Welcome to my blog for ART280!
I LOVED Jackie’s corner. Its a shame it isn’t open to more epareas of the uni, as its a great opportunity to display work and bring more of the public into the art world!
it was so lovely to see everyone else’s work on a shirt or bag too. I also feel Luke it boosted everyone’s confidence in their art.
I decided that I would display at university because there is a larger traffic flow than in Jarrow hall, and as much as I would have liked to display outside, the weather was too temperamental.
I displayed my work with Karine, because she also used many smaller canvasses to create bigger images.
I inluded 8 abstract paintings that (to me) represent songs about various folk tales (fun fact, I’m a synesthete) my whale picture, which was the same size as before, because I didn’t want it to be too overbearing when it was next to my other pieces. However, I didn’t know I was going to include more abstract paintings when I had my original idea to include more A5 canvases and bump the numbers up to 100, and my pisky.
Introduced by Jeffrey Sarmiento, Jonathan entered the room. Looking at him, you wouldn’t expect much; maybe some thrown pots with traditional glazes in the same colour as his checky shirt or corduroy trousers, but actually his work is next level extraordinary and is a fine leap forward into the next generation of ceramic art.
“I want to keep this very open, no secrets. There’s no point to keeping secrets, it just keeps us in the present and stops us moving forward”
Despite his keen interest in 3D printing, Keep started his profession as a potter, throwing since school and taking note of many cultural traditions surrounding pottery, particularly African, as his home town can be found in south Africa, although he prefers the term ‘sculptor who just happens to make pots’, but please note that this is also the man who says he managed to “escape the ceramics ghetto”, referring to the simple ceramic art uses to scam many collectors out of money.
He is amazed by human senses and experiences, and tries to include as many different senses in his work, and during his talk he brought up several images of human, pig and chicken fetuses with their different development stages, attempting to make the connection that one idea can turn into something completely different depending on natural experiences.
During the talk, I was mostly interested in this thoughts and opinions towards arts and crafts, and where his work sits within the two. He described how whilst he was studying, it was mostly European art that was considered fine art, and any pieces that showed significance of cultures other than European were considered almost primatine and undeveloped, and were therefore craft, a label given to items created out of nessecity. To him, these labels don’t matter because art evolves. He believes that the important thing to remember is the beauty in an object, which is unusual due to his skill in throwing, sculpting, and making digitally created pieces. I was also impressed that he admitted to “living cheaply” in order to be able to live off of his art, and talked about having a “regular Joe job” to fund his business, something that almost no other artists I have met would admit to!
“I chose to call myself a potter in support of the gradual acceptance of pottery into mainstream Western contemporary art. Having begun to work as an artist in South Africa – thirty years ago – when European notions of high art and other cultural imperialist attitudes were being seriously questioned, the pot offered a format of universal appeal and a common human visual language.“
To start building his empire, he developed a machine that would squirt out liquid clay. Using a “squirly pattern maker” and an old gluegun, powered by a small motor. This became his own ceramic 3D printer and would be adopted by american institutes to create your typical ceramic printer.
He creates his pieces by using a program called Cura, after training I’m the use of virtual reality programming 20 years ago. He then uses his digital designs to program his original printer to print out a physical piece before firing and occasionally glazing.
Despite finding his back for creating digitally designed ceramic art, he still enjoys mKi g what he calls “anologue” pots, which are made by hand, as this keeps him tied to his roots and makes sure he still has physical skilk as well as digital excellence.
Meeting Jonathan was an amazing experience, being able to speak to such a grounded individual was a refreshing change from the usual snobbery of the art world.
My poster.
Karines poster (for the same show)
Have around 100 canvases on a wall that all create a large image, but individually make no sense.
This could be at Jarrow Hall (Bede’s World) in their exhibition room, in one of their guts outdoors, or, if they didn’t have space for my pieces I could put them on a wall in one of the uni spaces.
Example:
I loved Kristina’s work! Its so colourful and upbeat.
Her theme is happiness, and her work aims to make people feel cheerful and forget about the stresses of everyday life.
Four wall lamps, 2011.
The first thing you notice about Mark Angus is his hair. His white, stuck-up-in-every-direction hair.
The second thing, as long as he’s started speaking, is that he sounds like a madman, and he is hilarious.
Hearing him speak about his work was an amazing opportunity. He has so much passion for his materials and makes some unique pieces that are displayed all across Europe.
