Day 1

It's day 1 of the project and, being the computer novice that I am, I'm just testing things out on my blogger site. Have a few ideas/themes that I might start experimenting with materials with tomorrow. Spent a bit of this afternoon having a look in the Sculpture section of the library and just picked out various books that caught my interest and see what they were like.

I'm going to try to post up some websites that I have been looking at in relation to these artists/works so I can further my research/process. So, the following is my list along with websites I've been looking at:

Anthony Gormley
Guardian article Possibly make links with my experience of medicine last year?

Simon Periton













Having looked at some of Periton's work, it reminded me of the intricate qualities that paper can take on when manipulated. Maybe look at making delicate of materials that are considered crude?

Robert Rauschenberg
"You begin with the possibilities of the material."
I want to almost search for what the material can offer. Discover potentials like flexibility, colours, etc.

Marc Quinn
Really like the traditional values with modernistic approach. Consider mixing not just medias but concepts to evoke responses?

David Smith
Guggenheim Museum, NY 2006 Visited this exhibition on holiday and loved it - particularly his smaller works. Definately want to work with metal and probably best to work at a smaller scale. Experimenting with coloured powders on the metal with directed lighting?

Jasper Johns

Richard Wilson
My proposal of a theme that looks at the discourse between the clouds and atmosphere with industries structures and products could allow the relationship between industrial materials (like metal) and natural phenomena (like light or water) to be examined. I really one of his works called: One Piece at a Time, where hundreds of suspended car mechanical components are dropped on the floor of a warehouse floor systematically at intervals. The intial spectacle is beautiful, but the final piece: a recording of all th pieces dropping, is even better. Have never really considered doing a sound piece but it could possibly analyse my theme better? Not sure.

RW: A fresh bunch of flowers was seen as a performance piece without performers, where these tributes were emerging as the ice melted, of course, there was a moment when the whole thing collapsed and there was what looked like seaweed everywhere. Accompanying that piece, which was the Slow Event, was the Fast Event which was not quite a Gamelan show but a three minute hard hit with pyros, drums and sculptural sound effects. I've known Anne and Paul since 1976 and it's always been an incredibly rewarding experience working with them because they have always been creative and active in their own areas and it's developed out of a genuine friendship. Paul-in answer to an invitation from the London Musicians Collective to take part in a festival just said to me and Anne "Do you fancy doing this with me?". I have a boat on the river and we went out on it to work out some ideas and we all got excited about the same things.



Ice could be a good medium to use for, as Wilson says, it provides a spontaneous transient quality. Performance could be an element to explore.. whether that be in real time materials or videoing of an event being played.

I've said before in an interview; what better way to deal with the idea of transformation than to deal with a material that has been through it's own transformation? Oil is also very much a material of our century. It has a strange wealth which is recognised- wars have been fought over it. I was also interested in using a material which was so anti sculpture, a material which you could be arrested and fined for if you poured it down the drain. It had all those environmentally unfriendly connotations. It brought me right back to the perfect solution of making a piece of work which is almost invisible, this connected on from the aluminium pieces except that in this case the room was the mould and the liquid remained liquid.
It was a totally psychological experience: I watched some people go into that room and walk halfway up the corridor and grab the sides - they thought the floor had gone. They got oil on them - but that described to me an inefficiency between the eye and the brain - like when you're on a train and the train next to you moves off and you think your moving, then you glance at the platform and see that you're not. Another thing about 20;50 was that, for it's time, it seemed to touch on it's immediate past: Op Art, Land Art, Field Painting, Installation - so many of those other "isms" from the sixties and early seventies were suddenly pulled together.

Tony Oursler
This atist's work reminded me of a work that I saw at the GSA degree show last year by Heather Brown. She did very similar pieces on eyes projected onto pink latex balloons. Oursler talks about media introjection... this concept of disruption to cause change or possible harm to the existing environment interests me.



Works partly made by hand and by video/projection allow them to estabish themselves on two different levels. There is a definate sense of interaction and yet there is a distancing of sorts. Strange... but this combination is very compatible. I would like to attempt to use this combination of techniques in my work perhaps.


Vera Rohm
"...a practical demonstration of the interweaving of light and shadow across the curved volumes of the built forms. The scientific purpose of this astonishing observatory is not forgotten, but its built mass is explored in terms of striking details, disorientating points of view abd effects of tonal equilibrium."
Rohm's most recent works, Integration, are a series of wooden scaffold like simple structures, where the beams have been stressed and broken to make splintered ends. These forms then seemlessly ajoin to glass/perspex beams of the same dimensions: beautiful. Ideas of poetry, transparency, endurance and merging come together in this work. 'Fertile' materials are used to create interior divisions. Again, I want to see through and around and inside materials: treating them and altering them to do so. Stripping them to their essential components.

Soft Sculpture and Other Soft Art Forms
"The artist began to explore the quality of the material and to allow this quality to become the expression of the piece. At the beginning, the pieces assumed sculptural dimension, but they were, for the most part, two-dimensional concepts with the addition of depth."
I am always attracted to textural surfaces as they interact on both physical and visual levels. Sometimes I find it challengingt= to bring an idea from a 2D to 3D status but I am aiming to explore 3D works for my final work... I hope.
Work by Kenneth weedman particularly interests me. His fluid use of materials to convey concept is intriguing. I want my work to flow and so the play of movement and progress should be evident in the materials. Wire, rope, cable, rubber, latex?

Alberto Burri









Getting back to the textural qualities of materials. Like the weave of the fabric... making links to stitching, bringing edges together: medical link with suturing? Welding of metal is the same concept. Want to break materials down and build them up again?