The Wednesday Lecture: Wednesday February 17th 2021
Willow Fisher
GUEST ARTISTS: Joshua Cook, Brad Dawson, Karen Halewood, Mary Hennnessy, Vinnie Quirk.
This was the second lecture formatted to present to us students work from studying MA. The artists had a ten minute time slot each to present their work, talk about their practice and about future plans for practical work. I found that these artists were all unique in their mediums, subjects matters and themes explored in their work, but all shared the similarity of showcasing their work passionately and confidently.
Brad Dawson
The first to introduce themselves was Brad Dawson, he began by indicating that he approaches his practice in three stages. Identifying each stage differently to what I think to ease himself into his work at a pace that suits him and that he feels content with. Overall he described the tone of his practice as being quite personal, conveying the emotive language and ideologies he has personally experienced. I think that it is certainly brave to create an artwork reflecting one's own personal troubles. He uses the term trauma to describe his artistic practice, indicating that his practice evolves from his personal experience channelling this negativity into his work, transforming his own trauma into an art form, and I commend him for his ambiguity and resilience. We all have trauma but not all of us know how to deal with it. Brad himself stated that he found it difficult to interpret it into art pieces. I would say that your mindset has to alter slightly to try and reconsider the mediums you're wanting to deal with, steering away from your own emotions to a more practical mindset. Looking at it from a different perspective, almost like looking at it in third person, detaching the personal connection from it, then applying an artistic mindset to comprehend the trauma.
He explained that the first stage is concerned with conceptual tragic disposition, reminiscing in the birth of tragedy. He engaged with us as an audience by showing us his performance piece called ‘The Goat Song’ on Youtube. I say we are the audience because we are experiencing this artist's work first-hand so our reactions and responses to it are unprecedented and raw. As well because it is all via zoom call he can see our reactions to it, so we are positioned in that state of it we were viewing the performance on a stage, which is its intended format. Within this active piece of performance art Brad is exploring the human psyche as a concept to express his own trauma through an artistic means. I would describe the tone of the performance as harrowing as the artist has taken into consideration the mise en scene for his work as they complement the eerie tone and mood of exploring trauma. He stated to us that exploiting his personal traumatic experiences was brutal as it really demonstrated those raw qualities, and in doing this he is revealing to his audience the philosophical harsh truths of life. He has a strong admiration for the theatrical side of expressing the narrative of tragedy, influencing heavily from the conventionalities of dramatized tragedies through theatre, conveying their poetic and traditional narrative elements. He finds the theatrical performance of human nature most appealing as he believes it to be a duality. Reiterating that it has an objective view of the performance, presenting the tragic tone on stage expressing the overwhelming negativity like death and pain, and for Brad he harnesses this and uses it for his advantage to explore the trauma he's gone through. Dark subjects are most prominent within these narratives throughout our history, finding its limelight as a staged entity through creative means like art, poetry, creative writing, music, theatre, dance. He identifies this as an artistic buffer for his art practice which enables him to reach for more, leading to existential ideas and outburst of motivation to push him further. He has made the assumption based on his own experience with his work that it is rather challenging to receive acceptance of these traumatic truths, however expressing the trauma through art allows it to be accepted, which I think a lot of people can agree with.
The second stage of Brad’s practice is him discovering an avenue to express his ideas and experiences through surrealism. For example he favours exploration of trauma in the format of dreams, which lead to him exploring chance, improvisation and ideas. It also enables him to act more impulsively pushing through with these initial ideas he's not so sure of, sometimes impulsive thoughts lead to amazing pieces of work when developed, it's just about orchestrating yourself to be more open minded and leave more things to fate rather than overthink everything. Embracing all of this is what the artist strongly values. He implies that he transfers ideas from the unconscious mind to his consciousness, again talking about the acceptance of acting on impulse to receive these ideas. They are symbolic and subjective, he describes it as being a combination of shared fears and desires, for example: Apollyon, the Realm of the Dead. Entering the surreal mindset to exploit these narratives exceptionally. The third stage of his practice is centred around research. Dawson revealed to us his aspirations relating to his artistic practice and what he hopes to achieve whilst studying his MA. He hopes to create a virtual reality for his performance. Creating an immersive installation piece to present his experiences and trauma. He believes that in doing so he can hopefully encourage the audience to engage with this dark surreal Greek like tragedy and relate to it somehow. Therefore showcasing a tragic disposition of his trauma, which is what he refers to it as.
