MA Week 80 – writing up and wrapping up; an end and a beginning

 

Reflection on the past 10 days, 10^th August 2017

 

A final etch

Most of my “spare” time since last week’s post has been taken up with preparing for hand-in, but I did get time to have one last day in the print room. I decided that I would like a souvenir of the “Movement” show at Left Bank Leeds, so I did a small plate etching of the venue. Etching and aquatint are teaching me a lot about composition and tonal values.  However, the foreground was still a bit light after the plate had bitten. I only had time to do that one ground on this plate, so I had to drypoint into it. This worked OK in the hatching of the shaded areas. The end result was pretty good for a piece that took just a couple of evenings to prepare then a leisurely day to etch and print. It was great to work without the pressure of trying to get something done for hand in – if it didn’t work, it didn’t matter. It printed up really quite nicely on the Somerset paper (soak well, blot well!).
 

Souvenir: of the exhibition at Left Bank and of happy days in the Print Room at College

 

Preparing for submission

Getting ready for the final submission has been a long process. It was quite exciting to see all my work together ready for mounting, but less exciting when I got spray mount onto the face of one of the aquatint prints and had a paddy of Biblical proportions (both situations were dealt with swiftly and smoothly by my in-house team).

 

Writing up the entire module’s practice holistically (rather than chronologically)  has, inevitably, yielded fresh insights. One of the more interesting ones is the creative tension between controlling a process and letting the process take its own course. Whilst experimenting with different types of paper for etching (see this week 79 blogpost), I’ve been making notes on soaking times and amount of blotting needed, plus ideas about how to ink and wipe the plates. I also made a test aquatint strip to try to have some control over how long to bite the plate for. This methodical, controlled approach is quite in contrast to the much looser process of monoprinting, where the colours and shapes drive the process. The inking of the “Gentrification” drypoint is somewhere between the two; part controlled inking and wiping, part monoprint. This then starts to give rise to thoughts of how these different approaches could cross over into one another.

It’s incredible to think that the MA is now at an end, but really it feels like a stepping stone to whatever comes next, rather than an “end” per se. That said, I was really sad when I left the Print Room today after saying goodbye to the staff. I’ve learnt a great deal over the two years, and in particular I’m amazed at the amount I’ve achieved in the past few weeks, especially as I work part-time too. It seems that since the start of June, all the hard work has started to pay off. I believe I now have a consistent practice, anchored in theories of place, psychogeography, identity and heritage,  that I can articulate visually and verbally, and which is of interest to others.

 
Next Steps

The first thing after hand in will be to have a rest, some time off from art practice completely, then come back to it afresh from September. I will obviously have to move my printing practice from College (no more big Rochat press! Aagh!). Hopefully I will move to Leeds Print Workshop, where there will be some familiar faces as some of the College staff and former students are members of the co-operative there. I’ve got a future reading list lined up, both theory and practical. I also want to do a lot of mark making to loosen up my style a little. Alongside this I will be keeping in touch with fellow MA-ers who have become my Community of Practice, and looking for opportunities to exhibit together.

 

Thank you very much

I would like to thank everyone who’s helped me along the way; my classmates – especially Sue, Carol, Mel, Paula and Larissa; Sharon; all the Print Room staff; Michelle; and of course, Nick, without whose support I wouldn’t be doing this. Thanks also to everyone who’s read the blogposts and found them interesting. The encouragement is much appreciated.  

Pressing publish on this post will be the last action of the MA bar the hand-in (and probably a few beverages thereafter). However, the blog has helped my reflective practice so I am intending to continue to blog but not as frequently, perhaps one or two posts per month.  

Signing off for now. Got something in my eye. Honestly.

 

 

MA Week 79 – The End is Nigh

 

Reflection on the past week, 31st July 2017

Printmaking

I spent Thursday in the print room – sad to think it will be one of my final sessions in there. I printed the final stage of the Royal Park aquatint. It needed a little bit more definition in the foreground, just to pull the foreground forward a bit more, so I drypointed some more vegetation into it, on the basis that both the plate and my patience were wearing thin after the repeated etchings. I also brasso’ed the sky and it printed quite nicely. The drypoint gave a much lighter, fuzzier mark than the etching and this has set me off with the idea of a drypoint into metal, but that will be post-MA.

 

Aquatint plate - final state

I don’t think I mentioned that I had been trying out different papers – I tried Fabriano Unica white, Canaletto, which is a creamy colour and Somerset velvet white. I think I got the best prints on the Somerset paper, but all the papers worked well, and I would use them all again. In particular, the Canaletto is fine for everyday work. Having made detailed notes on soaking times etc, the trick with the Somerset seems to be to give it a really good blotting. There is much more at play here, such as press pressure and the type of blankets, on the press, but there’s little point in further experimentation as I’ll be leaving this print facility soon. I am hoping to move my printing practice to Leeds Print Workshop from September. At this point I will experiment to try to get a stable process as hopefully I will be there for a while.

