Artist Research: Self Directed Project

This post will concentrate on artists that I have been looking at and incorporating into my work during this project.

While I was drawing out some of the imagery and newspaper texts, and working with the strange designs you find from old papers folded and abandoned for years, I realised that I was really working with some minimalist ideas for this project. The Newspaper Club nearly had me jumping straight into making a newspaper.It is a great website for building ideas for some really unusually newspaper publications. I still want to do this, and I will, but at this stage I would have been rushing articles and re-working texts together to have it done on time. I want to continue working with the newspapers, and it's a project that will go on after this brief is finished. My main two reasons for stepping back from making a newspaper publication for this project is the fact that our next brief (starting Monday) is a publication brief. I want to have tried a range of different materials and ways of working this year.

And by "strange designs you find from old papers folded and abandoned for years", I mean this. I really embraced these shapes in the Self directed project.

Richard Tuttle

"Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts. Minimalism is any design or style in which the simplest and fewest elements are used to create the maximum effect."

It actually really described a lot of my own tough process over this year. You really have no idea how hilarious a concept that is too me right now. I disliked minimalist art in first year. I really, really did not like it. I though so much of it was soul sucking and quite boring actually. Oh how times change. Maybe it's a reflection of my time in third, but I seem to be trying for a visual simplicity through what I make....or at least clarity in terms of visual design.

Peter Fraser:

"Small things are critical. Small things are key"

-Peter Fraser

Peter Fraser was the first artists I came across on this project brief. We each had to find an artists, and find a video about his work practise. I wouldn't normally have a big interest in photographers, but since the Site and Location I have enjoyed that element of working more and more. But rather than taking 'art shots'
(I don't know how to phrase what I'm trying to say here!), I really prefer the idea of photographing the everyday things, typical of people live, or what the world around me looks like right now. I'm always interested in looking at pictures of my parents growing up, not even just to see them at a younger stage, but to examine the backgrounds. What kind of cars are there, Is that shop closed down now? Is that wallpaper still available (or legal) today?....back to my whole interest in Trivia really.

 

Fraser constantly photographs daily life but doesn't consider himself a documentary photographer.
"I don't generally deal with personal issues". This is another element of his work that works for me. I don't really tend to deal with personal issues through my work (Or maybe I do and have done but can't fully see it).

Much of this project was completed in the last two weeks. So we had 14 days really to finish developing our idea and ....similar to Peter himself ->"12 Days-to be able to concentrate for 12 days was brilliant"
Well we had 14 Peter, are we not spoiled?!



'When I saw this cup poked through with cocktail sticks, I couldn't believe my eyes. I tried to stay calm'-Peter Fraser

"This was taken on a brilliantly sunny spring day in 2005, at a church in a remote Welsh village. I can't remember exactly where: I'd been driving around on a four-day photography trip and was very much in the zone. Since I'm not a documentary photographer, I don't feel the need to record that kind of detail. But I do remember it was a Sunday. When I pushed open the church door, there was no sound and nothing stirred: it was lunchtime, and the day's service must have been and gone. Even though I'm not religious, I always find churches interesting as places of quiet where you can hear your inner voice, away from the distracting ambient noise of modern life.

I slowly moved towards the rear of the church, conscious of the sunlight streaming through a stained-glass window to the right. I noticed a small door leading to a room containing the clerics' clothes, various artifacts and a safe. I had yet to take a single photograph when I caught sight of another door at the back of the room, smaller still.

I've spent years photographing objects close up, as I think small things are really important, not least because everything in the universe is made up of matter so small we can't see it with the naked eye. I almost never interfere with my subjects: there are mysterious forces at work in the world and they know, better than I do, how things should be placed. At the time, I'd been obsessed with a thought: that practically everything on Earth looks the way it does because, at some point, a human brain directed a hand to change the shape and nature of materials.

I sensed, as I went through that final door, that something might happen. And it did. There I saw, illuminated by intense sunlight pouring through a small window, a polystyrene cup with cocktail sticks poked through it – an exquisite example of the brain directing the hand to change the nature of materials. In such a situation, I never wonder how an object came to be. I tried to stay calm and took several photos, unable to believe my eyes. Minutes later, I was breathing the air outside, delirious with the thrill of being alive." Peter Fraser .Source  

Jessica Stockholder:

"challenges boundaries, blurring the distinction among painting, sculpture and environment, and even breaching gallery walls by extending beyond windows and doors"-The New York Times

Jessica Stockholder is an artists I haven't looked at in a while, and am glad to have come back to. 'Hollow Places' I found particularly interesting, especially her use of colour against the wood, the shape and general design of the work. her work has really helped to develop my work on this project.

Jessica Stockholder, Hollow Places

"My work developed through the process of making site-specific installations—site-specific sometimes in very specific ways but also just by virtue of being "art" in a room; there's at least that much going on between the work and its context; after all, paintings don't hang on trees. In all of the work I place something I make in relationship to what's already there. With installations it's the building, the architecture, or you might say it's the place that I work on top of; with the smaller pieces I work on top of or in relation to stuff that I collect. I don't see a dichotomy between formalism and something else. Form and formal relations are important because they mean something; their meaning grows out of our experiences as physical mortal beings of a particular scale in relationship to the world as we find it and make it. I don't buy that formalism is meaningless".-Journal of Contemporary Art January 2011

"paintings don't hang on trees"....that has stuck in my brain for some reason.

Grayson Perry:

"Fashion and consumerism feeds on youth and creativity"

Grayson Perry

Grayson Perry curates an installation of his new works alongside objects made by unknown men and women throughout history from the British Museum’s collection.

"He’ll take you to an afterlife conjured from his imaginary world, exploring a range of themes connected with notions of craftsmanship and sacred journeys – from shamanism, magic and holy relics to motorbikes, identity and contemporary culture.

Vases covered in witty captions, elaborate tapestries and the centrepiece, a richly decorated cast iron coffin-ship, will be displayed alongside objects from the past two million years of culture and civilisation. From the first great invention, the hand axe, to a Hello Kitty pilgrim hand-towel, you will discover a reality that is old and new, poetic and factual, and funny as well as grim.

‘This is a memorial to all the anonymous craftsmen that over the centuries have fashioned the manmade wonders of the world…
The craftsman’s anonymity I find especially resonant in an age of the celebrity artist.’

Grayson Perry RA, Turner Prize winner" Source

The Walthamstow Tapestry, Grayson Perry.

Works with ceramics, designs tapestries and is a character himself.
His work combine aspects of the modern world, brands, youth, fashion, and media are all reflected in his work. He is also interested in religious iconery, so in his tapestry version of "The Madonna", a Versasce photograph was used to base his design. Perry's Madonna is clutching "the ultimate consumer item", the handbag.