I find the themes that this artist explores really fascinating as I too find tragedy and dark narratives interesting in many formats, however I didn't quite enjoy his performance piece he presented to us. I have previously studied film studies so I do enjoy analysing visual art and find the reflective nature and analysis interesting. However for me ‘The Goat Song’ his performance piece just felt too perplexing. It isn't really something I favour to look at in an art sense, but I do understand where the artist is coming from. Surrealism captivating the trauma we have been through, I like that, but the video was just too anomalous for me. I did feel curious but didn't feel motivated in a way to proceed in my interest in the artist. I can see how I could intertwine this artist into my own practice. Currently I am making sculptures and experimenting with light so I feel I could be influenced from the enigmatic tones of this work.
Karen Halewood
Next was female artist Karen Halewood who predominantly creates experimental artworks consisting of performance and sound pieces. Reliance of sensory enables her to explore themes of the human body through her practice, other themes she likes to intertwine in her work are sexuality and feminism, as she feels she can form a relationship with these themes and understand on a deeper level as it impacts her. In her performances she acts out these ideas as a way to communicate with herself through action, therefore visualising the themes. The performances she conducts are usually live on stage which positions her in an open and vulnerable state that she finds motivating as it is ensuring her to present herself as she is. It's real and appears to the audience in its raw qualities, a truly exceptional experience. She states that she is interested in capturing the movement of a person whilst engaged in consciousness and unconsciousness, enabling her to appreciate the visual presences of the subject and capturing the essence of the body in subtle movement. I find this quite interesting as the practice is more concerned with capturing life as it is in its natural form, I would describe this artist's approach as being quite suggestive because she is less involved I would say. She isn't interfering with her subject matter; she is documenting the natural presence of it. This is what I find most appealing, her resistance to fully control the practice, relying more on natural order and chance. Halewood revealed that she began experimenting with performance art to demonstrate these human states to really exploit what's going on, concerning herself with the documentation of the interior and exterior of our bodies.
As well as her performance pieces the artist progressed to visualizing these experiences practically through creating collages, harnessing the skills she learnt to really inform how the energy flows through the body. I would say it is reflective work that complements her physical art well. Currently she explained that she is exploring her artistic practice in 3D environments creating installations. A variety of digital techniques are used in alternate ways during these experiments to allow her to vary her style and experience. She created an installation in her house which I believe reinforces that emotional and personal connection as well as the feeling of vulnerability apparent in a lot of her artwork. She manages to convey the emotions and energy that we all experience when we are engaging with these practices, so again it's enforcing the reflective nature of her work. She aspires to create a larger performance space in the future and describes what she has created and involved herself as being really positive. This positive outlook on the artist's practice and experience I think is really helpful to reveal to us in this conversation, as it is unconsciously acting as a reassurance for us that we can take risks and approach our practice in varying ways and get outcomes we may not like but still work. I think what's most significant about this artist is the more relaxed composition of her character and leaving more things to natural order rather than becoming overwhelmed with the responsibility and quality artwork.
Vinnie Quirk
Vinnie revealed firstly that although enjoys creating work he finds it most difficult to vocalise in talking about and explaining his artwork, so this has driven him to research into this to try and help inspire him. He hopes that in building his knowledge on why many find it difficult to explain their work will build his confidence and help him to understand why. He learnt about birth trauma, the mental trauma people face that nevertheless impacts their practical life and work. He read up on theories from psychologists and others to help strengthen his research on why some of us have this mental barrier that prevents us from talking about work we have created and are passionate about. I can identify with this artist because I find this most challenging too, I find planning and writing my artistic ideas pleasant and can fulfil my goals of creating these ideas by visualizing my personal thoughts and feelings. However when it comes to explaining them verbally I fault myself and I can't comprehend the confidence or understanding to do so, so this was interesting to her from an artist that they also struggle with this. I find it has reassured me. Explanations lead greater knowledge that can be materialized into our work. Vinnie uses these ideas to better explain and elaborate on his own ideas, experiencing this has led to his interest in personal trauma and making work from it. He as well describes this as a daunting and difficult aspect to do, but says that he has gathered influence from other work and artists, in particular an artist called Giger.
