ARCHIVE
CLASS OF 2024 CATALOGUE
‘Just stop thinking, worrying, looking over your shoulder wondering, doubting, fearing, hurting, hoping for some easy way out, struggling, grasping,..... Stop it and just DO!.... (LeWitt, S. 1965)
Doing is the key word here. The act of creating, of showing up for your practice each day is critical and essential. Great art can only come from a deep focused attention - attention combined with the discipline of doing.
Our Fine Art Studios at the Arts University Plymouth are situated just across the road, a short walk away from the main building. It is a rare, intimate refuge, a space that offers potential for those brave enough to face the challenges of the unknown. In this symbiotic space the graduating artists have shared their ideas, anxieties, love and lunch, for several years, marking a crucial shift in their individual practices and inspiring each other’s. These artists have continued to do, to brave the unknown, to play, test, and fail, and this has pushed the work and themselves forward. The creative process itself has been the primary method of enquiry; translating thought and material into rich exploration, new territories have demanded creative labour, personal determination, renewed ingenuity, and expansive thinking and doing.
Join us in celebrating the achievements of our graduating students in their show Threads of Entanglement, a tremendous result from a dynamic culmination of practical knowledge, skills and critical engagement. They have worked hard to get here, we are very proud of their achievements, and wish them every success in their creative lives and futures.
Sarah King
Senior Lecturer & Course Leader BA (Hons) Fine Art
with Fine Art team: Helen Billinghurst, Louise Fago-Ruskin, Jo Dorothea-Smith, Paul Hillon
CLASS OF 2023 (click to see work)
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ABOUT THE FINE ART PROGRAMME
Our BA (Hons) Fine Art course promotes contemporary art practice in its broadest sense. We encourage an ambitious, self-directed and critically engaged approach to creative practice.
Our Fine Art students are ones who relish questioning and are comfortable with not always knowing the answers, they have a hunger to learn, and an ambition in their independent practices. This dynamic course is at it’s core a rigorous, questioning, learning and collaborative experience, - communication is key and this happens throughout the programme, from day one, in visual, verbal, physical, immaterial and material forms.
The course accelerates creative ideas, working in a multidisciplinary environment with access to a range of processes and hybrid practices. Students develop their individual practice within the supportive environment of an independent specialist Art University, with a focus on the intersection of creativity and social justice; exploring interdisciplinary modes of practice and gaining valuable experience of the creative sector creating lasting professional networks for the future.
We currently work with the Tate Exchange programme, with KARST gallery in Plymouth, and with a number of international collaborators such as OTIS College of Art and Design, LA and Alfred University, New York.
The course has an extensive input from visiting lecturers to guarantee a wide range of voices alongside a strong team. In addition to inviting individuals to enrich specific topics such as professional engagement for contemporary fine artists, the visiting lecturers also provide one-to-one tutorials and critiques.
The Universitiy’s on-site public exhibition space, Mirror, also draws a range of national and international artists and exhibitions, allowing students the opportunity to engage with artists through related workshops, talks and screenings.
Graduates from our Fine Art course regularly go on to secure residences and exhibition opportunities at some of the most exciting contemporary physical and digital art spaces – many continue to postgraduate study, take on roles as Art therapist, Curator, Lecturer, Director of arts organization, Community outreach, Archiver, Freelancer, and Producer.
The BA (Hons) Fine Art course teaches students to take risks, and not to be afraid of failing. This situates them in the world as active agents, and instils in them a sense of themselves as artists, thinkers and makers.
Sarah king
Senior Lecturer & Subject Leader BA (Hons) Fine Art
with the Fine Art team, Helen Billinghurst, Loiuse Fago-Ruskin, Joanne Dorethea Smith, Paul Hillon.
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Catelogue Designed by Chris White
Class of 2021
ABOUT THE FINE ART PROGRAMME
Our BA (Hons) Fine Art course promotes contemporary art practice in its broadest sense. We encourage an ambitious, self-directed and critically engaged approach to creative practice.
Our Fine Art students are ones who relish questioning and are comfortable with not always knowing the answers, they have a hunger to learn, and an ambition in their independent practices. This dynamic course is at it’s core a rigorous, questioning, learning and collaborative experience, - communication is key and this happens throughout the programme, from day one, in visual, verbal, physical, immaterial and material forms.
The course accelerates creative ideas, working in a multidisciplinary environment with access to a range of processes and hybrid practices. Students develop their individual practice within the supportive environment of an independent specialist Art University, with a focus on the intersection of creativity and social justice; exploring interdisciplinary modes of practice and gaining valuable experience of the creative sector creating lasting professional networks for the future.
We currently work with the Tate Exchange programme, with KARST gallery in Plymouth, and with a number of international collaborators such as OTIS College of Art and Design, LA and Alfred University, New York.
The course has an extensive input from visiting lecturers to guarantee a wide range of voices alongside a strong team. In addition to inviting individuals to enrich specific topics such as professional engagement for contemporary fine artists, the visiting lecturers also provide one-to-one tutorials and critiques.
The Universitiy’s on-site public exhibition space, Mirror, also draws a range of national and international artists and exhibitions, allowing students the opportunity to engage with artists through related workshops, talks and screenings.