I’ve been to a few artist talks, but this was probably the most hilarious one I’ve ever been to. I would 10/10 recommend speaking to Mark, and definitely going to one of his artist talks.
Making my way to the glass centre I had high expectations for this exhibition. Since the past few exhibitions had been a bit pants I thought this would be better and I thought that after leaving the glass centre this year it would inspire me to start using glass again; walking into the foyer I thought it looked like a decent setup.
Unfortunately, I was way too optimistic. We met Sebastian, who would be our “guide” because clearly, we can’t guide ourselves though a single room, but to be honest we may as well have been guiding ourselves because all Seb did was mumble and nobody could hear much of what he said.
First we were taken to what looked like a fishtaank full of pebbles with a candle stuck in the middle. Apparently the idea was that you wrote on a piece of paper something that needed forgiving, and you burned it. Now there are two main issues with this – firstly, the candle wasn’t lit so unless you have matches or a lighter (which if you whipped out and started setting things on fire, the staff may have some issues with) you can’t participate, and secondly, there are fire alarms. So this idea (in my opinion) was about as useful as a spoon when you’re screwing furniture together.
After this was a table, around eight feet long, with what I thought was nicely flame worked glass that spelled words in both English and Arabic. I don’t know this for certain however, because it was all pretty illegible and extremely disappointing. There were also some blobs of glass on top of pieces of paper that told a story about forgiveness, but they didn’t actually cover the writing. It wasn’t nicely flame worked either – it was uneven and wobbly and you could see the joins, so it either wasn’t made properly or it hasn’t been annealed properly, meaning it could brake at literally any time.
At least I was impressed with the piece of sheet glass that was shattered with a large glass sphere! Until we were told that the artist hadn’t thought about the shock absorbent floor and uneven weight to the sphere (even though this had been pointed out) and it took several attempts to break the glass, and eventually end up putting grit under the sheet so it would brake.
There are a few right ways to do things, and this is NOT one of them.
Expressions in Paint is quite possibly one of the best exhibitions I’ve been to.
We started with a mosey around the studios, which was interesting and somewhat cozy – it was inspiring to see so many art styles and techniques.
After the studios we headed to the main exhibition. Seeing the focus on colour rather than perfection was amazing. It was lovely to see so many paintings which had been created through the enjoyment of a process rather than thinking solely of the end result, which I feel most artists seem to do.
Each painting worked as an individual piece, but seeing them all together brought so many positive emotions. It looked so free and cheerful, and the texture in the paint was beautiful.
Another interesting feature was just how well the two artists collaborated. If the exhibition wasn’t advertised with two artists you would probably think that there was a single artist who created the pieces. They were similar enough to flow through the room, but different enough to tell their own story.
I found a plynth and plopped my pisky and glass on it.
I put some paintings on the walls.
Even though I knew this crit was just a review of works in progress, I felt really on edge about two of the paintings (second and third left) because to me they just weren’t right. They’re unresolved and in my opinion, a bit pants.
The paintings were just tests, playing with colour and exploring texture.
Far right was finger painted, and the small blue canvas and small yellow canvases were slapped on acrylic with a big brush with random and fun movements. The middle canvas was painted, covered, repainted and covered, and after I eventually got sick and tired of it going wrong it had some paint sprayed onto it from a cif bottle and some paint splayed and scribbled onto it. The long piece of wood (second left) is unfinished – it’s the girl who burst and the northern lights, but the northern lights are just the base colours and have no depth and just look messy.
On the plynth was my pisky, a glass disk, boat and paperweight.
The class thought that the contrast between the natural wood and the precise brush marks of the painted pisky.
We talked about the glass being transparent and the swirls being quite eye-catching, and how they were all made. I think making more paperweights would be interesting and I’d like to see what a line of them would look like in different colours.
The glass disks would probably look interesting on a wall in different colours, but I’m not sure how I would mount them on a wall.
Somebody mentioned that although the colours in the painting were inspired by the story of Princess Cottongrass, and were made to look like deep waters, it looks like a dark sky with lightning in a storm.
Another comment was that the yellow canvas looks like it has a ring of people in the middle of it. I tried to make it look like fire and ice or dance patterns from a fairy or leprechaun.
Going forward, my ideas are to make more abstract paintings, more disks, more paperweights and try to include characters like the piskies, selkies or wizard Fish to the paintings, using the abstract colours as a background.
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