A Short film that Vinnie created called “Wednesdays” was presented to us which is available on Youtube. As is it exploiting personal trauma it is conveying very dark themes overall expressing a menacing tone. I didn't find this video piece interesting at all and found it rather disturbing, so I can't see myself referencing this artist in future practices.
Mary Hennessy Jones
This artist revealed that she enjoys experimenting with collage, and for inspiration she looks to work by an artist called Linda Sterling. Mary states that she's interested in showing as little information as possible to explore what you can see, and she overall describes this area of her art practice as being quite minimalistic conceptual collages. I find collage work really fascinating as it is a dense proclamation of subject matter that can be symbolic and analysed, so this area of the artists practice appealed to me. Moving on from this the artist then went on to work with animation and puppets as a way of conveying expression. She explained that through doing this she was enabled to access a darker side of her creativity and showcase this more daunting nature through these materials. She created a short film called “And not singing but screaming” which I would describe as being rather unusual and eerie in its reliance on the incidental sound which has evidently been manipulated by the artist to receive a more demonstrated response from the audience.
After this period she began to look at a building for inspiration for her new focus of artwork, it was an old tobacco warehouse. Her main goal was to be able to extract stories from the bricks that held together this historic building in order for her to experience on a deeper level the building's history and narrative. Those bricks have heard and seen things that only they can describe, and with the artist's interference she hopes to convey these historical narratives through art. To strengthen her research and ideas she created sound pieces on what she believed the bricks would sound like. This is interesting because there is no right or wrong answer, it is purely fictitious which allows the artist to access her imagination to create narratives to accompany these objects. I do however think it is a bit too far fetched to reason with and feel inquisitiveness for. She regularly asked herself rhetorical questions to help her to align herself with the subject matter, for example: What's there when the bricks are gone? She was also curious about the embodiment of the bricks. What did they smell like? What had they experienced? Therefore she produced scents on what she believed the bricks smelt like. She also presented to us a video she created, it was of the artist walking over beetroots with bricks taped to her feet as if they were shoes. Again I couldn't find myself interested in this art practice as it just felt too odd and implausible.
Joshua Cook
The final artist to engage with us about their artistic practice was Joshua Cook, who revealed that he is interested primarily with polaroid's. He describes this practice very passionately explaining that he uses polaroid's as a vessel for his creative thinking. He says that doing this quickly, taking a polaroid photograph, gets him into a fixed mindset. He takes the pictures then they help him to generate an idea and form a project, for him the polaroid's enable him to make a starting point. He created a show which enforced him of many ideas generated from all of these different images, for example he made a TV into a camera obscura. The whole show he explains was concerned with interfaces and interactions with art. Alongside this to complement the show he produced some posters themed from ikea books that included miniscule writing that needed special glasses to read. I like that he added his own unique personal touch to his already independent practice. The reasoning behind this he said was to make people think, he wanted to encourage viewers to look closely and provoke curiosity from them. Light refraction is something he also worked with in his practice, merging images together in his work, in his case he was merging faces together which I find relatable to my own ideas and concepts.
As of recently the artist has begun to work with sound, engaging himself with the boundaries between sound art and virtual music. He revealed that throughout this experience he has experimented profusely with sound, and what interests him most of all is the repetition of ambient sound which is evident in some examples of his work he provided to us.
Although I enjoy learning about other artists and align myself within practice of a similar age range and experience I don't find these lectures of this format with several artists that beneficial. Despite the variety in personalities and practice I have so far found it difficult to actually enjoy an artist's work, a lot of the work we have been shown for me is just too obscure. I find the construction and layout of the individual artist guest lectures much easier as they are just one artist and they have the availability to just talk about their work and provide us with imagery as evidence as they talk. I find that I learn more from them and this is clear in the notes I make, from this I am able to form an opinion and then formulate a response. However for the artist presentation lectures where there is more than one artist sharing their work I find it really overwhelming and difficult to understand what is being said. This may just be me and how I respond to the format of the lectures but overall I just don't find these kind of enjoyable. I find the content to be too brief and the subject matter of their work to be too peculiar.