Graduates from our Fine Art course regularly go on to secure residences and exhibition opportunities at some of the most exciting contemporary physical and digital art spaces – many continue to postgraduate study, take on roles as Art therapist, Curator, Lecturer, Director of arts organization, Community outreach, Archiver, Freelancer, and Producer.
The BA (Hons) Fine Art course teaches students to take risks, and not to be afraid of failing. This situates them in the world as active agents, and instils in them a sense of themselves as artists, thinkers and makers.
Sarah king
Senior Lecturer & Subject Leader BA (Hons) Fine Art
with the Fine Art team, Helen Billinghurst, Loiuse Fago-Ruskin, Joanne Dorethea Smith, Paul Hillon.
Class of 2022.
Click here to view their work
Click here to view their work
Catelogue Designed by Chris White
This exhibition celebrates the successes of the past three years, the drive, the passion, the tears, the laughter, and the individual struggles and achievements of the BA Fine Art class of 2022.
All of the projects in this exhibition are the outcome of an extended period of research, in which the creative process itself has been the primary method of enquiry; translating thought and material into rich creative exploration.
“In art, as in life, things can go wrong, things break, mistakes get made. That’s part of the adventure. I like the bumpy journey, the tricky mountain road rather than the fast motorway” (Barlow, P. 2013 )
Each artist's journey is significant, and in order to reach this point each of them has overcome major challenges. It is no easy thing to develop a focussed enquiry from the enormous possibilities that are presented by a blank page, an empty space, or the spark of an idea. For these artists continuous experimentation, failure and questioning has pushed the work and themselves forward, often into unknown territories.
The projects in this exhibition celebrate each artist's ambition for themselves and their futures, and is a dynamic culmination of practical knowledge, skills and critical engagement, situating them in the world as active agents of change, and instilling in them a sense and identity as thinkers and makers.
They have worked hard for this, we are very proud of their achievements, and wish them luck and good fortune for the future
Sarah King
Senior Lecturer & Subject Leader BA (Hons) Fine Art
with Fine Art team: Antigoni Pasidi, Tom Milnes, Louise Fago-Ruskin, Paul Hillon
A CONTEXTUAL ESSAY BY HUMA MULJI
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1
The Song of the Cicada
In the late seventeenth century, the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico, pioneered the idea that the Iliad and the Odyssey owe more to oral tradition than any single writer, claiming that there was no individual Homer, only a tradition of bards grouped together as ‘Homer’. He declared these texts as the creation of not one man, but the whole Greek people. (Fagles, 1996).
The Fine Art Studios at the Arts University Plymouth are situated just across the road, a short walk away from the main building. It is a rare, intimate refuge, a space that offers the potential for a similar encounter that forms a collective hum, not different from the orchestra of summer cicadas.
In this symbiotic space the graduating artists have shared their ideas, anxieties, love and lunch, for several years, marking a crucial shift in their individual practices and inspiring each other’s. Perhaps more unusually, they have seen each other through two extraordinary years of collective loss, but also immense hope. This is no small thing, and binds them and their work, perhaps more that we comprehend today. Their own odyssey, having chosen a path of most resistance in the current economic and social climate, to create things and ideas for which there is no validation or place in the world yet, is also to find home, again. They take this journey with a group of incidental peers; strangers at first, who become friends, critics, interlocutors, audience, and family.
My encounter with the artists’ and their work reveals a breadth of concerns and forms that move between the digital and analogue worlds, between the virtual and the material. The tapestries, films, sculpture, poetry, AI generated images, relational experiments through pesto-making, growing live plants such as moss and cress, conversations with strangers, ancestry work and sonic landscapes: mining worlds of close friends and far off universes. In conversation with each other, these works come together, in its vocabulary, as markers of a moment in time and in a place.
11
Friendship as Form
The ideas of any age are a repoussé performed on what is already there. Phyllida Barlow has expressed the debt we owe as artists, to others before us, “we stand on each other’s shoulders” she proclaimed in a conversation with the artist Daphne Wright (Arnolfini, 2016), but also to conversations we have with those around us in the present. However, relationality does not mean a world without conflict. Thinking “with” creates community but “thinking with care, stems from awareness of the efforts it takes to cultivate relatedness in diverseness, which means too, collective and accountable knowledge construction that does not negate dissent or the impurity of coalitions. It speaks for ways of taking care of the unavoidably thorny relations that foster rich, collective, interdependent, albeit not seamless, thinking-with” (Bellacasa, 2017). A digitized world accelerates and extends our networks beyond known geographies and demographics, heightening everyday conflict, such as we are experiencing in the sphere of social media.
To explore this idea further, into more than human worlds, Merlin Sheldrake, in his book Entangled Life, examines the possibility that a singular organism could contain two separate lineages, challenging the Darwinian theory that species developed by diverging from each other. His hypothesis suggests that Lichens were bodies composed of organisms with differing origins, they were essentially, converging. To stretch this knowledge far into the world of artists, “The idea that two different species could come together in the building of a new organism with its own separate identity” (Sheldrake, 2020), could then be applied to the disciplinary collaboration of artists, into duos, and groups and collectives, as we have seen in recent years, a rejection of the individual to embrace a togetherness.