I produced three prints of the plate at each stage and on each paper, and currently I am flattening them in batches under boards at home – I need my floor space back

As I mentioned last week, I will submit these prints a series, a metaphor for the MA journey. However, the journey doesn’t end there, so at some point I will need to do something that demonstrates this. I would like to somehow creatively destroy the plate but I don’t think I will get time to do it this side of the MA deadline.

 

Scarborough!

On Thursday I also tried brasso on the little Scarborough plate and printed that, too – the polishing seemed to help. I’ve also heard that my prints of this were accepted at Woodend Gallery in Scarborough for their Summer postcard show. So a trip to Scarborough is on the cards post MA, as if an excuse were needed!

 

Writing up

Most of the time since my last blogpost has been spent writing up. I’ve finally finished the deep reflection on the “Troubling Time” conference and I comb-bound it today. This should form a great resource for ideas and new research possibilities post-MA.

A different kind of map; how my practice has worked out this year

 

For my creative journal, I identified 10 themes, all interrelated, with a view to writing a holistic reflection on each theme. I’m finding it really interesting to look back over the whole module. I’m identifying lots of new possibilities and am generating lists of future ideas. Some of these were already in my mind; others have appeared as I’ve been writing. Again, this should form a resource for to kick-start what comes post-MA, whatever that may be. It’s also raising the question of how I will write things up once course is over. I think it will probably be in a workshop notebook plus annotated examples of print experiments taped into sketchbooks. It seems important to keep notes of processes to act as a reference.

I have to say that the writing up seems endless. I’ve written up 6 themes, with extensive reflection, but Etching is the next theme – wish me luck! As so often, I am reminded of my panel at Troubling Time. Bob discussed the idea of artists in their bunkers, and Jo discussed the idea of slow periods followed by periods of frantic activity. The current phase is definitely in the latter category.

 

 

MA Week 78 – Curation as Disruption, the pains of aquatint and endless writing up

Reflection on the past week, 24^th July 2017

 Curation as Disruption

The early part of the week was taken up with the “Curation as Disruption” exhibition. My pieces were hung on Monday morning, so on Monday lunchtime I went over to college to stick some of the small acetate squares on the wall, as Sharon had agreed the previous week.

I then ended up cutting more squares in the evening as I’d more or less run out, and I nipped back into college on Tuesday dinnertime to sprinkle these on the floor. The show opened that evening.

Almost 20 artists had responded to Sharon’s call out for work, resulting in a real mix of pieces on display. Textile pieces, a massive oil painting, a single photograph, a sound installation – all of these were there. Some artists had sent existing pieces, and others had responded directly to Sharon’s call out. The curation was also a mix. Some pieces had been hung in the classic way – in rows at eye level – and others were displayed in more disruptive ways, such as a photograph stuck on the floor, some ceramic pieces on a windowsill, and of course my own acetate fragments down the wall and onto the floor. The pieces were united by the relatively small group that had received the call out and their desire to support Sharon’s venture. There was a lot of visual interest due to the disparate nature of the work – areas of visual rhythm punctuated by areas of visual discord.

With my pieces - the top two and the bottom one

I had agreed with Sharon how my pieces would be hung. By chance I’d put the square and rectangular framed pieces next to each other on the kitchen table when I’d just framed them, and they seemed to work well immediately next to each other. My idea had been for the poem to hang underneath them. I’d envisaged them to be on a section of wall on their own, but Sharon suggested incorporating them with the other artists’ pieces. This then started a narrative with the neighbouring pieces, which contained a lot of greens, yellows and browns. I’d therefore tried to stick acetate squares of these colours nearby, to form a link with the other artists’ work. The hanging of the poem piece very low meant people had to stoop to see it, which was subversive, but perhaps not inclusive for less mobile people, which I hadn’t thought of.

View down into the exhibition space, showing my three pieces in a narrative with other artists' work

As a thank you, everyone received a badge – curator, disruptor, warrior, professor, artist. I took “disruptor” because I felt this was the most disruptive I’d ever dared to be with my art. I thought my pieces worked well, linked as they were by the acetate fragments. Each piece was strengthened by the presence of the others, and by the fragments. It was a departure for me and something that gives me food for thought. By sticking the fragments to the wall and scattering them on the floor, three fairly unremarkable pieces became an installation, something more to look at, something that stood out. . Food for thought. What else could become an installation? What wouldn't this technique work with?

