ImechE Cardboard Boat Race 2010

This was organised to persuade people that engineering is fun. And it is! The challenge was to make a boat from cardboard, gaffa tape, varnish and sealant, within a few hours to carry two of the four team members in a 200 meter boat race.

It didn't matter that none of us were engineers, or had any experience of it, or had ever even considered designing a boat of any form....It did matter that we could swim though!

Rather than create designs in advance we prepared by having a chat about it in the car on the way to Plymouth with a bit of input from google on the iphone. the key things we discovered were that the boat must displace more water than the weight of contents of the boat. We also discovered that it was good to keep the weight relatively low in the boat to prevent it from toppling over.
Advice from googling suggested that we should refrain from folding or damaging our cardboard, we should triple layer the cardboard varnishing each side and that we should spend significant time on the folds and seals to waterproof our boat.....so that's what we did!

There were 6 teams in total and each boat was so different! When we lined up on the quay, none of the boats had been in the water and none of us really knew if they would float or sink let alone get accross a 200 meter course. And some of them did do it!....some of them didn't :-) 

Somehow, who knows how, our team managed to win the heat we were in and also the race in full! Google's advice was brilliant....but even more useful was discovering how important oars are....they experience much more stress. It would be worth focussing a lot more attention on them in the future.

Affinity - Laura Medler workshop

So, One of the things that you can get out of art school....I project....is an experience of other people's creative processes.

With the Beastie series, I found that I liked to create visual narratives....I started with one picture which I felt epitmoised a feeling (not a whole story) and once I'd finished that picture, I looked at it, tried to see it from a different angle, and wondered what would happen next....at some point, usually within a day or so, I would feel like I knew what hapened next and I drew that image, then I'd start the process again and in this way I built a whole world around the central character Beastie.

I worked on three series since 2008 when I re-started to make pictures again and each series went through a similar process....the symbology developed and the techniques developed somewhat, but at some point I found it difficult to know how to continue. Hence recognising the need from some external input at Slade summer school. Partly I was blaming my lack of technical skill, partly I felt I wanted to move on and didn't know how to.

Following my two weeks of drawing into painting, I was given the opportunity to assist on Laura Medler's  and John Hilliard's photography workshops at theend of August. Despite the fact that I'm not a photographer, I leapt at the opportunity as I saw it as the perfect chance to see how real artists work and learn anything I could about their practice.

Needless to say, I was very nervous, I had no idea what to expect, and wasn't sure that I would understand or appreciate the work so I decided to try and prepare as much as possible.

Laura's workshop was first, and this is about that workshop.

I started off looking at Laura's photos on her website. Immediately, I liked the look of her images. The first I saw were deliciously lush gardens with women on swings. The images were distorted somehow and gave the impression of falling and were somehow reminiscent of magic and myths and childhood. Once in Laura's workshop, we had the opportunity to see a chronology of work which she produced and understand how she got there which I'll talk about later.

One of the other pictures which stood out for me in Laura's website was an image entitled 'still isodorable'. Firstly it jumped out because it was quite different from some of the rest of her work and I was interested in the fect that it was about another artist (Isodora Duncan), secondly, at school I attended dance classes and had been compared to Isodora but didn't really know much about her and never bothered to find out...But the synchronicity was so enjoyable that I decided to pursue it further and try and find out more about her.

Some stand out stuff about Isodora Duncan (for me!)

• She lived with her lover Paris Singer for a while at Oldway Mansion - just down the road from wher I grew up
• When I googled 'Isodora Duncan Devon' the website for Guy's Cliffe holiday flats comes up at the top of the list...this is where my husband was living when I first met him
• Despite being 'blousey' or older and embarrassing the public of her day by having a sexual appetite, she was still an excellent dancer who changed people's views of dance irrevocably
• Her signature dance moves were often prolonged stillness withonly small movements - as suggested in Laura's images

Obviously there's masses more about her which is fascinating, and I felt like I came to the workshop with some source material, which if a bit cheeky (would Laura be irriatated by my developing work derived from her ideas?), was at least really interesting for me. I felt like a detective....or perhaps that was just that google also threw up loads of links to Agatha Christie whenever I googled.

Needless to say, there wasn't really any time to develop the work I wanted to while helping out on the workshop, we were learning new techniques and didn't have masses of time to develop work from them, but I could and perhaps will in the not too distant future.