Can art schools harness this spirit of community more radically, to instigate the necessary infrastructure, to make new worlds, to shape our future? Karen Zitzevitz proposes that social Infrastructure is Form, that material and immaterial networks are crucial for art and its circulation, “as evidenced in the South Asian region, with its legacy of state opposition to the movement of both people and things across national borders” (The Third Text, 2017). The current decline in familiar social networks, physical spaces, resources and material access, of necessity, and the manifestation of new networks, as virtual worlds gain meaningful and accessible form, allow us new ways to consider and develop this infrastructure.
111
The Past and the Future in the Present
The politics of care involves much more than a moral stance; it is ontologically and politically ambivalent. Its entanglement with emotional labour, largely the domain of women, is yet to be fully understood. What might a consideration of conscious reciprocal interdependency, feminist ethics and material consequence look like? Attention to the multiple ways in which we could relate to those around us, those within us, an action intended to develop conduits to shape the future of contemporary art more broadly, more inclusively.
In a letter to her daughter, Julietta Singh writes “to shield you from the violence of our ways of life is both an inherited logic and a catastrophic error, for you will not know how to change the world if you do not understand how it came to be this way”.(Singh, 2019)
History is as full of hope as it is of horror, and we have here, in the work of graduating artists, cries of protest but also optimistic offerings and sometimes a quiet revolt.
Poetics and politics are in dialogue, past worlds are seen through a digital gaze, cottagecore aesthetics, retro technology such as in the form of the insistent drone of a dot matrix printer spitting out reams of paper, digital semiotics transformed through colour, fetishized domestic space disrupted by family and friends as protagonists and surveilled public space, sigil spell work, and deep-seated histories explored through Caribbean bead trade and examined from the horizon of Plymouth, investigations into the tactile, the catastrophe of climate explored through ethical material inquiry. There are offerings of the body as memorial, bodies that perform in, and are at one with the ancient geographies of the South West, wise to her voice and folklore.
Meeting these questions head on, albeit somewhat tentatively, the artists make sense of the world through a language of interconnection, not through the lens of binaries, separation, and hierarchies but one that believes in collective action.
Theirs’ is a song that points sharply to its time.
Huma Mulji
June 2022
References:
Singh, J., (2021), The Breaks, Daunt Books Originals, London
Bellacasa, M.P., (2017) Matters of Care, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis
Arnolfini, (2016), URL, Accessed 01.06.2022
Zitzewitz, K., (2017) Infrastructure as Form, Third Text, 31:2-3, 341-358
Sheldrake, M., Entangled Life, 2020, Penguin Random House, London
A glossary of an encounter:
#single sensory stimulus
#Intertwined
#Biophilicshape
#Wellbeing
#Vessels
#Alchemy of food
#steambending
#Symbology
#Visual energy
#Simulation
#Reincarnation of clay
#Fragility of the body
#Aftercare
#dysmorphia
#wound
#sound of other planets
#viewed and monitored
#Not real
#Schrodinger's cat
#Disintegration
#Traces of touch
#Emotional scarring
#Comfort
#Time
#Self healing rituals
#magical ingredients of life #universal and collective
#magical consciousness
#wonderment
#pinecone
#dark matter
#thresholds
#deities
#water
#networks
#talking to space
#radio work
#two realms
#there but not there
#processing information
#upended life
#catharsis
#shredded
#materials of past and future through AI
#digital semiotics
#safe icons on landscape
#AI powered paintings
#Remote access
#Cottagecore
#witchcraft
#alternative alters
All of the projects in this exhibition are the outcome of an extended period of research, in which the creative process itself has been the primary method of enquiry; translating thought and material into rich creative exploration.
“In art, as in life, things can go wrong, things break, mistakes get made. That’s part of the adventure. I like the bumpy journey, the tricky mountain road rather than the fast motorway” (Barlow, P. 2013 )
Each artist's journey is significant, and in order to reach this point each of them has overcome major challenges. It is no easy thing to develop a focussed enquiry from the enormous possibilities that are presented by a blank page, an empty space, or the spark of an idea. For these artists continuous experimentation, failure and questioning has pushed the work and themselves forward, often into unknown territories.
The projects in this exhibition celebrate each artist's ambition for themselves and their futures, and is a dynamic culmination of practical knowledge, skills and critical engagement, situating them in the world as active agents of change, and instilling in them a sense and identity as thinkers and makers.
They have worked hard for this, we are very proud of their achievements, and wish them luck and good fortune for the future
Sarah King
Senior Lecturer & Subject Leader BA (Hons) Fine Art
with Fine Art team: Antigoni Pasidi, Tom Milnes, Louise Fago-Ruskin, Paul Hillon
A CONTEXTUAL ESSAY BY HUMA MULJI
1
The Song of the Cicada
In the late seventeenth century, the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico, pioneered the idea that the Iliad and the Odyssey owe more to oral tradition than any single writer, claiming that there was no individual Homer, only a tradition of bards grouped together as ‘Homer’. He declared these texts as the creation of not one man, but the whole Greek people. (Fagles, 1996).
