Inviting the public into an artist’s studio.

With two colleagues (Tracy Brock and Bev Broadhead), we decided to invite friends and fellow artists to our studio space. Having recently moved in, we wanted to welcome them and also to show some recent work. I decided to use my wall space more as a salon type hang, to get work some past and some present and some on-going out on view. This was done as much for my benefit as it was for the visitors because I tend to make a lot of work and then shove it into a draw or a cupboard and don’t look at it again or see it as part of the body of work. It was interesting to me partly because I have a mixed practice to see drawings beside prints, sculpture, painting, and photographs. Looking at the work I wonder whether things are too disparate or whether they do constitute a recognisable body of work by a single artist as an outside observer might recognise. Yes, I know that they were all produced by me, that they all represent ideas and concepts that I’m interested in, or have researched and thought about, but productivity and heterogeneous output both alarms and pleases me.

I am also interested in producing work in one medium and then seeing how the same idea can be realised in another medium or taking a work and moving it from 3-D, to 2-D, and back into an element of a 3-D piece. Clearly, the work changes, develops, and sometimes is spoiled or even retarded by the slippages back and forth. But, as my practice is in part one of experimentation, the work doesn’t stop, and therefore no work or idea is completed, or exhausted. It might be left behind for a while but on this journey I will sometimes double back, and catch up with it again, reimagining it or having a new conversation with it.

And come back to my earlier thoughts on the opening, it seemed to me that the reason for doing it was not really to show work, but to begin a conversation, the conversation I might have with my own artwork, a conversation I might have with friends and other artists, and a conversation my work may have with my two studio colleagues’ work. So, the dialogue or dialogues were happening on many different levels and with different potential outcomes–all relevant, all interesting, and all about the beginning of something rather than an ending or a conclusion.

I am sure too that I need to think more about the difference between a studio where I make work and a gallery or other venue, where work may be displayed. Of course, I am aware of the work of Daniel Buren and am sure that this is just the start of my thinking about how I am using a studio space and with what purpose – other than simply to make art.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Working collaboratively.

I’ve been thinking more and more about working collaboratively with other artists. I’ve had some experience with the salon I established the group of fellow students during my undergraduate years in Norwich. We produced several pieces based upon instructions and exchange of objects, artifacts and artworks. Perhaps the most successful collaboration was with Jellis Artist, and the film that resulted in the instructions I sent her in New Zealand. The resulting work, ‘I love you like salt’, we uploaded onto Vimeo and has now had over 2500 views.

Recently, I have also collaborated with the artist David Kefford, a director at Aid and Abet, the artist run space in Cambridge. Together, he and I made an intervention piece in the chapel at Jesus College Cambridge. We have also collaborated on number of sculptural pieces and a short film and thinking about further collaborative works.

I have seen work produced collaboratively by artists such as Gilbert and George, Jake and Dinos Chapman, and Townley and Bradbury. All these artists collaborations seem to work in different ways, but they seem to share something in common being either siblings, married partners, or lifelong soul-mates (collaboratively speaking).

What then marks a successful collaborative arrangement?  Certainly a sublimation of ego is necessary.  When I showed interventions recently made by the artist Tracy Brock with several of my artworks I deemed ‘collaborations’ and exhibited them on my studio walls.  A fellow artist was appalled that I was happy with my work being interfered with.  I regarded it as a compliment that a fellow artist wanted to interact with my work and felt no loss of authorship.