Click here for an overview of Day 9. LB: Playing with projection... and a cage: Click here for a video of my Body cocoon 3, twirling performance, projected through a cage.
I was intrigued by the way several smaller projections appeared on the grid of the cage, and also, at times, on the ceiling. Sarah suggested capturing the mini projections using acetate sheets, which worked really well. Click here for ghost projections captured on acetate. I think this was the most successful experiment. I also tried using some white netting, which had an interesting effect, as the grid of the netting was projected on top of the original projection. My attempts with a translucent plastic shower curtain, were less successful, as it was too opaque, although the distortion of the projection might be something to explore further.
0 Comments
TH: Interesting conversations with visitors today. Mostly about painting. Pleased to be introduced to the work of Christiane Baumgartner and Gábor Ösz.
Put some sculptural bits and pieces on display. Cast plaster forms, with no clear idea of what will become of them yet. Spent time playing with video on my 'phone, swooping towards and within Lou's current installation. Click here for an overview of Day 7. LB: Another performance and more conversations: Harry performed again, interacting with the red knitting installation, this time with a different red knitted sculpture that he hadn't seen before. This piece, Heart of darkness, has a very different form to the sculpture he wore yesterday. Body cocoon 3; it has many holes in it and it's technically unfinished so that the knitting is unravelling. This meant that it became entangled in the hanging forms almost straight away, making them move as the shrouded form moved, but it also meant that they also began to unravel. Click here for a video of excerpts of this performance. Again, after the performance, there were clear marks of Harry's actions in the tangled threads: Today we were able to discuss the performance straight afterwards, so it felt that we were able to capture our instinctive reactions to the process. For me, it was quite wonderful that at least one person has been able to interact physically with my work. To be able to work spontaneously and intuitively with an experienced performance artist has been a great privilege. It has certainly given me ideas for performance for future work. Many thanks for the collaboration, Harry! LB: Arranging and rearranging body parts: Parts of me is a growing series of body parts - steel bodies and feet cast in concrete, plaster and Jesmonite - some of which I installed for the Interim Bath Spa MA Degree Show in September 2021, as assemblages, with my knitted Body cocoons. Since then I have cast more feet (in concrete), made another steel body and finished two more Body cocoons. Real Space provides enough physical space to trial different ways to assemble them.
Repeat photocopies of a photoetched drawing. Like memory the photocopier removes detail and colour - (particularly blue). It also adds new information - also a feature of human memory.
Considering how the photocopies can be presented. SK Click here for an overview of Day 6. Shadow CubeExperimenting with the virtual and the real. Shadows and reflections and their relation to the object. You tube video link Shadow cube video. SK TH: Locksbrook Campus proved to be a bit busier today, with the permitted return of all undergraduates in addition to last week's final year students. At one point, the gallery approached its maximum Covid-capacity, i.e. eight. So not crowded. LB: Today was a day of visitors and spontaneous performance! It was great to have some real people in the real space, talking about real art. We had a visit from a group of MA Fine Art peers and were able to talk about what we're doing, face to face. Plenty of thought provoking conversations. One such visitor was George Thom who viewed the gallery through a VR headset, to explore ideas of the virtual vs. the real, as part of his research. Harry Coucher, another of the current MA Fine Art cohort, began to spontaneously interact with my hanging knitting installation. Click here for part of this impromptu performance. It was so good to see someone else respond to my work in a physical space! After some conversation, we agreed that he would perform again, this time wearing Body cocoon 3, which is knitted with the same red wool. Touching textiles seems to be irresistible to many people. Usually, in a gallery, there are signs saying 'Do not touch' , but people often touch my work regardless. In pre-Covid times I would actively invite people to touch or, indeed sometimes, to wear my soft sculptures. Sadly, as a result of the very real and ubiquitous contamination anxiety due to the pandemic I haven't been able to allow other people to interact with my work in this way for the past year. As it happened, no one had touched the hanging installation for several days and the Body cocoon was in a bag, also untouched. After thinking it all through, we decided it was safe to go ahead. During the resulting performance the installation came alive; Harry said that he felt that he 'became part of the environment'. The subsequent conversation ranged from Deleuze's plane, 'insideness and outsidedness' to Freud's Uncanny, Kristeva's abjection, Csikszentmihalyi's 'state of flow' and Douglas' 'matter out of place'. Click here for a video of some excerpts of the performance. After the performance, there were clear marks of Harry's actions in the tangled strands of unravelling yarn. The presence of absence?