Fragments of my practice

It was a lovely evening. I knew many of the people there and it was great to have a catch up and a drink. It was a celebration for Sharon, too, her last exhibition before she leaves. I am so pleased I made the effort to contribute.

 

Printing: aquatint

I’ve pressed on with the new version of the Royal Park plate and it is now more or less at its final state. The aquatint was frustrating. Having done the test strip, I had decided to do a second aquatint bite for 7 minutes. However, the result wasn’t nearly as dark as I expected. I’d had real trouble spraying the aquatint solution onto the plate and it seems I might have sprayed too much, effectively blocking the plate from biting. I’d found it really difficult to get an even spray, although the test sprays onto paper seemed fine. I took several prints from the plate not withstanding this, then stopped it out again. I had intended to do a final bite for another 10 minutes, but I decided to go for 7 again. I re-bit some of the areas that should have gone darker at the previous stage, plus some new areas. Again, I had difficulty spraying – I got half way down the plate and the airbrush suddenly stopped working. I think the nozzle had become blocked with the solution. I switched to another airbrush and managed to get a full layer on, though it took me quite a while to convince myself that there was a layer on. When I bit it this time, it went much darker than the previous time, and much darker than I expected (or desired, really).

 

First print from the plate after the second 7-minute bite

The final stage was to apply another liquid ground and etch some detail into the foreground. This didn’t work quite as well as I’d hoped and really the foreground needs more detail still. I also got quite a bit of foul bite in the sky, despite cleaning the plate well beforehand. I now suspect that the plate needs to be cleaned with Cif or similar before applying another ground if it has already been printed many times. I am toying with the idea of drypointing some more detail as I don’t think the plate will take much more biting.

This piece will form the last part of my final submission. It shows a journey from a relatively simple line etching to a more visually complex version. In some ways it is a metaphor for the MA journey, as I have grown in confidence in the techniques I’m using.

Writing Up

Less than three weeks now until hand-in, so the weekend was spent blogging and writing up. The writing up still seems endless even though I am approaching it differently! I’ve also now caught up four further blogposts:

Week 72 – Selling at the Art Market and looking ahead to hand in

Week 73 – Monoprinting with Movement!

Week 74 – Submissions, Submissions

Weeks 76 & 77 – Preparing Submissions, and time management to the fore

 

 

 

MA Weeks 76 & 77 – Preparing submissions, and time management to the fore

 

More reflections on the past two weeks - Monday 17th July 2017

The movement exhibition wasn’t the only activity this week – it’s been a really busy week, and there was also a lot going on the previous week, which I’ll catch up here.

 

Curation as Disruption

As I mentioned in this week 74 blogpost , my tutor, Sharon, is putting on an exhibition at college called “Curation as Disruption”. I’ve been making some pieces for that. I’ve gone back to the idea that I mentioned, namely that of cutting up acetate photocopies of the Manchester Metropolitan University paintings into squares, supplemented by squares from the photograph of the City of Mabgate inn from the walk last November . These pieces had been well-received on social media, so I thought there must be some mileage in them!

 

I’d intuitively thought that these pieces would work well on a yellow background and a couple of weeks back I tested them on a pale yellow monoprint from the “Movement” series. They looked quite good, so I did a few more yellow and have spent lots of time since then cutting up small acetate squares. I’d envisaged a “path” and a “square” , as per my ideas in April, but as the exhibition’s title is about “disruption”, I decided to disrupt the path and fragment it as it moved across the work. This then seemed to give rise to the idea of sticking squares onto the mount, and onto the frame itself. These times when the work directs itself are the best – the creativity takes over. The cutting and placing developed organically as did the squares spreading out to the mount and frame.

Experimenting with the acetate squares spreading out from the collage itself

I’d also had a poem brewing in my mind from the outset regarding the effect this invitation had had on me. When I’d seen it, I’d just thought that I didn’t have anything to put into it, but the invitation wouldn’t go away. It seemed an opportunity too good to miss. I called my poem “The Bunker Breached”, a reference to Bob Dickinson’s talk at the Troubling Time conference on 1st June  which continues to resonate. My own print room bunker seemed very much breached by this invitation.

 

I delivered them to Sharon during my tutorial on Tuesday 11th July, and we agreed where they would be positioned within the exhibition. Sharon also agreed with another idea, that of sticking some of the small acetate squares on the wall. The pieces are now called Vacuus – Via – Vox. Vacuus, the square framed piece, because the centre square is the building numberplate of the City of Mabgate pub, which is standing empty. Via, because the rectangular framed piece started out as a path. Vox, because the poem gives an almost literal voice to the work.

 

Postcards from Woodend

Also at the start of the week, I cut the prints of the small etchings to postcard size and sent these off to the Woodend Gallery in Scarborough for their annual “Postcards from Woodend” Exhibition. I’m still awaiting hearing from them.

