they were piggies. As soon as I heard myself say "Piggies" I knew that was the name, and Sarah agreed. I know why they are called that, but the audience now have the freedom to connect with the piece and the name for their own reasons. There is also the connection with the footprints and the 'this little piggy went to market...' nursery rhyme, which subconsciously harks back to childhood for most people.

Possible sites for my work...

Over Easter I drove over to Holkham beach in North Norfolk to take some photgraphs. I am interested to see what my work will look like on the beach, rather than in a gallery situation so I have made some photoshop collages. 

I think when shown on the beach like this, they are not as clearly a piece of art. I found this while I was making some plaster casts of footprints on the beach too. Instead of coming over to look at what I was doing as people do when someone is painting in a public place, people looked at me as though I was some kind of vandal! I also think that Gary's idea of me being an 'erratic', moving things to places they don't belong is very important. When the pieces are taken back to the beach, they just don't work as well. 

I therefore tried a collage using Briggate in Leeds. I think that because they look so much more out of place, they work much better. It looks more like a have been walking down Briggate, thinking of home and the stones are like memories. 

Time to stop being so defensive...

I had a bit of a revelation about my work after setting It out in a crit situation and getting opinions from other people. When Rory gave my his opinion, I shut it out, and disagreed with him, because that is what was easy at the time. He wanted to me explain why I was trying to make my work look like stones or pebbles, and I was convinced that I needed them to look like pebbles for my work to be successful, and for me to have enough excitement about it to carry on. Rory disagreed. He gave me the example of Toby Christians piece "Snowball" 

Christian has made a marble sculpture that looks so much like a snowball it quite disconcerting to look at. Until you realise it is made from marble and not frozen water, it looks like magic, or trickery. It is an excellent piece of trompe loiel, and I couldn't understand how it related to my work. Rory said if I really wanted to make the pieces look like stones, I should remove the footprint element and work at making them as convincing as stones as possible. I thought he was talking rubbish and said that if I wanted to display stones, I would go to the beach and get some stones, and that the only reason Christian had worked hard to make a real looking snowball is because you simply can't display an actual snowball outside in normal conditions. However, after seeing my work laid out in the crit, I suddenly understood what he meant, and felt quite guilty about being so argumentative. 

The pieces were laid out in their proposed positions, but made from plaster as at that point I hadn't cast them in concrete. I found they were suddenly representing pebbles on their own. The small  cracks and bubbles were reminiscent of the sea, and the powdery quality of the sand represented the sand perfectly. They work much better as symbols for stones, rather than blindingly obvious copies. This again related to Plato's perfect horse theory. Its like the "idea" stone, or the "perfect" stone is the image everyone has in their head, then there's an actual stone, which is a representation of the "perfect" stone, and below that is my piece, which is a representation of the already represented idea stone. Ronald. H. Nash explains it better in his book 'Lifes Ultimate Questions':

Back from Easter...

So, I'm back from Easter, and haven't done anything, so I'd better get to it....

Continuing on from the things I had planned to write about. 

- Home sickness

- How would the piece look if it was a person homesick for the city?

- Influence of Plato's "perfect horse" theory related to Rory's argument about displaying a snowball, and why I would bother making a stone look perfect when I could just go to the beach and get one.

I have started to realise that my work is not really about the beach and childhood, but about how I'm homesick for the sea. I belong there, and by placing my footprints a symbol of the beach and the sea, it's like saying that in my head I''m still there. Its like I've moved my little bit of the beach up to Leeds with me. Gary likened this to the way nature moves things around, so in the same way that shells of animals that have never lived here turn up on England's beaches, I have brought stones from the quite, peaceful beach to the busy smoky city. I have been wondering how this would work in reverse; so something distinctive to the city would be sited at the beach, with maybe a hand or footprint imprinted in it. I see a traffic cone with the plastic melted as though someone had hugged it, or a bus shelter sticking up out of the sand with bum prints in the seats.  

I think this could be an interesting way forward for my work. I feel a wide audience can relate to my work as it is, but it would reach out to an even wider one if i approached it from a broader range of angles.

