Exhibitions

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted on here – and for good reason. Over the past 5 months my life has been jam packed with work. Between setting up my exhibition in December, finishing my work for semester one, developing my ideas, my research and my final piece in time for the graduate exhibition; I’ve barely had a minute to myself since the last time I posted.

It was my own fault entirely, of course. My ideas for this semester were more than ambitious, and without the time and dedication I had to put in, I doubt it would have worked out within even a margin of what I had imagined. But more on that later.

Christmas Exhibition at Denbies Wine Estate

This was my first proper exhibition and I was beyond nervous. It takes a lot of time, energy and money to set up an exhibition – even just in terms of frames. The fact we’d organised it around Christmas really didn’t help the feeling either. Nor did the fact that one of the artists didn’t arrive to set up until after midday, without labels, cards or a short summary about their work. Besides that, it went well. It’s wonderful to hear what people have to say about your work, the medium or the subject it was based on. I feel as much I informed people on what my pieces were about, I also learned a lot too: on how people absorb the images without the context; about the tales themselves, and quite often the relations they had to the viewers; and people’s curiosities, understandings and experiences with the techniques
I was using. In the end I only sold one print itself – one from the Lord Bateman set. But the feedback I received was just as valuable either way and motivated me a lot in the start of the semester. Other than the lino cut, I also managed to sell all of the story books I illustrated and had printed for the event (which can also be bought here and here). While we were all exhausted by the time it came down on the 27th December, it was well worth the effort and an overall success.

Undergraduate Exhibition

I don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard for anything in my life. The run up was hectic. I don’t think there was a day that I wasn’t doing some kind of work for it. Be it cutting prints, doors, making designs, looking at artists or planning the set up in general. I thought about it while eating, in the shower, as I drifted off to sleep. I’m sure I’ll still be getting war flashbacks to it when I’m eighty, rocking in a corner somewhere and screaming “And it was all for what? Sixty three percent?!” Though, honestly, I’m not bothered about the mark. I knew I was never going to get a great one – and not because I don’t believe in myself – but because I knew my tutors weren’t quite as enthusiastic about my ideas as I was, or that I was experimenting, pushing the boundaries of what printmaking is. And I don’t blame them, if it all went south it fell as much on their heads as it did on mine. While in the end the installation hasn’t come out entirely perfectly – down to a few small miscalculations – I am proud of what I managed to achieve. At the exhibition I heard nothing bad. The worst I had was “it’s different” and I’m glad they thought that. It was supposed to be. It wanted to make an installation piece that represented me as a person; my identity, nationality, sense of self. I wanted to create a piece that was eclectic and dissonant in places. I wanted to make something that showed all of the family members who contributed to making me who I am today. And I did. And I’m pleased with it. I learned a lot in the process. I know where I want to go with my art at very least now, even if I’m still uncertain about my life plans.

I feel like I really achieved something.

Jacob Epstein: Rock Drill – An Essay

Although Jacob Epstein himself tried to stay independent from the avant-garde groups of his time, besides The London Group – an amalgamation of The Camden Town Group and the English Cubists which formed itself in 1913 – his sculpture Rock Drill inhabits many styles of the modernist movement. These included hints of Futurism’s fascination with machinery, aggressiveness and war; Vorticism’s concept of “the point of maximum energy” and Duchamp’s take on Dada with his readymade objects such as the bicycle wheel which he’d announced as a piece of art recent to the time of Rock Drill’s creation.

The sculpture was comprised of an actual drill, bought second hand, and what is described by Epstein in his autobiography as “a machine-like robot, visored, menacing” in plaster perching on the instrument, the complete piece standing at around 3 meters. This figure, simultaneously man and mechanical with both parts merging into an extension of the other, did still appear to have a few shreds of mimicked organic nature to it in the foetus or “it’s progeny, protectively ensconced” within its ribcage, and the lines in the back and shoulder of the form from behind, almost presenting an anatomical description of the muscles of a human body. Like in many of Epstein’s sculptures presenting pregnancy and the female form, such as Figure in Flenite, the neck of the model cranes forward and the arm that controlled the drill defensively and equally aggressively curves around the form within. The fierceness and mechanisation of this sculpture has strong links to the Vorticist movement with the style of abstraction, modernity, the penetration of the space around it and, though being completely immobile, a sense of movement and dynamism within the work.