The Fine Art Studios at the Arts University Plymouth are situated just across the road, a short walk away from the main building. It is a rare, intimate refuge, a space that offers the potential for a similar encounter that forms a collective hum, not different from the orchestra of summer cicadas.
In this symbiotic space the graduating artists have shared their ideas, anxieties, love and lunch, for several years, marking a crucial shift in their individual practices and inspiring each other’s. Perhaps more unusually, they have seen each other through two extraordinary years of collective loss, but also immense hope. This is no small thing, and binds them and their work, perhaps more that we comprehend today. Their own odyssey, having chosen a path of most resistance in the current economic and social climate, to create things and ideas for which there is no validation or place in the world yet, is also to find home, again. They take this journey with a group of incidental peers; strangers at first, who become friends, critics, interlocutors, audience, and family.
My encounter with the artists’ and their work reveals a breadth of concerns and forms that move between the digital and analogue worlds, between the virtual and the material. The tapestries, films, sculpture, poetry, AI generated images, relational experiments through pesto-making, growing live plants such as moss and cress, conversations with strangers, ancestry work and sonic landscapes: mining worlds of close friends and far off universes. In conversation with each other, these works come together, in its vocabulary, as markers of a moment in time and in a place.
11
Friendship as Form
The ideas of any age are a repoussé performed on what is already there. Phyllida Barlow has expressed the debt we owe as artists, to others before us, “we stand on each other’s shoulders” she proclaimed in a conversation with the artist Daphne Wright (Arnolfini, 2016), but also to conversations we have with those around us in the present. However, relationality does not mean a world without conflict. Thinking “with” creates community but “thinking with care, stems from awareness of the efforts it takes to cultivate relatedness in diverseness, which means too, collective and accountable knowledge construction that does not negate dissent or the impurity of coalitions. It speaks for ways of taking care of the unavoidably thorny relations that foster rich, collective, interdependent, albeit not seamless, thinking-with” (Bellacasa, 2017). A digitized world accelerates and extends our networks beyond known geographies and demographics, heightening everyday conflict, such as we are experiencing in the sphere of social media.
To explore this idea further, into more than human worlds, Merlin Sheldrake, in his book Entangled Life, examines the possibility that a singular organism could contain two separate lineages, challenging the Darwinian theory that species developed by diverging from each other. His hypothesis suggests that Lichens were bodies composed of organisms with differing origins, they were essentially, converging. To stretch this knowledge far into the world of artists, “The idea that two different species could come together in the building of a new organism with its own separate identity” (Sheldrake, 2020), could then be applied to the disciplinary collaboration of artists, into duos, and groups and collectives, as we have seen in recent years, a rejection of the individual to embrace a togetherness.
Can art schools harness this spirit of community more radically, to instigate the necessary infrastructure, to make new worlds, to shape our future? Karen Zitzevitz proposes that social Infrastructure is Form, that material and immaterial networks are crucial for art and its circulation, “as evidenced in the South Asian region, with its legacy of state opposition to the movement of both people and things across national borders” (The Third Text, 2017). The current decline in familiar social networks, physical spaces, resources and material access, of necessity, and the manifestation of new networks, as virtual worlds gain meaningful and accessible form, allow us new ways to consider and develop this infrastructure.
111
The Past and the Future in the Present
The politics of care involves much more than a moral stance; it is ontologically and politically ambivalent. Its entanglement with emotional labour, largely the domain of women, is yet to be fully understood. What might a consideration of conscious reciprocal interdependency, feminist ethics and material consequence look like? Attention to the multiple ways in which we could relate to those around us, those within us, an action intended to develop conduits to shape the future of contemporary art more broadly, more inclusively.
In a letter to her daughter, Julietta Singh writes “to shield you from the violence of our ways of life is both an inherited logic and a catastrophic error, for you will not know how to change the world if you do not understand how it came to be this way”.(Singh, 2019)
History is as full of hope as it is of horror, and we have here, in the work of graduating artists, cries of protest but also optimistic offerings and sometimes a quiet revolt.
Poetics and politics are in dialogue, past worlds are seen through a digital gaze, cottagecore aesthetics, retro technology such as in the form of the insistent drone of a dot matrix printer spitting out reams of paper, digital semiotics transformed through colour, fetishized domestic space disrupted by family and friends as protagonists and surveilled public space, sigil spell work, and deep-seated histories explored through Caribbean bead trade and examined from the horizon of Plymouth, investigations into the tactile, the catastrophe of climate explored through ethical material inquiry. There are offerings of the body as memorial, bodies that perform in, and are at one with the ancient geographies of the South West, wise to her voice and folklore.
Meeting these questions head on, albeit somewhat tentatively, the artists make sense of the world through a language of interconnection, not through the lens of binaries, separation, and hierarchies but one that believes in collective action.
Theirs’ is a song that points sharply to its time.