Laura's approach to photograhy is firstly and necessarily analogue, it is technique or materials based...wheras I work from an image or idea with what materials I use to produce it being secondary, Laura like an intrepid explorer has taken the photographic technique and explored the options and limits of her own unique technique and this has helped her to formulate imagery who's narrative or symbolic content has its roots in the experience of the material process. I don't think I'm quite able to do it justice, but can only encorage you to take a look. It all makes sense and it still looks great!

I think that what really attracts me to her work is the internal logic. The work hints at grand themes without being airy fairy; there is a strong sense of the symbolic and is quite 'readable'. The work also seems to reference Laura's personal experiences and sense of place in her world and therefore has a sense of integrity which is very refreshiong....you don't feel like you're being given a dose of bullshit! and I think that the work is quite conceptual and (yet...because some people hate conceptual work) I think it works it it's on right, tilting the viewer towards interpretation but without requiring the viewer to know about x y and z in advance, finally, I like the fact that the work is clearly a female view of the world without being painfully political or feminist or angst ridden, this was really refreshing and I found myself hoping to find more work like this to look at!  ....For this reason I think that Laura's work is very very clever and I feel really priveliged to have worked with her.

Sandra Smith told me when she gave me the opportunity to assist Laura that she thought I would resonate with her approach...   It feels a bit stalkerish to say so, but I would say that I really felt a sense of affinity and I really hope to have the chance to follow her carrer.
The participants of the workshop were all attending Slade's foundation programme. The background and skills was very varied and in order to build up the group, the first day explored photograms.

On the following day time was taken up with some distractions - having to attend a meeting, participants dropping in and out and trying to convey the technique which Laura uses generally. The afternoon gave everyone the chance to stage an image/event and then try the process out for themselves.

The final day consisted of learning how to develop black and white film and then creating contact sheets with the intent of producing enlargements if desired.

I think that each student got results which is good, but it occurred to me that one of the downsides of a foundation is that one experiences a very wide range of distractions and also perhaps an overload of input without the time to develop what you produce. Also, the broad range of student needs is very challenging for any tutor and groups can be swayed off course by the dynamics of powerful individuals.

Really valuable tips from Laura about making art-work

1. Work and keep working even when you totally hate what it is you are producing - starting to work after a gap is very very hard
2. Most artists struggle with how to continue to work, especially after producing really good work - it can be hard to follow it up
3. When you work, you don't have to produced 'finished pieces' or ;real artwork'. the process of engaging with you material or technique throws up ideas and content as you progress

Inception - the beginning of an undertaking

At the heart of the film Inception seems to be the messages

• ideas are powerful, they have deep roots in our psyche and they shape our being
• ideas are dangerous, they can kill you
• you cannot change someone's mind easily, you must delve deep into their being to do so
• you must overcome the ghosts that haunt you to achieve your goal
• whose dream are you in?

There were probably lots more things to think about, lots more to 'get', but in amongst all that cleverness, 'bourne identity' feeling action and multi-level conciousness I lost myself a bit and came out of the film feeling dizzy, nauseaous and uncomfortable, I felt a little paranoid, like Alice in Wonderland perhaps.

Thinking about concepts and ideas, being in my head a lot, it makes me feel disorientated, I can loose confidence in myself and my judgements, it can be too ephemeral and each thing that I grasp at to find stability or direction, disolves or disappears. At times like these I am reminded to be here now. To re-focus on now, this moment, here - what my real senses are really experiencing in this moment.....Is this like forgetting?....or are films like Inception designed to make you forget? 

Lessons from Slade

Thinking of my experience at summer school in Slade, I thought I'd draw out so of the lessons I came away with.

1. The answers to the questions that other people ask you can tell you more than the answers to the questions that you ask other people

2. An object is always in relation to something else and your perception of that object shifts depending on how it is framed.....Even 'unfilled space' carries meaning, although what exactly is in that emptiness will be brought by the viewer not necessarily the framer

3. Follow your own narrative, by attempting to identify your hangups and overcome them, by allowing yourself to be taken away from your comfort zone and engaging the power if synchronicity, by communicating your need and trying to overcome it yourself, by attempting to learn what is being asked of you whilst focussing on what you are learning not what you think you should be learning, by freeing yourself from pre-conceptions and by grounding yourself in self-belief and by receiving the love that is all around you.

Drawing into painting 1 at Slade summer school

19th - 30th July 2010

Does it matter if you want to make art professionally but havn't been to art school?
I don't really know to tell the truth, but I've spent a lot of time suspecting that it does.

Immersion in an art world, the chance to learn and develop and artistic language, all those practical skills you have time to develop, all those friends and mentors, the platform for showing your work, stimulation, inspiration, feedback and support. I think I would have liked that.

