As the 'C' word started to take hold things at Uni were beginning to close down. Workshops were being cancelled, tutors were doing all they could to keep things going but it was becoming inevitable that it wasn't going to last the week. Distance learning was being put in place and studios were being emptied, overseas students were trying to work out how to get home and sadly the Degree Shows were cancelled. I cannot even begin to think what it would have been like for anyone who was working towards such a climax of their time at an Arts University and to then have the rug pulled out from under their feet through no fault of their own. This wasn't a local or nationwide thing, it was a worldwide thing. No final year shows. Anywhere. Sad times.
The last effective workshop I attended was the fourth and final Soft Sculpture one. A somewhat decimated group were in attendance and looking to finish things up before everything closed. I had been working on my spikey tight elements and just wanted to create more of these as I knew I was intending to use them as my installation as part of our Group Thematic Exhibitions, which by now were looking increasing unlikely to happen. In fact they never did and everything had to be turned virtual; exhibiting, group presentation, individual presentations, risk assessments and collaborative work. My virtual exhibition can be seen here: https://carldurban.wixsite.com/website/post/thematic-exhibition-process-materiality
The group blog and various comment is on the NUA VLE, so only available to those on the course. It was great to see everyone getting involved, uploading their work and commenting on each other's work. It is such a shame as I think the whole experience and seeing everyone's work would have been so useful. Our group 'Process & Materiality' was the largest group, being made up of 20 of us and looking at the blog uploads there was some really interesting work that would have been on show. And that was just our group.
I decided that although I had presented my piece as if it was part of the exhibition and therefore displayed it as if it was in the white cube of an exhibition space I also wanted to explore how it could look in other environments. I decided to take just one element that I had been working on and had been adding latex to the surface to see how it could potentially change the look and texture of one element. After three layers of latex it wasn't really doing as much as I wanted, it still was retaining the outward appearance of the original material so I left it to come back to. Even with the lockdown situation this offered a selection of opportunities. Here are some of them:
It was only on the last one when I decided to drop it in a bin of water and then move to get it in a better light did an idea come to mind as I felt it took it away from the known environments. Ideally I would have liked to explore options at the beach, ie sand and rocks but clearly these are currently out of bounds. I filmed it moving in the water and then took it into Adobe Premiere Pro to see what I could do.
By affecting the colour, slowing down the image and then adding layers with different amounts of opacity I managed to create something that is quite divorced from the actual piece and very abstracted from what it actually is.
This is the first thing I have created in a couple of weeks. I just haven't really felt creative and also wasn't sure I wanted to put anything out 'there' with all this shizzle going down. I have also been working on my 2000 word text as part of my first year. This has taken quite a lot of my time and attention to get it to the final draft stage. I eventually decided to look at a piece of work by Eva Hesse, 'Right After'. One of the last things she created before her untimely death in 1970. I really found the research interesting and tried to picture myself at the time she was creating her work and experimenting with the materials she was using.
Hesse's experimentation with a variety of material was fundamental to what she created. The possibilities of the material came first, creating form and developing her paintings into three dimensional forms. I like to think I also 'play' with materials to see what is possible, how it may 'talkback' this allows your hands to discover possibilities your head might not. It is only when you look to reflect and decide how something is looking can you develop and take it onto the next stage. I rarely have a pre-conceived idea of what I am about to make, sometimes it doesn't work and you have to move on. Other times it just takes time. Time is definitely a luxury we all have at the moment. Experiment, play, create.
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