Huma Mulji
June 2022
References:
Singh, J., (2021), The Breaks, Daunt Books Originals, London
Bellacasa, M.P., (2017) Matters of Care, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis
Arnolfini, (2016), URL, Accessed 01.06.2022
Zitzewitz, K., (2017) Infrastructure as Form, Third Text, 31:2-3, 341-358
Sheldrake, M., Entangled Life, 2020, Penguin Random House, London
A glossary of an encounter:
#single sensory stimulus
#Intertwined
#Biophilicshape
#Wellbeing
#Vessels
#Alchemy of food
#steambending
#Symbology
#Visual energy
#Simulation
#Reincarnation of clay
#Fragility of the body
#Aftercare
#dysmorphia
#wound
#sound of other planets
#viewed and monitored
#Not real
#Schrodinger's cat
#Disintegration
#Traces of touch
#Emotional scarring
#Comfort
#Time
#Self healing rituals
#magical ingredients of life #universal and collective
#magical consciousness
#wonderment
#pinecone
#dark matter
#thresholds
#deities
#water
#networks
#talking to space
#radio work
#two realms
#there but not there
#processing information
#upended life
#catharsis
#shredded
#materials of past and future through AI
#digital semiotics
#safe icons on landscape
#AI powered paintings
#Remote access
#Cottagecore
#witchcraft
#alternative alters
Class of 2021
"As an artist you create a language, you create depth to a language, you change the language." - Rachel Whiteread
There has never been a more exciting and challenging time for an artist to emerge than now. It is a time when confidence, self belief, drive and passion is constantly challenged to an unprecedented extent.
As anyone in the creative process knows, it is a battle to extract the substance of one's vision from the chaotic stuff of the world at large, and to put it back out there intact, in a way that affects, that makes it visible. But it is what artists, and art students, must strive to do.
In this exhibition you will find evidence of the many who have found themselves in the territories of the unknown, insisted on knowing and have come to know. They have had to create a new language, moving from physical norms to digital landscapes and back again.
For all the exhibitors here this is but one stage of a journey on which they will come to know more. We believe their insistence will stand them in good stead and trust to bring them every success.
The Fine Art Team: Sarah King, Antigoni Pasidi, Tom Milnes, Paul Hillon.
There has never been a more exciting and challenging time for an artist to emerge than now. It is a time when confidence, self belief, drive and passion is constantly challenged to an unprecedented extent.
As anyone in the creative process knows, it is a battle to extract the substance of one's vision from the chaotic stuff of the world at large, and to put it back out there intact, in a way that affects, that makes it visible. But it is what artists, and art students, must strive to do.
In this exhibition you will find evidence of the many who have found themselves in the territories of the unknown, insisted on knowing and have come to know. They have had to create a new language, moving from physical norms to digital landscapes and back again.
For all the exhibitors here this is but one stage of a journey on which they will come to know more. We believe their insistence will stand them in good stead and trust to bring them every success.
The Fine Art Team: Sarah King, Antigoni Pasidi, Tom Milnes, Paul Hillon.
Amber Lang-Beer, Alexandra brown, Ruth Brown, Megan Cadwaladr, Charlotte Day, Abbie Dyer, Tuesday Fordham, Gabriella Gans, Jack Hobson, Aislinn Lock, Lucie Smith, Philip Tatton, Blaze Thorn, Jason Turner.
A CONTEXTUAL ESSAY BY MAUD CRAIGIE
BA (Hons) Fine Art Summer Show 2021
known unknown
It has been a particularly strange year; one in which many of us have had to re-evaluate and reinterpret our working methods. Some commuters have travelled, cocooned from the weather, to makeshift offices in their kitchens, dressed in sweatpants and smart shirts – as if caught halfway through a metamorphosis. Part of the strangeness is the universality of this shift. One inevitable change seems to be the collapse of boundaries between the personal and professional. Facing colleagues and classmates over Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, we are further apart, less able to read each other’s facial expressions and intonation. At the same time, we can’t help revealing more of our lives, more of the spaces we inhabit. We share accidental snatches of the people we live with; family photographs and notes stuck on the fridge; or glimpses of bedside tables, as we set up workspaces in what is often the most private of rooms.
On a day which shifted from sharp rainfall to interludes of grey sunshine, I visited the Plymouth BA Fine Art studios to see the work of the graduating students – for once in person. Many of the students discussed how their methodologies have changed over the past year. Some who previously worked with physical materials have experimented with digital outputs out of necessity; others who previously worked digitally, had become tired of staring at a screen – which now takes up so much of our daily life – and have moved towards creating physical objects.
For many of the students, the home has become a site of enquiry. Familiar objects and familial relationships have been scrutinised and dissected. Dining chairs and tables laid for dinner; a recreation of a teenage bedroom wall; homemade candles and childhood family photographs feature in or inform a number of the works. Similarly, many of the works contain ritualistic tasks: nail painting; knitting; weaving reams of black wool; flattening plastic bottles; poster making; and holographic arms endlessly moving in a loop.
While many of the works are about people, bodies themselves often appear only on the peripheries – like the shadow of a knitting hand. Instead, many of the works focus on the spaces we inhabit, or on the items we use - anthropomorphising furniture; creating participatory events in public spaces; on the discarded waste materials humans leave behind.
