DiArt

Experimenting, Seeing, Creating

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ART SALE at Writtle University College looking great.

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Now this works makes more sense to me....and why I was so eager to take it off and leave the space like nothing had happened.

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SOME OF MY LAST YEARS ART WORK AT UNI....

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This is not normal

Those exact words...repeated over and over, but days passed, weeks, months and years until the courage came to surface. 

I am not on my own on this. Many mums out there feel the pressure that I have been feeling for so many years, trying to act like nothing was happening, trying to convince myself that it was ok, it was normal and I should just live like I was doing....but we have a choice and my choice was to stop it. It took me years but I am so glad I did. 

Thanks to my experience I came to the idea of my final project, it has been part of my artwork but I never realised that the reasons of my past outcomes was the insecurity built over the years.

Feeling trapped, feeling worthless, pretending to be strong, pretending that everything was ok, that I could cope, that I could do everything on my own without the help of anyone because I wasn't weak, I wasn't needed, I wasn't lazy....but the truth is....yes I am, and it is ok to feel like that sometimes, I am a human being, I am not a robot.

Having said the above, I was very inspired by several articles where I read that some statistics shows that the wife was not stressed out by their kids, but by their husband....and since then I realised that I am not alone on this. My kids are behaving like kids, they can stress me most of the time but in general the main reason of my anxiety, my  mental health problems and the feeling of low self steam was created by the pressure from my husband to show him that I was not weak, that I could cope and that the job of a mum was not difficult. But things got worse when he expected the house to be just how it was before having kids....and there it is where all started.

Ok, let see one of my ideas below....I really like the minimalist effect on it, and my signature colour that I always use in my work...

This was just an idea....I wanted to buy a giant clock where it could just set on 1800 hours, the time where most husbands (at least mine) was coming home....the 15 min before that was basically a panic mode of me tidying everything and cleaning the traces of a family life with my kids. I wanted to buy some storage boxes so I could pretend to just packed all my life in those boxes before 6 o’clock.

This idea was my main one, but I had around 10 others where I would just put clocks everywhere on the cubicle, like seen below. 

But it was going to cost me too much so I rejected this one.

On my sketch book I draw a few more: a massive box in the middle filled with toys, everyday items, and any kind of object that my husband would find intrusive being in the incorrect place.

Another idea, was to buy many kitchen timers which could go off every 15 mins, and I could just destroy them (as part of a performance piece).

The one I thought it would be very visual affective was the one where I created doors around my cubicle and when the 6 oclock was approaching I could hide my kids in one of the doors, in another I could hide the toys, in another all the items that could be of any disturbance to my husband.

All my ideas were very similar, but a couple of weeks ago I decided to do a video with a couple of friends recreating the panic of being at home knowing that Daddy was coming in a minute and the whole living room was a disaster, clothes everywhere, toys, books, you name it....and I set an alarm so went it starting go off we would tidy up and hide the children somewhere.

This idea was most liked by the tutors so they suggested to go by it. So again, with the help of my peers, and after building the cubicle for the end year show we did another similar video. (It would be post shortly)

Here you can find my space finished....what was about to come later left the area in a completely different look.

I had to bring lots of items, furniture from my house, it took me a couple of trips but I am very happy with the results...a few more touches on the walls, the video and hopefully the whole installation will be finished. Just waiting for the feed up from my tutors to do minor changes as I have a few decisions to make before showing to the public on Wednesday.

Next post will be a short taste of the video...and the names of a few artists I have been looking at that relates a bit to my work.

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Got it

That is it... I have got my theme for this year show, I finally came to it and it has been in front of my eyes for years. Years of thinking it was OK, years of holding on and years of coping and suffering. Many women are going through the same situation and I want to make my theme an awareness, and awareness to those mums that are suffering in silence and I want to let them know that they are not alone.... More to come

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collaborations with my little artists

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clay, colours, painting, deconstruction equals....beauty

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deconstruction of found painting

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Experimenting with hand cut collages. 

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week of creations, discoveries and experimentations...

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NEW INSPIRATIONS

Since last Monday from our Drawing session I have been thinking about my lack of creating, which is something that I really enjoyed doing....I have left aside some of the only things I can (or I think I can) do, like creating abstract paintings, using different materials as textures.

All started with Julian Schnabel, an artist that I wasn't aware of his work before and thanks to this Monday session it woke up my eager to create some "messy”. artwork.

From Julian Schanbel I went back to Gerhard Richter, Mark Bradford and Clyfford Still, I am going to research into these artist more in depth and discover new works from these others  ( Antoni Tapies, Anself Kiefer, Ed Moses) which their works are great creation using texture.

Here I am going to add some of the images I have found in google. In the future I will add more as I have a list of favourites that I would like to share here. But for the moment here are just a couple of examples.

Mark Bradford

Ed Moses

Antoni Tapies

 Anself Kiefer.

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NETWORK, NETWORK, NETWORK

For my last presentation on my Studio Practice today I have changed a bit of direction by the influenced of certain theories, lectures and new art movements that I have been reading for my dissertation.

I am still interested in the idea of using tyres for my end year show to try to convey several messages to the viewer. But for this project I kind of wanted to create something that could only be seen through media, through internet as  Alan Kirby Put simply, “it is the impact of computerization on all forms of art, culture and textuality“.

