Something Your Nan Might Like

Over the past two months, I’ve been experimenting a lot with my art and especially its target audience. Before, I was kind of making work for myself – largely – or catering what my tutors and other art-trained professionals might like. This semester, I’ve decided to twist that, to make art that you don’t need a degree or any kind of artistic knowledge to look at and understand at very least. I wanted to make something your nan, or your hipster cousin, or your four year old son might like. Something that was interactive, and didn’t just had sit on a wall, behind a sheet of glass.

So, I’ve started playing with ceramics.

I’m using my good old themes of love, death and destruction in folk songs and stories, like I have been before,  but I’m transferring the finished linocuts onto pre-made ceramics with decal paper. Generally, I put them on appropriate items that would add to the story: for example, a milk jug for Twa Sisters because they were supposed to be a farmer’s daughters and so I could put the drowned body of the girl at the bottom.

I’ve finished a plate set already which has turned out alright for a first try. But what I’m finding hardest is translating my thoughts about it to my tutors. They don’t seem to understand I’m not trying to make ‘High Art’. I’m making something for real people, not some elusive, rich, old man, hiding behind his critic column in The Telegraph. I was asked in a tutorial today if the print I’ve been slaving over for the past week was going to be an ‘actual print’, separate from the ceramics. It was already an actual print: I’d cut the lino, rolled up the ink, ran it through a press onto paper and would present it in portfolio like I’d done both years before. The only difference being that it would have a sister, sitting at the bottom of a milk jug. If someone pasted Millais’ Ophelia onto a dinner mat, it wouldn’t render the whole painting obsolete. So why does extending my work that little bit further – to combine the folk stories with a form of traditional folk art like ceramics – render it worse off than if I’d simply left it on the paper?

The art world perplexes me.

I’m Back

Summer and the months leading up to now have been stressful to say the least, hence the lack of online presence. In June, a guy I’d been at school with since playgroup got hit by a car and killed on a night out. I found something that generally wouldn’t effect me pushing me into a mass of tears, and I struggled with the feelings of shock and confusion most of summer months. It wasn’t even that I knew him particularly well – we hadn’t spoken properly for years. But when I thought of him, I saw the innocent four year old that I grew up beside who drew the best dinosaurs I had ever seen. Only recently have I stopped thinking about it in every spare second.

Between that, I was framing, cropping and polishing ready for my upcoming exhibition in December. I planned on doing far more work than have, I must admit. But I did manage to finish my first oil painting, ready to framed when I return from University – which I pray will come sooner rather than later or there is every possibility I may go insane from lack of outside exposure and slow internet.