Over the last year, we have all been intimately tied to the spaces in which we live. The home has necessarily expanded to become the space in which we do almost everything; our whole lives subsumed by the domestic. The word domestic, relates to the home but also, like domesticated animals, implies a taming and orderliness. Semantic satiation describes the phenomenon of a familiar word, which becomes strange through repetition. As we repeat a well-known word, we can temporarily lose its meaning: the spelling starts to look incorrect, or the sound feels alien in our mouths. As writer and philosopher G.K. Chesterton notes, a word, ‘does not become tame, it becomes wild, by repetition’ (‘The Telegraph Poles’ in Alarms and Discursions, 1910). Like the wildness of a repeated word, many of the works, constructed from domestic materials, disrupt any sense of order. Instead, we are shown the alienation which can develop through intense familiarity.
The home is a site of memory, inextricably linked to the past. A number of the works in the degree show focus on formative childhood and adolescent experiences, both real and imagined, and embody a retro aesthetic. There is a saturated, silent video which depicts scenes of a teenager’s dressing table; there is a dark, fairy-tale-like oil painting, based on a photograph of the artist as a baby; there is an edited record of an uncomfortable family meal, the table settings re-laid within the exhibition space. In one work, bright pink posters of apparently aphoristic phrases cover a wall. On closer reading, the words, which have been extracted from an accompanying semi-autobiographical text, are more disturbing than they initially appear.
One key tenet that separates humans from other animals is our ability to imagine complex futures and to reflect on and learn from the past. In a world that has spent the last year in a kind of stasis, the future has in many ways been put on hold - perhaps making deep investigations into our pasts inevitable. However, the past represented here does not always offer respite from our uncertain futures. Behind the bubble gum pinks, handwritten posters and heart necklaces, there are investigations into past traumas and ambiguous relationships with our homes and our families.
Connection and disconnection seem to be at the heart of many of the works, mirroring the simultaneous distancing and revealing that occurs over Zoom. Disconnection appears through investigations into complex personal and familial relationships; in the physical disconnection of a broken table leg. We are shown connection through Happenings and the facilitation of events which enable communities to form; and through the exploration of the interconnectedness of the universe. In one work, three miniature holographic figures circle their arms in an infinite loop. They are positioned in front of a gold curtain, with shallow trays of water refracting sound and rippling into the space. The size of the small figures in relation to our bodies generates a shift in perspective - a sensation of viewing on a macro level. Rather than examining the past, here we step out of time and re-evaluate our present.
Maud Craigie
Artist and researcher
maudcraigie.com
Craigie's solo show, Indications of Guilt, pt.1, is currently open at MIRROR, Plymouth College of Art and runs until 07.08.21.
known unknown
It has been a particularly strange year; one in which many of us have had to re-evaluate and reinterpret our working methods. Some commuters have travelled, cocooned from the weather, to makeshift offices in their kitchens, dressed in sweatpants and smart shirts – as if caught halfway through a metamorphosis. Part of the strangeness is the universality of this shift. One inevitable change seems to be the collapse of boundaries between the personal and professional. Facing colleagues and classmates over Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, we are further apart, less able to read each other’s facial expressions and intonation. At the same time, we can’t help revealing more of our lives, more of the spaces we inhabit. We share accidental snatches of the people we live with; family photographs and notes stuck on the fridge; or glimpses of bedside tables, as we set up workspaces in what is often the most private of rooms.
On a day which shifted from sharp rainfall to interludes of grey sunshine, I visited the Plymouth BA Fine Art studios to see the work of the graduating students – for once in person. Many of the students discussed how their methodologies have changed over the past year. Some who previously worked with physical materials have experimented with digital outputs out of necessity; others who previously worked digitally, had become tired of staring at a screen – which now takes up so much of our daily life – and have moved towards creating physical objects.
For many of the students, the home has become a site of enquiry. Familiar objects and familial relationships have been scrutinised and dissected. Dining chairs and tables laid for dinner; a recreation of a teenage bedroom wall; homemade candles and childhood family photographs feature in or inform a number of the works. Similarly, many of the works contain ritualistic tasks: nail painting; knitting; weaving reams of black wool; flattening plastic bottles; poster making; and holographic arms endlessly moving in a loop.
While many of the works are about people, bodies themselves often appear only on the peripheries – like the shadow of a knitting hand. Instead, many of the works focus on the spaces we inhabit, or on the items we use - anthropomorphising furniture; creating participatory events in public spaces; on the discarded waste materials humans leave behind.
Over the last year, we have all been intimately tied to the spaces in which we live. The home has necessarily expanded to become the space in which we do almost everything; our whole lives subsumed by the domestic. The word domestic, relates to the home but also, like domesticated animals, implies a taming and orderliness. Semantic satiation describes the phenomenon of a familiar word, which becomes strange through repetition. As we repeat a well-known word, we can temporarily lose its meaning: the spelling starts to look incorrect, or the sound feels alien in our mouths. As writer and philosopher G.K. Chesterton notes, a word, ‘does not become tame, it becomes wild, by repetition’ (‘The Telegraph Poles’ in Alarms and Discursions, 1910). Like the wildness of a repeated word, many of the works, constructed from domestic materials, disrupt any sense of order. Instead, we are shown the alienation which can develop through intense familiarity.