The main idea of my project is not the work of art created in my video, which was influence by an art work by  Kirschner & Panos “He doesn’t Know you don’t Love him”, and John Baldessari 1971 “I will not make any more boring art”. As I was saying the main idea of my work is the way viewers can see it. These days  reality fades out of view and is replaced by “simulacra”, images that are false and hollow yet seem real and natural to us.

Just a quick explanation of the above influences, Kirschner and Panos use Sandford Meisner technique: (Meisner’s techniques paradoxically deploy an unnatural training routine of intense repetition and observational feedback to stimulate ‘authentic’ emotion and spontaneity in performance).

Although the above technique is used by two individuals sitting opposite each other, I twisted the main idea by just doing it on my own and writing on a wall. (can be seen on the video attached).

My second influence on my video was by John Baldessari. Here is an explanation of his work “I will not make any more boring art”. 

The print is based on an installation created at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, but not by John Baldessari’s hand. “As there wasn’t enough money for me to travel to Nova Scotia, I proposed that the students voluntarily write ‘I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art’ on the walls of the gallery, like punishment. To my surprise they covered the walls.” Those same students made this print, but Baldessari wasn’t at the workshop when the print was made. In both cases, Baldessari gave scant instructions to the students from thousands of miles away, and he was not present to supervise, raising questions of authorship and the role of the artist.

Going back to the main idea of why I am presenting my work through the internet is to explore the idea of how artists these days are showing their work mostly on the network than in real life and how individuals have free access to it. They don't need to travel, they don't need to be in a gallery, they have limitless possibilities to see art through internet. In other words Mass communication which is “the study of how people exchange information through mass media to large segments of the population at the same time. In other words, mass communication refers to the imparting and exchanging of information on a large scale to a wide range of people”.

Hyperreality explains how individuals may find themselves, for different reasons, more in tune or involved with the hyperreal world and less with the physical real world.

As Baudrillard claims that our current society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, and that human experience is a simulation of reality. Moreover, these simulacra are not merely mediations of reality, nor even deceptive mediations of reality; they are not based in a reality nor do they hide a reality, they simply hide that nothing like reality is relevant to our current understanding of our lives. The simulacra that Baudrillard refers to are the significations and symbolism of culture and media that construct perceived reality, the acquired understanding by which our lives and shared existence is and are rendered legible; Baudrillard believed that society has become so saturated with these simulacra and our lives so saturated with the constructs of society that all meaning was being rendered meaningless by being infinitely mutable. Baudrillard called this phenomenon the "precession of simulacra".

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Artist Chakaia Booker Gives Tires a Powerful Retread

The below article represents pretty much why I am choosing tires as a medium for my art this year, or at least part of the reasons.                                                                                                                                                                           

Booker does not want to belabor her process or the meaning of her work. At various times over her four-decade career, she’s said her abstractions speak to the environment and ecology, the diversity of humanity and African Americans in particular, the slavery experience, the industrial world and communication.

She says she does not pre-ordain values or expectation ”the products of her labor are there for the public to enjoy or not, to make their own interpretations, or to take them simply for what they are: giant assemblages of rubber and steel. “My intention is to translate materials into imagery that will stimulate people to consider themselves as a part of their environment, as one piece of a larger whole,” Booker told Sculpture magazine in 2003, in a rare lengthy interview.

                                                                                                                               Booker takes the ordinary tires and renders them into the extraordinary. When do you think of a car tire? Probably only when you buy one or it goes flat, Bell writes in the exhibition catalog. Booker has commandeered the unseen, unconscious item and turned it into something that is strange and fearful, he says.

The whole interview it is in the following link. Worth having a look.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/artist-chakaia-booker-gives-tires-powerful-retread-180957362/

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Creating and Experimenting

The above it was just a simple paper collage where I placed the tire into a green environment.... 

Why working with tires....why my obsession towards this industrial product, a material that may fade, but almost never completely degrades or disappear.

These last few days I have been trying to get hold of a tyre....surprisingly it is not as easy as I thought. Legally they need to be properly wasted and no one would hand me one even if I was assuring that I was going to properly recycle it afterwards.....luckily, my daughter’s school have a few in the play ground so I could borrow one.

The below it is one of my experiments working with the tire. I had a big canvas in the studio so I covered the tire with black ink and cover part of the area of the canvas no trespassing the golden line with marks from the tire. This painting convey many meanings but the result didn't convinced me, the tire didn't have much markings hence the poor quality of the print so I was no very happy with how it ended up, although a message was starting to gather together in my head.

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ONA by Cumul

Funny enough, I found a Spanish artists working with tyres too. Love the reason behind his work. Here is what I found about it.

“A tire sea resting within the fields without any promising destiny but with the only purpose to stain black the landscape,” write the artists. “ONA” is a part of this sea...now though, she finds herself immersed within the urban surface, breaking down the architecture and creating an aesthetic experience.

The artists cut the tires with handsaws and arranged them into the shape of one of the “waves” from Sesena’s sea of tires. Infamously known as Spain’s most famous ghost town and victim of the 2008 housing bubble collapse, Sesena is home to few residents, yet contains thousands upon thousands of used tires.