 

Other work

My tutorial confirmed what I’ll submit for this module. I also discussed with Sharon a different way of writing up my creative journal. Previous ones have tended to re-write some of these blogposts, but in more detail, and I’ve wondered why I’m doing it that way.I’m going to write holistic reflections on each topic (e.g. drypoint etching), which will go into more detail than the blogposts and serve as reference material post-MA. Hopefully writing up by topic will be more useful and less onerous than writing week-by-week information.

I’m having to put quite a bit of effort into sequencing, planning and prioritising my work at the moment. My overall plan has rather been abandoned in favour of detailed to-do lists! There just seem to have been so many opportunities come at once. It’s a good job I have decent time management skills! For example, alongside preparing the above two submissions, I also cut up some of the rejected prints from the “Royal/Library” series to make business cards ready for the Movement opening on the Wednesday. In the end I hardly used these as I didn’t have as much interaction as I’d expected with other attendees.

I’ve also made a lot of headway with the deep reflection on the Troubling Time conference, and I’ve published a blogpost about that event here.

 Finally, on Sunday I also picked up my prints from Left Bank, then I went on to the Kirkstall Art Trail where both Mel and Michelle were exhibiting – a busy week indeed.

 

 

 

 

MA Week 77 – “Movement” Group Summer show at Left Bank Leeds

 “Movement” Group Summer show at Left Bank Leeds, 12th - 15th July 2017

The highlight of this week was the "Movement" group Summer show at Left Bank Leeds. The opening night, on Wednesday 12th July, was buzzing and it was really lovely to be supported by a number of classmates and other friends who attended during the evening. The show was also open Thursday - Saturday inclusive, 10 am - 4pm, and in total there were over 300 attendees. This is the only annual group show at Left Bank, and it is a prestigious one within the Leeds art scene. Although the gallery space is fairly local to me, the show itself was national and included established artists such as Ian Kirkpatrick (now Leeds-based, work in many national collections), Michelle Harrison (Manchester-based painter, illustrator, has exhibited internationally, artwork on the flyer) and Jelena Lunge (York-based illustrator, has exhibited internationally, work exhibited next to mine). For me, this was my first major step in establishing myself in the Leeds art scene.

 

"Royal/Library" series of prints exhibited at Left Bank Leeds, 12.07.2017

The venue is a former church which is used as a multi-disciplinary arts venue, and this interesting space lent itself well to this kind of show. My prints, "Royal/Library" - series of 4,  were displayed in an alcove, which gave the work its own space and allowed it to “breathe”. This led to an interesting interplay with work in the neighbouring alcoves. There were 4 alcoves on "my" side, which alternated works in colour with works in black and white, and this gave a nice rhythm to the exhibited works. There was also a rhythm to the frame colours - my frames were white, whereas others had gone for black or a mixture. My prints were hung in a series of 4, rather than a quadrant - all the series were hung this way - and they were hung from a batten with string. This hanging technique was used in all the alcoves and gave a consistency and narrative to the works. The rhythm was also reflected across the building, to the works on the opposite wall, which were hung similarly. My own prints, mainly orange and red, were contrasted in the opposite alcove by some lovely illustrations based on the sea, mainly in blue, black and white. As well as the alcove space, the main body of the former church had been divided up using display cabinets. These formed a kind of "zones" within the space and also led to a natural circulation of people.

 

Opening night - visitors viewing my prints (alcove behind settee)

The exhibition was curated by Courtney Spencer, a director at Left Bank, and it was interesting to see how Courtney had ordered my prints. I would have done it slightly differently, and this is one of the joys of having someone else display your work - the other person sees something else in it. The exhibited works covered various genres: paintings, mixed media, sculptures, videos, textiles and even performance pieces - I think mine were the only prints which is gratifying. There was a great deal to take in given the variety of the work, and I am still processing a lot of it in my head. Rather than try to document it all here, I think some of the influences will intuitively work through into my future practice. However, I will mention a couple of particular favourites: “Bookworm”, a tubular sculpture made from books by Sarah Binless, whom I met , and those sea illustrations by Sarah Louise Hawkins.  The curation was excellent and it was great to make contact with Courtney.

Left Bank Leeds, exterior view

Left Bank is a wonderful space and I went back on the Saturday with Michelle, who originally suggested I apply for the show. It was good to see the show when it was a little quieter and there was more space and time to take it in. I can feel the space luring me back and I would like to volunteer there, perhaps to do some invigilation, when the MA is over.