The home is a site of memory, inextricably linked to the past. A number of the works in the degree show focus on formative childhood and adolescent experiences, both real and imagined, and embody a retro aesthetic. There is a saturated, silent video which depicts scenes of a teenager’s dressing table; there is a dark, fairy-tale-like oil painting, based on a photograph of the artist as a baby; there is an edited record of an uncomfortable family meal, the table settings re-laid within the exhibition space. In one work, bright pink posters of apparently aphoristic phrases cover a wall. On closer reading, the words, which have been extracted from an accompanying semi-autobiographical text, are more disturbing than they initially appear.
One key tenet that separates humans from other animals is our ability to imagine complex futures and to reflect on and learn from the past. In a world that has spent the last year in a kind of stasis, the future has in many ways been put on hold - perhaps making deep investigations into our pasts inevitable. However, the past represented here does not always offer respite from our uncertain futures. Behind the bubble gum pinks, handwritten posters and heart necklaces, there are investigations into past traumas and ambiguous relationships with our homes and our families.
Connection and disconnection seem to be at the heart of many of the works, mirroring the simultaneous distancing and revealing that occurs over Zoom. Disconnection appears through investigations into complex personal and familial relationships; in the physical disconnection of a broken table leg. We are shown connection through Happenings and the facilitation of events which enable communities to form; and through the exploration of the interconnectedness of the universe. In one work, three miniature holographic figures circle their arms in an infinite loop. They are positioned in front of a gold curtain, with shallow trays of water refracting sound and rippling into the space. The size of the small figures in relation to our bodies generates a shift in perspective - a sensation of viewing on a macro level. Rather than examining the past, here we step out of time and re-evaluate our present.
Maud Craigie
Artist and researcher
maudcraigie.com
Craigie's solo show, Indications of Guilt, pt.1, is currently open at MIRROR, Plymouth College of Art and runs until 07.08.21.
Class of 2020
Dr Dave Beech
Lockdown is a savage montage
ISOLATION IS A CUT
Lockdown takes a pair of scissors to society
CORONA IS THE WORLD AS AN INTERNALLY HETEROGENEOUS
Covid-19 is the hardest example of soft montage
WHATEVER COMFORTING IMAGE WE HAVE OF A UNIFIED SOCIETY AS A WHOLE IS FRAGMENTED BY QUARANTINE
Hugs, handshakes and kisses have been spliced with the scalpel of social distancing
A BLADE 2 METRES WIDE SLASHES THROUGH THE WORLD..........
ISOLATION IS A CUT
Lockdown takes a pair of scissors to society
CORONA IS THE WORLD AS AN INTERNALLY HETEROGENEOUS
Covid-19 is the hardest example of soft montage
WHATEVER COMFORTING IMAGE WE HAVE OF A UNIFIED SOCIETY AS A WHOLE IS FRAGMENTED BY QUARANTINE
Hugs, handshakes and kisses have been spliced with the scalpel of social distancing
A BLADE 2 METRES WIDE SLASHES THROUGH THE WORLD..........
Dave Beech is an artist and writer who was a member of the Freee Art Collective and is Professor of Art at Valad Academy in Gothenburg.
His works have been exhibited at the Istanbul Biennale and Liverpool Biennale.
His books include Art and Value (Brill, 2015) and Beauty (MIT Whitechapel 2007)
His works have been exhibited at the Istanbul Biennale and Liverpool Biennale.
His books include Art and Value (Brill, 2015) and Beauty (MIT Whitechapel 2007)
CONTEMPORARY ART: CONDITION AND TECHNIQUE
Dr Dave Beech
What is contemporary art? Do all Fine Art courses in universities and colleges around the world that teach art today necessarily teach contemporary art by virtue of the simple fact that they take place now? Or does art have to have a certain character – a specific set of
characteristics – in order to count as contemporary? What, if anything, are the tell-tale signs of contemporary art? Or, to use slightly more technical language, what is the “period eye” - “the mental and visual equipment brought to bear on works of art in a particular place and time” - of contemporary art?
Contemporary art is characterised above all else by the belief that there is no limit to wha art can or ought to be. In other words, art is contemporary insofar as it acknowledges the principle that art can be anything and anything can be art. Since the radical opennes of art to an unlimited repertoire of materials and techniques stands in contrast with th history of art (and the kind of art that is presented within national public museums of art as exemplary of art as such), and so the overriding impression given off by contemporar art is that it is illegitimate or provocative or bogus or elitist. Ironically, then, it is when ar is at its most open that appears to be closed off to most people, and when it reconfirms the high arts of the renaissance palaces that it appears to be most populist.
Art’s institutions are not in agreement on this score. Contemporary galleries and art magazines may take it for granted that anything can be art but most of art’s institutions contribute in some way to the subversion of art’s contemporary condition. The art room in schools, the museums of painting and sculpture, state art collections, the art market an in some cases the art school itself can use different mechanisms to load the dice in favour of certain recognisable forms of art (painting, sculpture, printmaking, plus one or two other “disciplines”), but these institutions cannot fully revoke the underlying principle of the infinity of art’s forms that has lodged itself within the specific institutions of contemporary art.