Click here for an overview of the day. LB: Today Sarah and I finished setting up the dark space. Click here for a video of the finished space. We're both planning to use it for various explorations with light and projection. LB: Looking back to look forward: Red is the colour...., 2019, hanging vertically as a walkthrough installation. Hanging these knitted sculptures emphasises their ‘fragility and vulnerability’ (Larratt-Smith 2011). Louise Bourgeois suggests that the hanging thing ‘…is very helpless’ (in Nixon 2005:170) and ‘hanging and floating are states of ambivalence and doubt’ (in Larratt- Smith 2011). Hanging work, as a device, suggests 'a kind of displacement’ (Barlow 1996: 9) and adds a sense of abjection. It's a very powerful effect. This is the first time I've installed all the long sections of Red is the colour of... in one space, and I'm delighted with the impact they make. I'm now imagining a much larger, immersive, walk-through labyrinth of red knitted forms, of course, but it has been very useful research to be able to set it up using the grid. It was also much easier than attaching each piece to a ceiling! I think that the constructed space - the 2 walls and the grid - frame the installation in an interesting way, and would potentially enable a viewer to walk through the sculptures. It also adds contrasts of plane, surface and form. Would a caged walk way bring further contrast? Barlow, P., ‘The Sneeze of Louise’ in Cole, Ian, (ed.), (1996), Museum of Modern Art Papers, Volume 1 Louise Bourgeois, Oxford: Museum of Modern Art pp4-11
Larratt-Smith, P., (2011), Louise Bourgeois, the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, Available from: http://arttattler.com/archivebourgeois.html (Accessed 6 November 2013) Nixon, M., (2005), Fantastic Reality: Louise Bourgeois and a story of Modern Art, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: MIT Press I returned to a piece that I made last summer, 'Articulated memory', made from printed card.
My work has been questioning the importance of the image' to it. With plain acetate and card added, I have experimented with lighting, photographing and videoing the piece. Raising questions such as;
TH: Rearrangement of supportive 'scaffold' for hanging sculptural work. Artfully casual heap of my sketches displayed, for a time at least. LB: More planning, moving and arranging things today. I'm especially excited by all the metal grids I found in the yard, and extremely grateful to Poppy, Tim and Sarah for pandering to my whims and to Si for his help and advice. We have constructed the perfect, walk-through space for installations. Click here for an overview of the day. LB: Looking back to look forward: Shadow sacks, 2019, in a rusty cage Shadow sacks, 2019, 3 suspended Shadow sacks are knitted, felted cocoon-like sculptures. I made a series of them for B-Wing and installed Shadow sacks at B-Wing in Sept. 2019, as 2 different installations. I haven't installed them anywhere else between now and then, so I found it especially interesting to work with them today, and in such a contrasting setting. They were designed to hang or to be suspended, and I do think that the hanging installation is definitely more effective. I used meat hooks and chains for this installation, and I think it's very striking against the white walls, hanging from the grid. However, I think I'd also like to try suspending more of them as well, maybe with black wool. It's so helpful to have the opportunity to try out various different installation ideas.
TH: Sculptural pieces started to appear in the gallery. Delight in certain quarters at the discovery of two mesh trollies and more Heras fencing panels than we could possibly use. LB: Click here for an overview of today. LB: Looking back to look forward - Red is the colour...., 2019, in a rusty cage: Click here for a basic stop animation of the installation process. I made Red is the colour of... for B-Wing, an exhibition in Shepton Mallet prison, which started the week I started this MA, in Sept. 2019. Click here for images of this work installed in the decommissioned prison. It's very useful to revisit it here, and now. I also installed part of Red is the colour of... at 'inaugural' in Feb 2020 at Sion Hill gallery, an exhibition with my part time MA Fine Art peers. I included some extra, long sections that I'd knitted since September. One of my areas of research for this project is how work is perceived when it's installed in different ways and/or in different settings. Art historian and curator, Miwon Kwon discusses the ‘impermanence and transience’ of art installed in response to ‘one site after another’ (2002, p4). Artist, Richard Tuttle ‘enters a dialogue with the space’ sometimes reinstalling his work to explore how it can respond differently to the same setting (Petersens, 2014, p77). I also often choose to install my work in unexpected places. How can I bring that sense of the unexpected into a gallery setting? It's clear that my experience of installing my work in the prison is still influencing my decisions and aesthetics through the rusty, steel grid. Kwon, M. (2002) One place after another: site-specific art and locational identity. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press
Petersens, M. (2014) ‘The visual poetry of Richard Tuttle.’ in Tuttle, R. (ed.) (2014) I don’t know. The weave of textile language. Exhibition held at Tate Modern 14 October 2014 - 6 April 2015 and Whitechapel Gallery, London 14 October – 14 December 2014 [Exhibition catalogue] pp 73-81 TH: First day in the gallery. Twenty-four panel painting on the wall. First time ever it's been displayed in all its 7.5 m wide glory. The advantage of having a real space at last. LB: A morning of conversations, making plans, moving temporary walls and beginning to construct a dark space for our experiments with projection. It's so good to be back at Uni,, in a real space, and to be able to start working with Sarah and Tim on this project. I find that working in a physical space again, and being able to discuss my work with the others, is stimulating plenty of new ideas for installation.... Click here for a short overview of today. LB: Looking back to look forward: Body cocoon 5, in a showcase Sadly, I had to leave early today, but in my absence, the others kindly installed my most recent hand knitted Body cocoon, number 5, in the perspex-covered plinth in the main entrance to the campus. I finished constructing this in January 2021. Click here for video performances of me wearing it and more images. I find it interesting to see it here, lying in a sealed perspex box. It seems lifeless, compared to the living sculpture it becomes when it's worn. Maybe the showcase's sarcophagus-like form is apposite? It makes me think of Bataille's notions of 'form' and 'formlessness' (in Faiers, 2014, p103)
Faiers, J. (2014) ‘Knitting and Catastrophe.’ in Textile: The Journal of Cloth & Culture, 12(1), pp. 100–108. doi: 10.2752/175183514x13916051793596 (Accessed: 7 November 2019) |
Who we are:LB: Lou Baker |