Having work in the show felt unbelievable, a real achievement, and it takes my work to the next level. It was exciting for me to see it to see it displayed alongside other artists' work, forming a dialogue, and this led to an emerging sense of myself forming a dialogue with other artists. The show was over all too quickly but I will definitely apply next year.

 

 

 

MA Week 76 – two exhibition openings

 

A quick update! - 10th July 2017

 I realise I've not blogged for 5 or 6 weeks now but this is because I've been spending so much time making. I've got lots of half written blog posts so I will go back and fill in the gaps. But it's high time I raised my head above the parapet again as I have some exciting news: I have two exhibitions coming up. 

Hard at work in the Print Room!

The first one opens on Wednesday evening. I'm delighted to say that four of my most recent prints have been accepted for the group Summer show, 'Movement', at Left Bank Leeds. This is the first time my prints have been accepted and it's fantastic that such a well known Leeds venue will be showing them. I dropped them off yesterday and met the curators, Courtney and Si. I'm already really excited about it! The prints are a response to the mini-derive in April (see this week65 blogpost) and use a similar technique to the ones I produced for the Manchester Metropolitan University postgraduate conference back in February (see this week 55 blogpost ).

 

Tickets for the opening night are available here: http://www.bit.ly/movement17.

The second one is a pop-up show at college, 'Curation as Disruption', which my lovely tutor Sharon is installing as one of her last pieces of work before she sadly leaves the college. I've gone back to the squares I did in early April (see this week63 blogpost)and worked them up a little bit more, along with a text based piece. They are quite small pieces, and it would have been nice to go much bigger, but time simply doesn't permit: I'm still working on these as I type! The opening evening for this is Tuesday 18th July, so I need to get them completed tonight if possible.

 

In and amongst all this, I've also been preparing some postcard-sized prints for an anonymous postcard sale at Woodend Galley in Scarborough (hope I haven't let the cat too far out of the bag there!). This has involved me producing a tiny etching plate of South Bay. This in turn has made me itch to get back to Scarborough asap! The prints have turned out quite well although there is still a bit too much plate tone in the sky for my liking, so I need to work further on them in due course. So there may well be a third exhibition coming up too.

 

Right, back to it!

 

MA Week 75 – Submission Success!

Reflection on the past week, 3^rd July 2017

I spent a good deal of time on Monday and Tuesday evenings trying to get the best possible images of my prints for submission to the “Movement” group Summer show at Left Bank. In the end I decided to submit unframed images of the prints as I couldn’t get good enough quality images of the framed versions with the limited kit and knowledge I have. Notwithstanding this, I learnt a lot and will be putting this into effect for future submissions. I also polished up the descriptions of my work.

 

One of my accepted prints!

Friday wasn’t a good day as I was laid low with a stomach bug and spent the day in bed. My mood brightened considerably when I checked my Curator Space account and found that the prints had been accepted! I was delighted, particularly so as they were based on an urban wandering which terminated not far from the venue. This is the first time my prints have been accepted and I very much hope it will be the shape of things to come.

After some consideration, I’ve decided to have a second go at the Royal Park etching (see this week 72 blogpost for details of the first go!). This has had me running into college on a lunchtime to get plates cut and grounds on and drawing the design on the plate on Wednesday evening. I manged to get into the print room for a long afternoon on Thursday and the plate bit pretty well. I’d made an effort to try to etch just into the ground rather than scratch the plate, which seemed to have worked. I also took a deep breath and left the plate in the mordant for a shorter time than normal. These two actions resulted in a finer line than I’ve previously achieved, which I rather like. I’ve also started an aquatint test plate as I’m intending to aquatint this new plate next week.

 

Royal Park v2

 

 

MA Week 74 – Submissions, submissions

Reflection on the past week, 26^th June 2017

 Last week started on a social note as I met Mel on Monday at Left Bank Leeds. She had some of her analogue photos of Leeds in the showreel for the “Humans of Leeds” exhibition which opened that evening. It was great to see her work and also to have a look at Left Bank with thoughts of exhibiting there. Working on exhibitions took up a large part of the week. College was closed so I couldn’t get into the print room, more’s the pity.

Submission for “Movement” Summer Group Show

I spent quite a lot of time choosing the prints to submit. I’d decided to submit four, mainly quite arbitrarily as I’d had four prints in the MMU conference. I tried to choose some that related to each other but didn’t effectively repeat each other, which ruled quite a lot of them out. There was a deep red one which my partner, Nick, really liked but I hated. That kept going in and out of the selection but in the end Nick argued it in. 

The prints are A4 and I bought some 40x30 cm white Ikea frames to house them. I had thought of spraying them, two yellow and two red, but having looked at spray paint I quickly came to the conclusion that it would be a tortuous undertaking and would probably detract from, rather than add to, the prints.

 

A rubbish image of the controversial deep red print!

