postgraduate art show lincoln 2015
DESCRIPTION
MA fine art final show exhibition 2015 publication. University of Lincoln United Kingdom.TRANSCRIPT
Project Space Plus
9-18 September 2015
to be discussed
A winding path
A winding path can be a wonderful way to feel lost, without actually straying from the correct track. A drift can be aimless, but usually involves structure, either by bumping up against something or by instigating a set of rules or parameters to stick to.
In Nicholson Baker’s novels a series of particular tasks – the lunch-break, striking a match to light a fire early each morning or feeding a baby – give a structure to allow meandering and divergent thoughts to emerge on the page. Within what could be perceived as repetitive, somewhat mundane activities, a congregation of insightful commentaries and observations surface. Through Baker’s writing, the reader’s mind is taken on a rich exploration of diverse human experiences.
Fine art students chart their own journey through the MA structure. Getting lost in an art practice can be exhilarating and useful where the route taken is rarely clear-cut and often not the one the student believes it will be when they start off. That is what makes studying and making art so exciting, challenging and generative.
The ability to take a personal concern or observation and to communicate it effectively to others should not be taken for granted. It requires knowledge, curiosity, experimentation, insight, playfulness and intelligent sensitivity. Nothing is achieved without dedication and commitment. The paths these students take requires them all to learn, unlearn and re-learn. I believe that they are all better artists for their unique journeys taken on the MA.
An artist keeps discovering fresh winding paths to take.Though on the surface they may appear to be the same, underneath they are all distinctive, much like the different thoughts evoked each time a match is struck or when on a lunch break. It is often in these ‘in between’ places, times or situations that the most profound possibilities are waiting, hidden from view, ready to be brought out into the open and unlocked by the artist.
Andrew BraceyProgramme leader MA Fine Art
to be discussed exhibits four artists whose work displays extraordinary focus and enquiry at the edges of the tangible, identifying particular moments of fleeting but intense experience. Through such concentrated, focussed work, these artists ask us - the audience - to consider if these brief moments are perhaps the most important moments in understanding the human condition. Instants of grieving for the tragedies of our shared history, or of one’s own intimate biography. Gestures of celebrating our community in its everyday variety and tracing our capacity to both heal and memorialise: meetings, losses, loves, accidents and tragedies, passers by, aftermath, and deferred beginnings. These are the kinds of intensely specific experiences we all share, but find challenging to interpret and explore in visual language. It is this highly complex and challenging seam of life that these artists mine.
So what is to be discussed? Awareness of our self and our world now; our self and our history then and the infinite threads of possible and impossible futures.
Michael Wilde paints the aftermath, the inscription, of the bloody trace of history in our memory and landscape. Eleni Zevgaridou seeks out and captures the individual on campus, and through conversation and meetings, celebrates their presence in sculptures
which exist as both objects and as groupings in conversation. Elizabeth Wright’s delicate ceramics and wood pieces emerge from processes of repetition, memorialising private grief, while Malynda Umland crochets the never-were as absent presences in women’s lives.
What is key in reading the work in ‘to be discussed’ is that while there are multiples, groupings, series and apparent repeats, none are ever the same. Why not? Because these artists also understand identity as in becoming, constituted anew in the now. The passage of time, repetition and remembering, constitutes each recurrence, each instance, differently, as different sums of then and now, of you and I, of here and there. As Kierkegaard wrote in 1843,
Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backwards, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forwards.*
Dr Catherine BurgePrincipal Lecturer, School of Fine & Performing Arts
* Soren Kierkegaard from ‘repetition’ 1843, re-quoted in Christine Battersby (1998)’ The Phenomenal Woman’, p. 172. Battersby’s translation reads more fluidly and poetically than quoting directly from my copy of ‘Repetition’ which is Princeton, 1983
MalyndaUmland
i’ve been thinking about this forever
Malynda Umland’s work questions the internal
conflicts raised in response to contemporary
family planning.
She reflects on and explores her own constant
emotional struggle to make the decision to either
prevent children or not. She examines the concept
of not allowing something to take form outside
one’s own imagination through the repetitive
process of crocheting and subsequently unpicking
a pair of baby booties as her way of memorialising
each opportunity passed by.
These baby booties, which other than within the
artist’s own memory and documentation end
up as something non-existant, are indicative of a
desired experience which she is actively denying
herself yet still mourns the loss of.
time is up
I am taking a bath.This is not an unusual practice for me.I love copious amounts of bubbles and soothing hot water.I sit there. 30, 60, maybe 90 minutes.90 minutes. 90 months. 90 pairs of baby booties.90. 90. 90.Usually I read, or listen to music.Not today.My mind is distraction enough.To do list: Make. Research. Make. Research. Reflect. Repeat.Was that the laundry buzzer I just heard?What will I make for dinner?Forget dinner, I have not planned lunch.I need to order groceries.Should we try, should we wait?I need to figure out my life first.House, dog, career, 401K.Forget that, put groceries in the fridge first.Maybe then, after we have groceries.My eyes close, ears and nose fill with water.Momentary silence.My heart is restless.Boom-boom. Boom-boom. Boom-boom.Clockwork.
