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.