While Gaudier-Brzeska and T. E Hulme – who was to write a book on the piece and Epstein’s other work before he was killed by a shell in 1917 – showed enthusiasm for the sculpture, much of the public were disturbed and disgusted by it when it was exhibited in 1915 along with works from other artists in the London Group. The Current Art Topics article in the May 1915 edition of the Fine Arts Journal can be seen as an example of this, openly slandering Epstein and the London Group’s exhibition, which the author describes as “refuse”, stating:

“The piece de resistance – the draw, of the show is Mr. Jacob Epstein’s performance entitled ‘Rock Drill,’ exhibited first, I believe, at Brighton a year or so back, to the scandal of the community. Neither it nor its meaning can be fully described in these pages, but I can quote the ‘Observer’ probably the foremost English Sunday paper whose art critic writes as follows: ‘The whole effect is utterably loathsome,’ * * * ‘Even leaving aside the nasty suggestiveness of the whole thing’ etc., etc.”

By the time of its exhibition in 1916, however, Epstein had dismantled the piece, removing the legs, the drill and cutting the arm that operated it off at the elbow, casting it in gunmetal in a rather bitterly ironic way and renaming the work Torso in Metal from the ‘Rock Drill’. The slaughter

that was witnessed in this time and the death of Gaudier-Brzeska in June 1915 on one of the French battlefields was said to have spurred many associates of the Vorticists into a realisation of the true horror of war and influence Epstein’s radical alterations to his work. It has been widely understood that this fragmentation of the sculpture was a mirror of the very same fragmentation and destruction that fell upon the men and their bodies on the battlefields and trenches of France during the War. Though having been cast in metal, these alterations made the sculpture appear no stronger, but defenceless and sad, unable to protect the progeny within him. Much later, Epstein would write about the previous state of the work: “Here is the armed, sinister figure of to-day and to-morrow. No humanity, only the terrible Frankenstein’s monster we have turned ourselves into.”

Henceforth, Epstein’s Rock Drill, a sculpture that was before violent and optimistic though ‘prophetic’ to the destructiveness of the First World War, became a symbol of the audacity and atrociousness of war and the demise of the avant-garde. Many avant-garde artists and those that had associated themselves and their work with the Vorticists had – or had known those who had – enlisted during the war days, leaving their numbers dwindling in Britain by the end as they died or recoiled from the movement and its implications of human abstraction and mechanistic energy. Epstein himself stated that he couldn’t see that forms of abstraction taken up later than 1913-14 made “any advance on the period, or produced more novel forms,” besides the use of mannequins in surrealism and what he describes as “lunatic collections.” Despite his negativity towards progressing appearances of avant-garde art, his work still had a profound influence on later artists such as Henry Moore.

 

Bibliography

Carroll, Luscombe. Current Art Topics, Fine Arts Journal. Volume 32 (5). 1915.

Comentale, Edward P; Gasoirek, Andrzej. T.E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism. Ashgate Publishing Limited. 2006.

Cork, Richard. ‘Rock Drill’: Rediscovering a Lost Revolutionary Sculpture. Available: http://www.henry-moore.org/hmi/events/past-events/2013/richard-cork. 2013. Last accessed: 2nd November 2014

Cork, Richard. Jacob Epstein. London: Tate Gallery. 1999.

Epstein, Jacob. An Autobiography. London: Hulton P. 1955.

Malvern, Sue. Modern Art, Britain and the Great War: Witnessing, Testimony and Remembrance. London. 2004

Redfern, David. History of the London Group. Available: http://www.thelondongroup.com/history.php. Last accessed: 30th October 2014

Walsh, Micheal J. K. London, Modernism and 1914. London: Cambridge University Press. 2010

Running About in Wales and Preparing to Exhibit

It feels like last Saturday was decades ago, largely because I tried to fit a weeks worth of tourist attractions into three days, for my lovely friend, Lily. It was good to have a break, to be honest. And I do love rubbing the scenery of Aberystwyth in other people’s faces – especially if they go to mainland Universities. Though – as I learned on Wednesday – Rochester, with its castle and cathedral, is a good rival.

But I’m back to the grindstone now: framing, organising, making lists and slowly succumbing to the madness within. I think everyone’s a little on edge. A lot of my work still needs to be framed at worst and screwed with picture hooks and wire at best, and no one else is much better. There is little chance I’ll have time to finish my ceramics for exhibition – which is not necessarily a bad thing if you consider that they’re currently not in the best state. I’m looking forward to it though, even if it is a bit daunting, at least in hopes that I might get a solid response to my work from the public, if not a bit of cash. God knows I need it this time of year.

