2nd Semester Week 13

Not long now and the semester will be over! The 3rd years are panicking and their stress levels are at breaking point, anxiety perspires through their very pores, the good news is that is them and not us.. yet! The scary thing is that it will be us next year.... arrgghhhhh! They are producing some brilliant stuff this year and the studios are getting busier. The stress seems to all boil down to their dissertations and that is my fear, but I have managed to get my dissertation plan ready and it has been handed in draft form and passed to my surprise. I have tweaked it where advised to and just have the bibliography to add this weekend and that is ready for hand in. Yeahhh!

Now this week it was great to get into college again and back into my space, there is something rewarding about being around creative people especially when no one at home is creative. I would not say it is inspiring or even motivational but there is a comfort in knowing you are around people that understand your thought path and they do not need to ask "What is that" or "Why" and the best one ever "What is that supposed to be?" It just feels really good to fit in. Now that emotional sloppiness of behaviour has been vented it is time to get creative.

I have had three one to ones this week and all have been really helpful, each have given me numerous avenues to follow if I choose and each has its advantages and disadvantages. This I know is my choice in the long run and I have to stick with my own ideas and be true to who I am and what it is that I hope to achieve. But that said here is my shortfall for this weeks output...

Melting perspex to get my words hanging and taking up space using light and movement. These pieces are only maquettes and I may create larger work with these at a later date. 

 I photographed the blocks to give the impression they are defying gravity, to give the illusion of time and space suspended in animation, a feeling of being lost around ones peers and an isolated feeling of abandonment within a unit of stability, these are just stabs in the dark and at the moment possible ideas to play with over the summer break. I have used photography to capture the essence of what I would hope to achieve if these were in an installation.

The spirals to be are a significant structure, sometimes we feel we are spiralling either in or out of control in either direction. These were made to hang so that they could be free moving and that they could either stay still and be read or they may spiral one one or the other much like us as humans. With these pieces I used my own words in sentences that read down the structure, philosophical words of my own with personal meaning. These pieces again would be much larger in an installation and would dominate an exhibition space.

These pieces were experiments with the use of text on objects of relevance continuing with my story telling theme. these were words and phrases you may have heard growing up and were usually around the table at mealtimes. I found that the plate worked really well and I was pleased with that however I feel that the cutlery did not have the effect that I had envisaged so will not be making the cut. The cutlery though was a main part of the piece as the concept behind it were my Sheffield roots.

I have also been in contact with Liliane Lijn who very kindly responded to my email asking her about the use of text within her work. Lilliane's work is a great inspiration to me at this point of my degree and I am working on something structural at the moment in my studio which involves a set words from a passage within Samuel Beckett's tragic comedy 'Waiting for Godot' (1987). "Only One Was Saved" are the parts I have taken, this again has personal relevance to me and the structure defines four weak pieces bonded together to create strength in unity, solidarity of sticking together to become strong, the piece has a way to go yet but time is not on my side so it may not get placed in the final studio setting, I refuse to have an extension for my work as I have not had one yet and do not intend to....so fingers crossed I pull it off.

That is it for this weeks work and now to get on with the wrapping up of the writing parts of the semesters works, that should keep me busy all weekend. aarrggghhh!