Perhaps Nothing, Perhaps Something

"Minimalism is a medium in which the form is daringly reduced to next-to-nothing. Yet there's another art form, represented here, in which the subject is so condensed it points to a haunting vacuity. The human psyche abhors a vacuum, and is automatically inclined to people absences with imagined presences. Rachel Whiteread's sculptures, with their cast solidification of in-between places, fit the role perfectly. House and home are also exploded in a piece by Cornelia Parker, a suspended composition of bricks eroded by the sea. And, as always, Paul Rooney charms with his sound meditations on the poetics of boredom" 

(Clark, R. (2009) Exhibition preview: Perhaps Nothing, Perhaps Something, Leeds. www.guardian.co.uk. Online on 3/04/09) 

I went down to the Leeds Met Gallery to see the Perhaps Nothing, Perhaps Something show. A lot of people have commented on it, and how it felt a bit pretentious, but I didn't think so. I was a bit surprised at the way I was told, very forcefully that I was not to touch because the work was very fragile, to which I said "Yes, of course" but to which I felt like saying "Well yes, I'm not completely stupid".  But then I thought, maybe it's not obvious you can't touch this work, after all, Rachel Whiteread's 'Untitled (6 Spaces) are very sturdy looking resin which look, and seem as though you should be able to sit on them, and Parker's suspended piece 'Neither from nor Towards' looks fairly sturdy (although my first comment was "imagine what a nightmare it would be if all the strings got tangled!")

Cornelia Parker - "Neither From nor Towards"

Rachel Whiteread - "Untitled" (Six Spaces)

As for the aesthetic appeal of the gallery I wasn't particularly impressed. The front of the shelves had been taped messily, and the wooden dowels holding Paul Rooney's sound piece "Words and Silence" were wonky and uneven.  Obviously I can understand that this is a gallery in a university, not the Tate Modern, but they are showing well known works from prestigious artists and I didn't feel they were shown off in the way they deserved to be. 

Paul Roony - 'Words and Silence' 

I wondered weather it would really matter if any if the pieces of work were touched. I would be quite interested to see what happened to Whiteread's piece was made interactive, and the audience were allowed to sit on it, or run their hand over the top surface. 

I really loved  Chris Wright's work 'This is the place where', which is 5 photographic lights shining onto one point on the floor. The Leeds Met Publication  says:

"There is something missing in Chris Wright's work This is the place where. Photographic lights are normally used to highlight a subject or product to make it seem more appealing. The fact that these lights are set up for that purpose but are then thwarted by not having a subject explores the value of nothing in a commodity led society. The circle of light works in a sculptural way, the viewer can enter the space but there is a perceived barrier, an in between space."

Paul Rooney - 'This is the place where'

 I was really struck by the "perceived barrier" that appears around the work. I felt really awkward standing in the circle of light, almost like I had climbed on top of a sculpture and jumped up and down on it. It was a bit disconcerting to feel this awkward when standing  in what is essentially just a spotlight. There was a couple standing looking at the piece with me, and when I stepped into the light, the woman's intake of breath said quite clearly that she expected lazer beams to shoot across the room and arms security to start swarming around me. It was intersting to view a piece of interactive art that involves to physical touching, no leaving a mark or contributing to the work. My presence didn't affect the work at all, but the reaction of the audience and the awkwardness of not knowing whether or not you could step into the light became much more important than the work itself. 

Revelation of sorts...

Today I realised why I am making the work I am making, and why it has such relevance to me. Rory asked my why the idea of stones/pebbles was so important, and I couldn't really tell him, other than that I needed the pieces to look like stones for me to be able to fully engage with them, I have realised today why. I'm too tired to explain at the moment, but I need to write about:

- Home sickness

- How would the piece look if it was a person homesick for the city?

- Influence of Plato's "perfect horse" theory related to Rory's argument about displaying a snowball, and why I would bother making a stone look perfect when I could just go to the beach and get one.