One More Week of Sorrow…

There are teen days until my exhibition and I am bricking it, so to speak. Though I’ve finished all my course work within my means at Uni, I’m far from done. Between manning the show for five days, Christmas and New Years, I need to find time to play about with a kiln and do some dodgy decals. And whether or not they’ll be successful is another thing entirely. But I’ve done the plans and made what are effectively simulations of what they’ll look like when done, so I can pray.

Besides my work, I’ve had to deal with the monotonous, droning of my housemate’s Skype calls, words as crisp as a winter’s morning through my wall, continuously from 4 in the afternoon until 2 in the morning (or taking-the-mick o’clock, as I like to call it). It’s the sort of talking that is so loud and equally uninteresting that there’s more of a chance that I’ll die of boredom before I actually fall asleep. Though such is life.

Tomorrow, a friend from home is coming up, so I’ll be very occupied
showing her the sole tourist attraction we have in Aber and trying to find something to entertain her for the remaining three days in the vile Welsh weather. Though there are high chances we may just spend the entirety of the time dressed up as regency dandies, smoking cigars – which isn’t a bad outcome to be honest.

Time is passing way too quickly.

Haunted by The Ghost of a Flea

For the past few weeks, we’ve had fleas – fantastic, I know. And not just the sort of fleas you shower once and flea treat your pets and they’re gone. They’re the sort of fleas that live in the carpet and keep on coming back just when you thought you’d got rid of them. The sort of fleas that are probably laughing with their flea mates over a drink, about how stupid you are, and giving you the middle finger while you aren’t looking.

I bought flea spray and ritualistically sprayed my whole bedroom three times a day, which didn’t seem to work. Then we got a bunch of insect bombs and nuked the house. That evening, a flea landed on my sketchbook. I watched the life drain out of its sad little body, satisfied with our work, and then skewered it with a pencil. The last I saw of them, the grandfather of all flea grandfathers landed on my arm and looked at me as if to say “Geoff you” before I squished it and threw the corpse into the bin.

I haven’t seen one since, or even noticed a bite, but the fleas still haunt me. Even the word makes me itch like mad. I couldn’t help but scratch myself as I wrote three paragraphs on The Ghost of a Flea by William Blake for my most recent essay, the bug between his legs mocking me as I wrote. It didn’t make me feel any better, either, reading in John Varley’s notes on the painting, saying ‘that all fleas were inhabited by the souls of such men, as were by nature bloodthirsty to excess, and were therefore providentially confined to the size and form of insects: otherwise, were [one], for instance, the size of a horse, [it] would depopulate a great portion of the country.’ I must say, I’ve had a few nightmares of that nature since, and woken up itching like I was wearing a shoddily made Christmas jumper.

Of course, the itchiness may be dude to the thousands of tiny slices of lino that have embedded themselves into my carpet and seem too turn up everywhere I go. I would hoover them up but I’ve come to realise that 1) there are considerably more important things I could be doing and 2) our hoover is about as good as a mouse with asthma sucking on a straw.

But the presence of lino shards actually means I’ve been doing my work and believe me I have been working my sorry little butt off. In the past week I have cut and printed three A3 prints, one of which was a reduction print, and an A4 reduction of a face. I’m exhausted, I must say. But it’s all coming along: the Lankin prints have been decorated and are ready to scan and I’ve begun playing around with the design for Twa Sisters on the computer. I’m contemplating putting ink on some of my older prints for Lord Bateman as well, considering how nicely the blue and green theme for Lankin turned out.

Gods willing, I’ll be done with them and the ceramics themselves by the end of the week, giving me enough time to prepare for my exhibition from the 21st to the 27th this month.

Please check out the facebook event for it: Denbies Exhibtion – Light and Colour

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.

Thought For the Week: Sexism of Studying Art

I will admit before I came to University, I believed there was equality between the sexes. My mother never made me feel any different from my brother and, when it came down to it, I just thought my dad was little bit prudish and old fashioned when it came to him letting my brother get away with bad table manners or loud and agressive attitudes (which were my not so secret talent).

But there isn’t, not completely, not at all. And it’s one of those things, we’re so used to it that it slips through the cracks. It’s not like racism, people see that a mile off now. Not that they always did. But if you say all black people are theives and crooks deepdown, it’s obvious to everyone that you’re a racist. Where as if you say all women are housewives or their only purpose is to have offsporn and care for them, it’s sexism but most ordinary people wouldn’t even think to point it out. Not that racism and sexism are remotely the same thing on any level, but racism is lot easier to see at the moment.