I spent a lot of time trying to get decent images of the prints in the frames. Mel had given me some advice (two light sources at opposite sides) but I only have one small desk lamp and my little compact camera, and it’s not enough to negate my reflection in the glass of the frame. This effort is ongoing and I am becoming very aware that I don’t have the kit or the expertise for this. I’ve got decent images of the prints unframed, so I may well have to run with these. Most of the rest of the submission is drafted so just the images need sorting out tonight. The submission needs to be in on Wednesday.

 

“Curation as Disruption” call out

About ten days ago I received an email from Sharon inviting submissions for the last show she’ll put on at College, called “Curation as Disruption”. I’d read it and rather dismissed it in the drive to get everything else done, but it’s kept coming back to me. It seems stupid to turn down an opportunity to exhibit, and more to the point, it is very important to me that I support Sharon after all the help she has given me. A poem has started to form in my mind, about Sharon’s invitation disrupting my concentration, so this could form (part of) the submission. I will allow the call out to disrupt my plans, and I am thinking of going back to develop further the “squares” or “tiles” idea from April, which seemed to generate some interest but which I never took further as I wanted to concentrate on printing. The pieces will need to be small in order for me to be able to manage the work, so I bought a couple more frames when I was in Ikea with a view to doing this.  

I am continuing on with the deep reflection on the Troubling Time conference, too. Reflection on practice and pestilent reflection on the glass of picture frames.

 

 

MA Week 73 – Monoprinting with Movement!

Reflection on the past week, 19^th June 2017

I spent the earlier part of the week continuing to consider what I could submit for the “Movement” Summer Group Show at Left Bank Leeds, following my conversation with Michelle last week. I felt that the Burley drypoint wasn’t yet developed enough. However, the circles-and-squares soft ground etching from a couple of weeks back  was of interest as there seemed to be a lot of movement just from those few shapes.

Other ideas included doing another etching of Royal Park and printing it at each stage of the aquatint, or doing a long drypoint of the MA journey. However, both of those will take too long at this stage and they are not particularly to do with movement, although both are ideas that I may take forward before the end of the MA. Eventually I decided that I would do something specifically to submit to the Show and that I would use the tried and tested method of monoprint with resists of letters and stylised map which I developed from the dérive withMichelle. To these I added some of the shapes I saw. This approach made sense as the dérive was a physical movement, and coincidentally it terminated very near to Left Bank.

Chute-ing star

Ahead of this, I had a sunny lunchtime walk on Wednesday to the Royal Park pub area again (I am becoming obsessed with this area) and also took some more pictures of another coal chute I came across. As the print room was closed on the Friday, I only had Thursday to do the prints, so rather than try to laser cut the street and other shapes, I hand cut them from thin card on Wednesday evening. I managed to get the letters laser cut on Thursday morning. I chose the letters from “LIBRARY” as the now-defunct Burley Library was one of the most interesting parts of the walk. I then realised that a lot of these letters are duplicated in “Royal”, as in Royal Park, so that confirmed my decision.

 Thursday was a frenzy of monoprinting. I would have liked to have used a blue and a red ink as my two colour choices, but I was unsure whether they’d combine to a vibrant purple or a grotty brown, and I didn’t have time to test this. I chose cadmium deep red and cadmium yellow based on the red and yellow tulips we’d seen at the start of the walk, on the basis they’d mix to a nice orange. In the event they mixed to more of a brown, but this didn’t matter too much as it could indicate the colour of the bricks of the houses around there. The red got a bit too dominant, and I tried thinning it with the transparent ink, but this just made it sticky. I was a little bolder than when I did the previous monoprints and in some I left quite a lot of white areas. I also tried to print the inked shapes onto the prints with some success, but this needs more experimentation.

 

Monoprints with Movement

I got a good number of prints, and hopefully some will be suitable for submission to the Show. I need to review them and pick out the best ones.

Other than that, I’ve started a detailed reflection on the Troubling Time conference, which will hopefully work up into a source document for academic and visual research post-MA.

MA Week 72 – selling work at the Art Market and looking ahead to hand in

Reflection on the past week, 12^th June 2017

 The Art Market

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago (see this week 70 blogpost) ), the College holds an Art Market as part of the end of year show and I had decided to submit some work. It was quite exciting preparing for this. I took the best 5 prints of the gentrified office building (now titled 'Gentrification'), plus I decided to take the prints I did for the Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) PGR conference back in February (see this week 58 blogpost) . I wrapped them in cellophane and they looked pretty professional. I decided to price the work for that particular market, especially as the College were not taking a percentage.