I want to write now but my eyes are falling out........

The idea of an online gallery...

I have just been exploring Saatchi's online gallery and have found it very strange. The typical clean, simple, 'white cube' feeling the physical Saatchi Gallery has seems to have been abandoned and replaced with a confusing, flashing and blinking home page. Far from showing off the work, I feel it disorientates and the viewer. It is a nice concept, and I like the idea that any artist can add themselves to the site and gain a wider audience, but I don't think it has been executed very well. There are so many artists shown that you have no idea where to start, and when you do chose someone to look at, you a presented with another page packed with icons. I feel it would be more successful if the artists were grouped into categories rather than all being displayed in the same place. This would make it much easier to find works you were likely to be interested in, as at the moment, it is very frustrating to use. 

I have been thinking about how my work would change if it was shown on a site like this. I have often thought about how different my work would be in photographic form, because to be effective it requires a physical audience, and their reaction and derived conversation is almost as important as the piece itself. Touching the work is a big pat of this reaction, and in photographic form this is obviously not possible. By taking it into virtual form, i.e. placing it on an online gallery, there is nothing physical at all. So much is created using computers, in films for example, an entire universe, with characters settings and weather can be created from nothing. This takes away the real feeling of anything displayed online; you have no feeling of weight or scale, you can't walk around a sculpture or stand in front of a large scale painting and marvel at the tiny details. Maybe work created specifically for viewing online, photography or work of a small scale  might work, but I don't think mine would. 

I have compared my work to the work of Barbara Hepworth.  Although her work is not designed to be picked up and is definately "behind the velvet rope" it still has a sense of weight and warmth in real life, and I always feel the need to get as close to it as possible. 

Barbara Hepworth -Porthmeor, bronze.

In this image, there is no real sense of depth.  You can't tell how deep the curve of the piece is, or indeed how big it is. I want to look down upon it into the bowl like shape the bottom creates, and (at risk of being thrown out of the Tate St. Ives - again) run a finger around the rim of the holes. This image is a good avert for the piece, because it makes me want to see it in real life, but as a true representation of the work, I think it is unsuccessful.   

The IMPACT exhibition opening

Yesterday saw the opening of the school exhibition at the IMPACT Gallery at The Royal Armouries. The kids from the four school had a 4 hour celebration/opening and they were all really pleased to have their work on the walls, and at 14 have started calling themselves published or exhibiting artists which is great. There has been a real team atmosphere surrounding the whole thing, work from the schools was mixed in with work done by myself and the other students, and work done by the lead artists Lizzie and Peter. 

It was great to see them so excited about it, but I found it very difficult to get any other response from them. They had a very simple questionnaire  to fill out asking them what they liked, something that surprised them, and three words to describe the exhibition. Some of the words coming from myself and the other students for this question were: Empowering, accessible, considered, heartfelt, professional and having great potential. The kids found it much more difficult, and when prompted came out with good or cool.  I think this is a reflection on both art and English education in school; they were so excited about the work, but couldn't find any words to describe it.

The exhibition will be up now for around 6 months. I think seeing it up on the wall along side exhibits which almost glorify weapons is very odd. I think it is confusing for the viewer to look around a museum exploring and celebrating ancient and modern weaponry, then to be confronted with not only art, but art which has the complete opposite message to the rest of the gallery. It is situated in the IMPACT gallery, which was set up by the mother of a boy killed by another youth with a knife. It was intended to highlight the dangers of carrying weapons and provide facts about gun and knife crime that would hopefully dissuade young people from using them. I really don't think it is very successful though. It is very wordy and very stereotypically' 'museumy'. I found it boring and I like museums, so If a board teenager was shown around I don't think any of the messages would get across. I know most of the kids were just impressed with the weapons and didn't seem to feel uncomfortable with the fact that they were real, very sharp and had the potential to kill.  I think this is another example of how today's young people are being desensitised to the things they should be wary of by the media, televisions and computer games.

My work so far....