Since I’ve come to Uni, I’ve really seen it. And franky it’s soul destroying. No one has respect for you, or things you do. I’ve had conversations with men who are less educated on a subject than I am and won’t admit my point is right (or even factually correct, which it is) until another man has repeated what I’ve said in full as if they’ve made it up themselves. You work three times as hard as a man at university doing art and get half the marks if you’re lucky, and not because their work is good, but because they’ve got the lecturers, who are also all men, in their pockets. As a woman, they’ll name anything you do silly and girlish, like my themes of folklore and folkmusic, but a man who does the same is creative, innovative and intelligent. My work involving the death of a character, which does happen a lot in folklore, is – and I quote – “morbid and… unconventional…” while another male student whose work is based solely on drawing cartoon corpses is “an inspiring look at the world”.

They sound like small silly things, I will admit. But they add up and I’m tired of my work and thoughts and values being discredited solely because I am woman and I have a vagina. The thing that hit me hardest though and spurred me to write this post, was that I went to the Harry Potter Studio Tour yesterday with my friend for her birthday. When we got to to the art department’s section, I looked through the wall covered in works of art and at all the names of the artists there. The wasn’t a single woman. Not one. And if there was, they definitely didn’t display her. It really hurt, I was looking at it all thinking I’d love to do this sort of thing and then realising that I obviously don’t have the right genitalia for it. And that’s not an over-reaction. From my experience of doing Art in Further and Higher Education is that there are minimal men doing it. We’ve got a year of 60 pupils and 3 of them are men and I know for a fact that it’s very similar in most other Universities. But the men alway come out on top.

I don’t want my work to be judged on the hole between my legs.

This Semester’s Portfolio – The Best Bits

La Thuile des Fées With Fae

The Litle Elder Tree Mother

Arianwen

Silent Poole

Voice Like a Nighitingale

Vanya

From Aberystwyth With Love

Study

Fae

The Forsake Mermaid

La Thuile des Fées

The Forsaken Mermaid Book Covers

Portfolio submitted. Assessment completed and I’d like to think it went pretty alright. I’m a free man, even if I do feel a bit like my life has next to no purpose anymore – besides cleaning. Our house is a state and my mum arrives on Wednesday, so this is going to be fun. I cleaned the stairs yesterday with a dustpan and brush because our hoover is a hunk of shite and I can honestly say it was a terrible mistake. I am still surprised that to dust didn’t crawl up my arm and strangle me – and there’s a little bit of me that wishes it had. We had enough dust on our stairs to make Jeremy Clarkson two toupés and a matching merkin for good measure, and possible more if you can manage to extract what’s imbedded in my lungs.

Also, I think I might set up shop as an Agony Aunt due to a weird sudden influx of people asking for relationship advice. “What should I say to her?” “Does the mean she likes me?” “I think she doesn’t like me, what should I do, oh Alex, your highness?”. Frankly, I find it rather comical. One, because half of these questions are posed by Ex-Boyfriends I’ve been trying to chat up, and two, because my love-life is a joke. And I mean literally a joke. We laugh about it around the dinner table, on nights out, every time anyone of the male variety is mentioned in conversation. But then again if people are pleased with my bad relationship advice, they can take it. I’d just recommend not using it on anything you expect to last more than three months.

Yet More Woe

If I said this week has been the most stressful week in my life, it’d probably a gross understatement. Besides rushing to get my work done before hand-in tomorrow, realising that there isn’t a chance in hell the posters I printed online weren’t going to arrive before sumbission because of the awful delivery company that is UKMail and having to fork out an extra £50 to get them printed at a local store, the results of the general election make me want to pull my hair out. I probably wouldn’t be quite so angry if we had a proportional voting system that meant your vote counted towards something even if your constituency has a majority one way or the other, but we don’t. And it baffles me as to how so many people can listen to the right-wing media, run by Cameron’s chums, and believe that they’re doing a good job despite the fact that the number of people forced to use food banks has risen drastically since Cameron came to power, there is now more national debt than there was in every Labour government combined, 25% percent of children are living in poverty and that they want to scrap the Human Rights Act – wehey!

On the plus side, I’ve got my portfolio sorted and ready to submit tomorrow, even if there’s a little nagging in the back of my head telling me that I’ve probably forgotten something. I don’t think I have, but this speaks for my whole second year at University so I have a right to be nervous. Though I’m pretty pleased with the re-done illustration prints, or at least they’re superior to the God-awful paintings I did, even if they don’t fit the brief – and it’s extra work so I might even get some brownie points for that as well.

Either way, if this all goes to shit I’m moving to France and buying some sheep or something.