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.