 

Prints packed and ready to go to the Art Market

 

Friday was the opening night of the show and of the Art Market. As mention below, I met Michelle beforehand and the Art Market was in full swing by the time we got there and met some of my fellow students. I was thrilled when the sister of one of my classmates bought a 'Gentrification' print plus one of the MMU prints. It made all that time in the print room seem worthwhile. 

On Saturday morning it was my turn to do a stint on the till at the Art Market and I was joined in this task by a student I didn't know but who was very pleasant and easy to work with. I'd not been there long when my lovely tutor, Sharon, appeared. She also bought a print of 'Gentrification' and I was secretly very pleased although I pretended to be tut at her! It was really interesting to see what people were buying - a real mix of stuff, it wasn't the case that one particular genre or medium was flying off the shelves. 

 

View of the Art Market - my prints are the green ones above where the girl is standing

 

I had a quick look when I went in for my tutorial today (more on this below) and could only find one 'Gentrification' and two of the MMU prints left – looking quite exciting!

Printing

After dropping off the prints at the Art Market on Thursday, I went back into the Print Room, and I was in there on Friday too. I’ve been doing some further work on the Burley drypoint (see this week 69 blogpost ). I worked further into the plate, to try to get some lighter and darker marks. Then I tried it drypoint with a painted monoprint on top. I experimented with mixing the coloured ink (cobalt blue) with a transparent ink extender to give a lighter background. This worked OK, as did variable inking of the background. However, most of my efforts at the painted monoprint were rather too indefinite, and the drypoint seemed to come too far to the foreground in the print.  On Friday I tried the transparent ink again, this time with a very high proportion of it, but it got quite sticky and difficult to work with. It did give slightly better results than the previous day, but I’m not sure if these are really two separate prints that I'm trying to put together. I don’t know where, if anywhere, this is going to go next. A possibility might be another drypoint plate as the foreground, or perhaps trying a different colour foreground or mixing some transparent ink into the black so the two layers might “equalise”.

Experimenting with inking the Burley drypoint

I also took the first prints of the aquatint of Royal Park that I was working on a couple of weeks ago (see this week 70 blogpost). There were supposed to be three tones within the print – it had been bitten three times after applying the aquatint solution - but it seems that all the tones had rather collapsed into one. After discussing with Mike, I put another liquid ground onto the plate and worked back into it to try to get some darker contrast into it. However, the result now looks rather too dark – I haven’t been able to get a satisfactory print and basically the plate looks over-worked. I was disappointed with myself but I can learn from this. Really I need to do a test strip beforehand for the aquatint and possibly print it at each stage, although the thought of all that stopping out fills me with dread.

 

The aquatint before I worked into it again - should've left it there!

Catching up 

As I mentioned above, I met Michelle beforehand to catch up with what's happening in her practice. As always it was a good conversation and we discussed opportunities. She had previously encouraged me to submit some of the work based on our dérive for the group show at Left Bank on the theme of 'Movement'. I showed her some of the work I’ve mentioned above and we talked about whether these would be suitable and how I could develop them.

Another catch up was with my tutor, Sharon, at my tutorial on 12th June. As ever, there was lots of food for thought. A large part of the discussion was around what I will submit, as the deadline is now only two months away. There was also a lot of discussion around the idea of the Royal Park aquatint as a journey. Further ideas were around embossing the paper on the Burley monoprint instead of having two layers of print. Much to do!

MA Week 71 - Troubling Time

Reflection on the past week, 5^th June 2017

 

Preparation

Wednesday was spent finalising the paper for the "Troubling Time" conference on Thursday, 1^st June. I reused some of the slides from the "Grim up North" paper last September, and took my dissertation as my academic source material. The ideas was to do a talk of about 5 minutes then ask the participants to produce a visual work, based on the organisers' encouragement of contributions which “engage practically with their duration, with the aim of fostering methodological diversity”. In the end the talk lasted 7 minutes, and I felt that 10 minutes would be a reasonable amount of time to be able to produce the artwork and that this would work within my 20-minute slot.

 

The day itself

The conference itself was a fantastic day and I am writing a very deep reflection on it to hand in as part of my final submission. The speakers included PGR students and lecturers, many of whom are practising artists. They introduced me to concepts of temporality that I hadn't realised existed. In particular, there was discussion of capitalist notions of time; the regimented working day, driven by society. Contrasted with this were notions of doing less to achieve more, awareness of differing temporal rhythms, and the joy of the dérive. The reflection I’m producing will form a rich source of research material for me to develop once the MA is finished.