Above: a "pebble" with a footprint 

Today I have been thinking about my ow practice and trying to come up with a plan for the final resolution. I had a chat with Stephen about it all because I have been so interested and involved in the making of the work, that I had forgotten why I ever started making it. Stephen explained why he thought I was making it:

- To explore the negative space between human interactions; to cast the gap between a cheek and a pair of lips, a hand and a shoulder and feet on the floor.

- To tap into a very small but very important personal memory about the beach and collecting the things found on it. This is a childhood memory that has in ways shaped who I have become, I prefer the country to the city, I miss not being able to look out to sea and see nothing at all, and for this reason I feel very claustrophobic in the very middle of the country. I also like the simple joy picking up a perfectly formed pebble can bring, and I think everyone can relate to that. 

The audience for my piece will obviously be the people attending the exhibition, which will probably be at LCAD. I have decided not to show at the hospital because I think there is quite a fine line in my work between craft and fine art. I think if it is seen by the untrained eye, it could simply appear a representation of a beach, and if that is what I had wanted I would have made a watercolour or taken a photograph. 

I have also been discussing how my work should be displayed, and I was surprised how different the pieces looked when they were taken out of the window sill and laid out in a line. They had a real sense of movement, and therefore a much more heightened sense of human presence and impact. I talked to Stephen about creating a much more realistic looking "path" through the stones by documenting the movements of my feet as a carefully picked my way along a route as you often have to when walking on a very pebbly beach. 

I think it is interesting that the smallest touch can convey human life; a finger tip pushed imprint in a "pebble" shows it just as well as a whole body and I am interested to see how little information I can provide the audience and  still have them understand what is happening....

Audience for the IMPACT Project

Since Christmas I have been working on a project in conjunction with Education Leeds and the Royal Armouries called IMPACT.  We (me, 3 other LCAD students and lead artists Lizzie and Peter) have been working with 4 local school to create work around the issue of gun and knife crime, hopefully to be used to influence kids to take the right choice when faced with using a knife. Today and yesterday I have been working at the West Park Centre editing work the pupils have done for the exhibition at the Royal Armouries. After the exhibition, some of the work will be taken further by myself and the other students/artists and used in a resource pack aimed at year 6-7 - 10 and 11 year olds. Morley High in particular have had the benefit of a visit from a stage make-up artist and have consequently created quite graphic pieces, and as they are the oldest group, most of them being nearly 17, they have been able to be very sophisticated in their analysis and viewing; they can see that although the bloodiness is a bit gory, it is needed to give the piece the impact it needs. While editing however, we have had to really think about the audience. Younger children, and even more squeamish adults may be put off by how real it looks,  and not being able to see past this, may quite easily miss the point. We have really toned down the red for this reason, and I have been amazed how much difference it made. Even though real blood isn't bright crimson, using this colour made the images look too shocking. 

It has been good, but difficult to try to think from the point of view of someone who is both younger, and not at all trained in art.  People who are trained seem to have an ability to look past the shocking because they are conditioned to expect it. Similarly with nudity, artists and photographers tend not to bat an eyelid at nudity, but those who are untrained often become giggly and childish. raaaaaaaaaamble 

Why I hate the internet, yet am still doing a blog...

It's been about a month now I think since audiences started, and I have finally decided to start a blog. I was going to have a stop about it, and not do it, but on reflection, I realise this won't get me anywhere. It's because I hate the internet. I hate the idea of communicating virtually, and not engaging personally with people when you find something exciting. When I am excited about a piece of work, or something I've read or seen, I want to tell people about it, and show them, not battle with a computer, getting stuck behind firewalls and disconnected every five minutes. It worries me that eventually we will never see each other in the flesh, everybody's life will be virtual, with virtual friends and a virtual personality, where we know more about how Facebook operates than we do about our friends. My art is about being, and physical reactions. It's about the conversation that happens around it, and the facial expressions of the viewers; these things cannot happen in a virtual world. For this reason I have been reluctant to start a blog, but after realising that I am more than likely going to be marked down for not conforming, I have admitted defeat, and here it is...