Post-production: moving on
Since December, and continuing my process into a professional practice, I have been developing techniques that harness specific elements which underpin my current body of work. Aside from aesthetics, my work seems to be developing a elements of a socio-political and environmental lensing that influences my thinking and research. So, we can see that there is an opportunity to expand on these nascent articulations of practice. I say this because I have had two external yet fundamental endeavors riding alongside my BA here at London Met. The first being a setting up of a studio that I have taken on with ACME arts organisation and the second, applying for a masters. Each of these processes underpin how I will continue my practice in the real world environment of the arts.
ACME Contract. The paperwork for my new studio in Haggerston
Both have presented new ways of thinking in relation to my evolving practice. Taking on the studio, has provided a very much needed ‘space’. My method of production is inextricably linked to producing thought based investigations to my subjective state. These investigations, including a philosophical as well as aesthetic approach, explore a objective world of material embodiments that embrace ways of being. My multidisciplinary approach to making resides in many materialities. I find that painting which I rarely do at the university, still acts as my most potent form of inner worldly expression. It could almost be that my work is diaristic and a statement of existence - I paint therefore I am - as it were. It could be conflictuel to say that my digital, sculptural and installation based work explore my reactions to the world externally to my inner world. But, I feel that my practice exists on two sides of a line that separates both states. As my BA unfolds, I find I am trying to refine where my practice shows its strengths. If i adopt most of the feedback I been given, it would be demonstrating what my work does as opposed to articulating what it is I think my work is theoretically based on.
Having said that, one thing that combines my professional practice with theoretical research is how the latter allows me to justify the approach to the contextual side of my work. I believe that developing a contextual framework for the works I produce, articulates my response to a world in flux. Whether in the studio or at the university, I am constantly looking for ways to respond to how I come into contact with the world around me. The studio has become a place to house my ideas. the percolation of themes reside in the spaces around and behind what it is I do on a daily basis as a practicing artist. Therefore, I see the act of painting as a way to produce work that embodies a subjective sense of the self and articulates my reflective self back into the world that feeds corporeal information to me.
First Day in the studio located in Haggerston.
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How I ‘articulate’ my response to existence is one aspect that comes into my making process. There are many factors that obviously bring an individual into contact with things. Amongst the multiplicity of existence in a world in transition, some of these factors can be socio-political, environmental or cultural forces that constitute the ways in which we comprehend the world. My work is an articulation of the relationship between myself and the world at large. Aesthetics communicate to the senses, yet for me, aesthetics aren’t the only way objects communicate or hold a reserve of potential meaning. As philosopher Graham Harman states, a “relation is always external to it’s terms.” The terms on which I underpin the contextualization of my work is by noticing things in objects and then, use metaphor and artistic licence to articulate those observations. So, if a crack in a ceramic is political, its because the political is happening elsewhere. Not that my work is political. My work is dependent on spaces and materials. Where the canvas is situated, the studio it resides in, the music I listen to, whether I’m working in the day or at night, are all elements that I rely on to sustain my thinking as research. Sustaining my approach to making will be to pursue a masters. It is here I will capitalize on what I have learnt so far and then simplify my response to making. Part of the process to achieving this has been to use the last few weeks to apply for a Masters in Fine Art at four institutions. The four institutions are Slade - see showreel fig. 1 below - Goldsmiths, Royal College of Art and Chelsea College of art. Each university has required that I think about my work in a very measured way. Learning why it is I feel each institution may be beneficial in developing my artistic process. Therefore, I have had to analyze what has been crucial to my practice thus far. And what is key in what each institution offers. The one at the top of my list is the RCA’s Contemporary Art Practice MA. I feel this best suits how my work resides in the socio-political sphere when I think of what my work in ceramics embodies, ie: terrains, placement, grounding, existence within fragile environments. Then, in accompaniment with that is my philosophical approach to making, which is best identified in my installation work. See fig. 2 below.
Fig. 1, Showreel Of my work produced for a Masters application.
Fig. 2, Concrete Lampshade 2021. A work that investigates the withdrawn elements of existence, appearance and latency.
Katy Macleod (ed.) Thinking Through Art: Reflections on Art as Research 2013
Katy Macleod and Lin Holdridge are the editors of a book called Thinking Through Art: Reflections on Art as Research, which contains an essay by Clive Cazeaux titled Interrupting the Artist: theory, practice and topology in Sartre’s aesthetics. Cazeaux draws attention to theory and practice in particular through the highlighting of how value in education is both harnessed through the academic process as well as the creative endeavor. Both forms merit differing abilities. I find this intriguing as I try to underpin my practice through theoretical context. Cazeaux in his conclusion to his essay, focusses on Sartre’s ability to remind us that any “gaps between the world and our knowledge of it” are a “condition of our rootedness.” [1] This rootedness is of particular interest to me as I try to develop a continuum of development into my ontological investigations as to what it is to make work and be a practitioner of the arts. I agree with the thrust of the essay in as much that, we can lose the essence or vitality of the experience when we try to capture it in definition. One of the most intriguing aspects of making - and this is where I would stake my claim as a practitioner - is that, as I go on in my process, I am searching for the vitality of any medium I work with. Therefore, to state what that vitality is, I believe, is to get down to the truest essence of that a form that contains a “withdrawal,” [1] without exhausting its potential of being through definition or purpose. Teleological assumptions as to what a work may serve as a purpose - and here I adopt Graham Harman’s Triple O [2] approach - may rob the work of deeper essentialism that may exist in what Heidegger refers to as “the essential withdrawal of being.” [2] Harman et al, utilise this withdrawal which for me, can only go as far as to contextualise my work with what Heidegger would phrase as a “historically conditioned environment.” [3] That the past influences the future is demonstrable in where I extract my conext from literary sources and occurrences that have already been. Again, this approach to expanding and amplifying my outreach within academic frameworks, gives rise to using context as a resource but not necessarily body. To really further investigate the withdrawn, one must consider how to find it in that which we see everyday. So, to conclude, what informs my practice and my desire to continue making is firstly the here and now and how that is informed by the past, Through theories, politics, interactions, future potentials, I am able to navigate a way to finding a clearer definition of how my work communicates and on what terms that is happening in real time.
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[1] Guang Yang, ‘Between Self-showing and Withdrawal’, Research in Phenomenology, 48 (June 2018), pp. 233-243 <https://www.jstor.org/stable/26563953?seq=1>
[2] Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology, (London: Penguin Random House, 2018). See Harman’s description of Object-Oriented Ontology.
[3] Martin Heidegger, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, <https://iep.utm.edu/heidegge/> [accessed 12/01/2022] §6, para 4.
[4] Ibid, §6, para 5.