 

My Panel

My own panel, “Walking and Space”, was shared with two particularly excellent speakers, Bob Dickinson and Jo Lee. Bob is a PGR at Manchester Metropolitan University as well as being an established art writer and former BBC radio journalist. Jo is a Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design at Sheffield Hallam University. Bob's talk, “ART BUNKERS”, started by describing artworks being displayed in an underground bunker in Konjic (in Bosnia-Herzegovina) and ranged through many concepts of “bunkers”, including the way that artists bunker themselves in studios in old mills and the like in the more run-down parts of town. These then become gentrified and the artists have to move out. This made me think, somehow, of me bunkering myself away in the print room, forgetting to drink water or eat my lunch, completely focused on the artistic task in hand.

 Jo's talk, “Essaying time: photography, artistic knowledge and meaning in movement”, covered concepts of how artists work - very slow periods followed by bursts of intense activity - plus the idea of going backwards to move forwards, constantly repurposing and seeing anew. She showed a mesmerising slide show of triptychs of her photographs of the now-defunct Spode porcelain works. So many surfaces, marks that were just crying out to be made, a palimpsest of life. Interesting concepts around surfaces, what’s underneath, does it need to be revealed.

Jo had helped calm my pre-talk nerves and in the end things went well. After explaining my practice and my methods of layering and the way I use colours, I invited the participants to produce a piece of visual work that said something about that day. I'd taken along a selection of pens and pencils, some blank paper, an old road atlas - a nod to psychogeography - and pairs of scissors. I'd done a couple of quick sketches in the train in the way over and used this as an example - but none were needed. I'd been prepared for people to ask for further clarification, to do nothing, or even to argue - but none of this happened. Everyone got on with the task in calm, studious silence.

The responses were incredibly varied and complex and in all honesty I am still processing this in my little brain. The responses included a participant from Argentina who used portions of the sea from the road map to depict her first crossing of the Atlantic; a stitching together of various pieces of the road atlas index with a challenge to estimate how long it would take to travel from each place to the next; a clock with no hands; a compartmentalised version of the journey that I'd undertaken that morning, from Leeds to Manchester. I stuck them all in a sheet of A1 paper I'd brought along, rather hurriedly, so aesthetically it wasn't overly pleasing, but time was pressing on.

 

The artwork on display at the conference

The session overran wildly (well, about 5 minutes) but nobody seemed too worried about this. As I mentioned in my week 70 blogpost, I'd made some postcard sized business cards which I offered to participants by way of thank you. These went down really well and were very much taken in the spirit in which they were offered. 

 After the session quite a few participants came up to chat to me. Some were studying, or had studied at Leeds and had enjoyed the images of the city that I'd used. My Argentinian friend commented that she'd never seen this done in a conference before and was really pleased to be able to contribute to the collaboration.

 My initial reaction was to take the collaborative artwork and submit it as part of my MA submission, but I quickly realised I couldn't do this, as it didn't belong to me. It belonged to everyone who had contributed and to that point in space and in time. So with the help of a couple of the others I pinned it up on the wall.

 

Networking

One of the really enjoyable things about the day was the number of international participants. Over lunch I chatted with an Albanian and two German participants, one of whom is a professor in Tokyo.  There were also participants from Universities in Greece, Canada, Hungary and Poland. This international flavour made for very broad view and was quite a contrast with the "Grim up North" paper, which was more localised by the nature of its subject matter. This in turn made me realise how flexible and malleable my practice is, and how the visual arts cover such a wide range of source materials in every piece they produce. This breadth of practice is such a key strength of the visual arts.

 

With Bob at the drinks reception

The day ended with a drinks reception. It was a lovely Summer afternoon and we drank prosecco in a nearby bar. I chatted at some length with Bob, who was a very interesting and equally knowledgeable conversationalist. It rounded off one of the most interesting days I've had during the MA.

 

The next day

The conference itself was actually two days, but I'd only booked for one. I wished I'd booked both. However, it would have been too much of a rush to get back to Manchester for 9am the next morning, plus I needed to get back into the print room to prepare for the art market as I mentioned in last week’s blogpost. I'd connected with a few of my fellow participants on Twitter and one of the first tweets of the day was an image of our collaborative work welcoming the participants to day 2. The excellent conference organisers, Mao Hui Deng and Sophie Stringfellow, also tweeted a picture of themselves in front of the work as a wrap-up to the conference at its close that evening. It seemed the work had become a kind of talisman for the conference, some kind of visual representation of the narrative of the two days. I felt humbled and gratified.

I was very tired that next day but I was aware that the previous day's discussions had left me with a different view of time. So rather than rushing, I decided to relax and enjoy the printing. This was one of those serendipitous moments when theory and practice combine in increased creativity. I'd inked this plate umpteen times before, but the inking suddenly went quite futurist and dynamic, with no input from me at all. I'm not sure how this happened but it was intuitively connected with the previous day's activity.

 

The conference will stay with me for a long time. A real highpoint of the MA.