I'm not saying I didn't get the chance to study...I did, I studied arts and cultural management at Dartington College of Arts and then at the University of Sussex. The inimitable Sue Kay & Janet Summerton as my tutors; truly inspirational and powerfully intelligent ladies. They taught me some of the basics about the culture business in the labour era.

Was it because I was too young to appreciate it? Was it because I wished I was somewhere else? Was it because I'm not particularly academic or was it just a story of life that meant that I didn't really 'get it'. But to date, I have spent the last 10 years wishing that I had ignored my cousin's advice and gone to art school to study fine art rather than do what I did.

My cousin, who may not even remember the incident now, said that art school was a terrible and brutal place which destroys your artistic soul. He was my hero (being the only artist I knew) so naturally I believed him. And despite the fact that I loved making in a way that somehow defies description, I decided to do something more 'business focussed'.

So, early this year, I decided that I was fed up of feeling so sad about this, and besides I can't afford to go back to do another degree and learn everything I feel I've missed out on, so I saved up and decided to go to Slade for two weeks on a summer school course entitled 'Drawing into Painting 1'.

I don't want to mislead you...I haven't been doing nothing for 10 years. I've squeezed in a bit of drawing between my day job and my social life, I worked for a few years doing arts admin and I was a puppeteer/puppet-maker breifly but somehow this hasn't felt 'enough'; I've been haunted by regret and lack of experience. I finished a series of 24 drawings in 2009 entitled Beastie and the Golden Cat which you can see on my website and since then I've found it hard to know what to do next...All the things I've done to develop the prject have been cringeworthy. So I suppose what I'm saying is that I was really ready for any input which I could get at Slade. I was ready to absorb it all, to learn anything I could, and I had no pre-conceptions and so it's not surprising that I think that this summer school may have been one of the most transformative of my life.

Three tutors across 10 days of tuition - Ian Rowlands, Daniel Preece and Sandra Smith all brilliant teachers and all excellent artists....Line, tone, measurement, scaling up, temperature, mixing colours in a limited and extended palettes, proporation, placement and tips for following your own creative path. I'd like to go into detail about exactly how we explored each of the elements of the course, but I'm not sure I'd do it justice and I'd just land up writing far far too much!

I don't know how much of this stuff people get to learn at art school...or are people supposed to learn it in college or at school? Daniel told us about a trip he made to a maths summer school in his teens where they re-visited all the times tables he would have learned in primary school. He said that re-learning these helped him to fill in the essential missing gaps in his knowledge and helped him pass his exams. In the same way, this course was designed to do just that....and I would say that it did.

But the course wasn't only brilliant because of the input from the tutors...perhaps the other things that are so brilliant about summer schools are meeting other people from all over the world and from all sorts of different backgrounds...who could fail to be inspired? to make new friends and imagine new worlds? and taking a significant amount of time out of your everyday life to focus on something totally different ....who could fail to be refreshed?

A friend asked me during the summer school - If you had the choice, would you choose to journey to the centre of a great city, to knock on a door and to enter a new world in which everyone knows you and welcomes you with open arms, or, would you choose to journey down a well, to know on a door and find yourself exactly where you are...I decided that I choose to be here, now. Primarily because I struggle to believe in another world where everyone loves you (it seems too unlikely) and secondly because instinctively I prefer to believe that my life is here and now and not distant from me. As a result of the question, I decided to focus my making on the present, the being here now. I drew on the people and environment, I drew on memories which grounded me and I painted Felix, the French chap at his easel opposite me, I drew the walls, windows, light of Slade, I played with photos of the space and I incorporated the images of my Cat Beastie. I made a picture of Felix, in Slade inside the body of a cat while I was at Slade and as I finished it, on my last day, I noticed, engraved in stone above the entrance to the building, an angel and the words Felix Slade. How fortunate :-)

What no-one could have expected though was that two of my tutors knew my cousin and were able to help me to understand that perhaps, the life I've lived to date is actually the right one to have lived, perhaps my cousin was right and that art school was perhaps more macho or savage back along...maybe it wouldn't have been right for me then, perhaps a bit of life experience has helped me to understand and appreciate the opportunities that are now in my world, valuing my diverse background and personal perspoective and that despite being a bit older, I have lost none of the creative energy I had as a younger person and I can direct it where I wish.

So, in gratitude to all my teachers, here begins my blog, a record of a creative journey. Non, je ne regrette rien.