My time has been split 60:40 between course writing & course making.
I'm up to around 3,000 words on my dissertation. I can't tell you yet if they are all in the right order, but according to Word that's where I'm at.
I have to say, that in comparison to the last dissertation I wrote this one is a whole lot easier. For my first one, all those years ago, when I had no personal computer, no car, no internet and almost no life skills (I survived on pasta, mayonaise and sweetcorn), I had to write the whole bloody thing; 12,000 words on a manual typewriter in a week. My fingers throbbed with pain. I was set on writing about art in Berlin during the period of the Berlin Wall: a fascinating subject I think most people would agree. Mum and I spent a week in freezing February 1993 traipsing round, trying to find our way around the former East Berlin. It was fascinating. It was cold. One big issue with the subject matter: I don't speak or read German. I scraped a pass, I don't know how, I can only think of the reason being that I took the time to visit.
This time I'm working on something much more manageable and armchair researchable: I'm looking at the dichotomy of being inside/outside, of passing through.
Inside / Outside? That sounds simple doesn't it? Except that the more I look into it the larger, more complex, and more interrelated it gets. Of course that's the fruit of knowledge - the closer you bring it to your mouth the larger it gets, and you can never digest it all. That's something I really like about contemporary art, it's endlessly interesting - the more questions you ask the more questions you discover and there are so many rabbit holes to disappear into. For me, the dichotomy of inside/outside is a case of one's length and depth of vision being altered by the environment as you move from within to outside. Furthermore a question is raised about being 'between' but I am most particularly interested in where a lack of difference in how places look can lead the viewer to feel discombobulated. It's something about where a difference should be, and isn't.
So writing-wise that's all interesting and good. Artwork - well, it felt a bit frustrating not to be making resolved work until I remembered that I'm supposed to be experimenting this semester. So I've been doing a bit more of that, as well as sneakily trying to bring a larger scale work to completion - just to see if I can. I've just handed in my proposal for this module's artwork and there will be an opportunity to present that to a group, so I will feedback on that probably in my next post.
I also spent a couple of days invigilating at CET (Coventry Telegraph's old home) 'The Future' at Coventry's first biennial. Some images of current work and from that below.
WIP: Iceberg and Power Station. Improbable structures and something about drawing what could not happen (?). There will be more steam rising.
Detail from above. There's going to be more of this.
Collage experiment: Incised lines partially filled with charcoal. An attempt at something like Roni Horn's collages - the precision and the finger marks. I wanted to try and make lines another way and I really enjoy the precision of line vs the totally random and nebulous pastel powder (I sprayed the paper with fixative and pressed it onto some pastel dust on the cover of my sketchbook that had fallen off another work, then fixed that. You can see where I discovered it wasn't fixed.)
Some painty swiping pages from my sketchbook with paint left over from painting pumpkins and bats for my daughter.
The rest are from CET Coventry Biennial. Dashes of colour and perspective. The works employing audio filled the space most effectively, but some other artworks seemed a bit lost. It was a privilege to have been able to spend so much time there.
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