Let’s put this in context. Everyone having the right to vote is commonly understood as positive, and yet the statement that everyone is an artist remains unpopular, as is the assertion that anything can be art. (And remember how reasonable it seemed - and for so long - to refuse demands to extend the franchise to women, labourers and immigrants, a well as the mentally ill and prisoners today.) So, the contemporary condition of art (ie art’s infinite possibility) is haunted by an interminable dispute over whether art is in fact ope to unlimited and unlimitable activities and objects or art ought to be limited to a familia group of Fine Arts (in the visual arts this boils down to drawing, painting, carving, printing, casting and a few more recent additions such as film, video, graffiti and digital imagery).
However, the specific controversy over the contemporary condition of art - namely tha anything can be art - is nothing but the latest in a long line of disputes over the nature of art that began with the Renaissance project to elevate art above handicraft.
Every distinction and differentiation that sets art off from everything else ends up as a division within art itself. This is evident in the long history of the avant-garde from Futurismto postmodernism, particularly in Pop’s embrace of commercial culture and Conceptu-
alism’s replacement of the image or object with words or ideas to the cynical or ironic love of spectacle in yBa to Arte Util’s advocacy of usefulness over aesthetics. In these and countless other ways, art internalises disputes over art’s boundaries and definition within itself as a the a set of disputes not only about the category of art itself but als about the techniques, experiences, knowledge and institutions appropriate to it. These questions are given a different emphasis depending on whether one considers art fro the perspective of art history, art criticism, art theory, aesthetic philosophy, state policy sales or tourism, but in the artist’s studio the issue that is stressed above all others in these matters is the question of technique If traditionally art consisted principally of acts of drawing, painting, carving, printing and casting, today these techniques survive within contemporary art both in their original technical sense but also in an extended, stretched, performative sense. Drawing, in con- temporary art, not only refers to dragging a pencil or stick of charcoal across a flat sur-
face but also hanging rows of coloured pom-poms, making a mosaic spiral, pushing dirt across your own body, and arranging digital shapes into 3D patterns. These are not metaphorical examples of drawing. As much as we might admire the skill and beauty of art’s
traditional techniques, drawing has always existed in other forms. Drawing the curtains, drawing water from a well, draught beer, drawing a comb through your hair: these activities are not admired but they are legitimate examples of drawing and, in that sense, reveal something about what drawing is.
The same is true of carving. We not only carve statues and carve the turkey we also carveout careers, carve up Africa and carve our way through a crowd. From a certain perspective these seem like metaphoric applications of the literal meaning of carving exemplified in the production of sculptures, but the word is older than that and it is more accurate to think of carving as a much broader set of activities. Etymologically, carving is connected with cutting (corfen), scratching (kerben) and writing (graphein). For artists today the standard definition of carving is a point of departure not a recipe to follow or a truth t uphold.
Contemporary art follows a path laid out by Carl Andre when he stopped carvin wood and acknowledged instead that placing pieces of wood in a room carves through the space. This is evident in works that are constructed out of found materials or image of the landscape that are extracted from their original context either physically or with the use of narrative and dialogue Photomontage is a form of carving. The artist does not draw or even take the photos tha they use but assembles them and rearranges them on a new page. Montage, like so many other techniques of contemporary art, does not begin with one’s own observations of experience but with the world of images and things as a great reservoir of materials and meanings. Montage traditionally uses scissors or a scalpel in place of a brush or an axe
or a camera to make pictures by carving up existing pictures. Digital assemblage, which includes the use of digital “brushes” and other tools and filters, not only allows the cutting and pasting of existing images but also processes of re-sizing and manipulation that separates the image from its multiple sources more radically than conventional montage This means that montage is closer to drawing today than ever before. We might even say that montage, in one form or another, replaces drawing as the core technique of art.
Montage is central to appropriation, copying, quoting, Dj-ing, curating, documentingarchiving and other so-called “post-production” processes that characterise so much contemporary art today. Despite the value justifiably attached to the traditional skills of drawing, painting, carving and so on, what makes the techniques of contemporary art preferable is not only that they appear to be critical of the older established techniques but that they seem to disclose something important about them.
The techniques of contemporary art substitute all the romantic conventions of picture making and object making with a repertoire of procedures that emphasise mediation, displacement and context over the modernist myth of the origin of aesthetic experience in
isolated, subjective, self-sufficient individualism. Mark-making gives way to procedure of mark-marking or economies of mark-making; composition spills out of the art object to include spatial and social forms of organisation, transport, management and world-build-
ing; and, artistic style is upgraded to an ethically consistent way of engaging with the world. Even contemporary painting itself has adopted procedural methods or has be-come a living archive of its own history.
Contemporary art has spurned artistic labour, if by that term we mean a certain group of techniques such as painting, carving, drawing and so on which are in themselves artistic, aesthetic or creative. While some artists continue to paint, draw, sculpt and craft their works, they do so today in the knowledge that art is not limited to such techniques or traditions or that such practices are artistic on account of being those crafts most prominent within the history of art. Contemporary art has opened itself up to an infinite variety of techniques such that no specific set of skills can be categorised as artistic. It is not that all activities are now regarded as creative in some general sense and therefore suitable for art, but that the distinction between artistic and non-artistic practices no longer holds. Contemporary art is differentiated from traditional and modern art by affirming this infinity of techniques.