I am sitting on the couch.A needle produces fabric out of wool in my lap.A bearded face is asking me for lunchMy head is in the refrigerator.Nothing is worth eating.It’s crinkle cut chips and chicken strips.From the freezer, to the oven.220 Degrees.Timer set.Tick tick tick tick. Tick tick tick tick.12 half double crochet.Join. Chain 2. 12 half double crochet.Tick tick tick tick. Tick tick tick tick.Boom-boom. Boom-boom. Boom-boom.My mind is back under the bubbles.Boom-boom. Boom-boom. Boom-boom.Tick tick tick tick. Tick tick tick tick.RING.Time is up.Hands still.My lap is home to half of one baby bootie.And unused wool.Not there yet.Time is up.
Malynda Umland
Michael Wilde
Michael’s work offers momentary images
aimed at the subconscious. Presented in groups
they are seen one after another, each having an
opportunity to make an impact on the viewer
or pass without effect. For a few individuals,
the glimpse of some particular image or other
may excite the imagination in a dynamic
way, whether consciously or unconsciously. It
will have a separate, “postbeing”, existence
alongside other continuing events in time, but
fade at an extremely slower rate. Its impact
on the continuity of experience will be
marked and remembered and it will in itself
be resistant to conscious modification through
time; unable to be changed by prolonged
perusal, it will punctuate the life of the
individual.
PostbeingI am,
Some where, some when.
Moving through space and time,
Transformed with each happening.
Me as other, after and before, here and everywhere else,
My being being different after each event I meet.
Instants of each passing “now” reveal a varied focus
That may reach the sublime in a sudden explosive burst that has a “postbeing” of unchanging impact, living forever as it was;
A permanent landmark in existence with its own times and spaces.
It fixes the changes it causes in me;
It moves my essence on and around the universe of all the instances that I am.
Michael Wilde
July 2015
ElizabethWright
Human culture is invested in things – but the arts have long hoped to disclose the human essence within them (Charlesworth, 2014).
How do objects mean?
How does a broken plate mean?
How does a plaster cast of a cereal bowl mean?
When we attend to the work of Elizabeth Wright, we find ourselves posing these questions. The carefully choreographed vignettes before us seem to make more salient, more vivid, the everyday means we all employ to make objects into emissaries of meaning. Vischer’s term Einfuhlung (feeling-into or empathy) comes to mind; we feel into the objects, and through them on into the other who created them. We have an inkling of her intentions through our embodied simulation of her actions - intersubjectivity through intercorporeality.
Charlesworth, J.J. (2014, June 24). Subjects V Objects. Retrieved from http://blog.jjcharlesworth.com/2014/06/24/subjects-v-objects/
A written response.David McAleavey 2015.
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EleniZevgaridou
NOMATEI
a koinônia of minumental figures
Nomatei* is a monument to the unacknowledged
people. Nomatei identifies differences of
characters, advocates diversity, and eliminates
hierarchies and social positions. Nomatei is a
‘minument’ to human nature and to the thesis that
every one holds an important role in society. It
offers space to frailty, to the seemingly insignificant
and the often bewildered.
How does one capture external characteristics
which embody what is hidden within? It might
be said that figuration in contemporary art is
currently a rare phenomenon; yet, at the same
time the figure may be accessible and identifiable
to most people. More so, the role of the figurative
monument is unclear in contemporary art and
life. Nomatei seeks to address this lack, explores
* Nomatei: a group of eponymous people that share the same ideology in this case the idea of a univer-sity.
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complementarity, understanding and social behaviour,
through the heterogeneity of the figure and through
minumentalisation.
The constant repositioning of these sculptural
‘sketches’ seeks to explore experiences of
cooperation, loneliness, tolerance, success, loss,
prejudice, and ultimately coexistence. The mode of
working, sketching in three dimensions, emphasizes
body language and poise, over detail, arguing that the
whole body is as eloquent as a portrait of each one
of us. Recognition of the sitter happens from the total
body not just the face. The scale and presentation
balance collectivity and solitude. We exist as ourselves
but also through others. For this reason we might
consider them not to be separate pieces but one
collective piece of work, a form of human society.
Nomatei is a monument for the inhabitants of the
University of Lincoln as a community. People that
perhaps have nothing in common apart from a
common denominator, the love for learning, the
inclination to research, to the new, to a collective
future.
Eleni Zevgaridou
We are very grateful to the following for their help, advice and interference:
Ang Bartram Richard BlackAndrew BraceyRob BrittCatherine BurgeStewart CollinsonFrederick DickinsonSteve DuttonJeanine GriffinSteve HaddockMedina HammadLee HassallAnnie MorradAnn PoveyAlec ShepleyFelicity ShumGerard Williams
issuu.com/tobediscussed/docs/tobediscussed
to be discussed
MA Fine ArtFinal Exhibition2015School of Fine and Performing Arts